ServiceCenter 6 Seminar in Copenhagen last week

[sjensen]

Last week I joined a ServiceCenter 6 presentation in Copenhagen and basically I am impressed, because not only Peregrine managed to get out of Chapter 11 they also managed to continue to develop the new ServiceCenter 6 with a new look and feel during the come back to the world of business.

I also saw customer loyalty at that session and I really look forward to see Peregrine being VISIBLE and present in the Nordics again.

Now we will begin to move from Servicecenter 3.0 SP10 A9901 onto
Servicecenter 5.1.2 Appl. SC 5.1 on our new pSeries 690 machine running AIX 5.2 ML02 and hopefully a weekend work will be enough to do the upgrade.

So Servicecenter 6 BETA TESTERS, what can you tell Jensen in that area? What have you experienced? A SC system without a P4 environment directly integrated to a RDBMS? I really liked the Eclipse client and the new web client. One of the most common complaints we hear is around the Servicecenter GUI, "it's look like something from the good old mainframe days and bla bla bla". We will NOT go for SC 6 at the beginning, we want to hear from the BETA testers. Jeppe I know for a fact that Post Danmark is a BETA TESTER, what have you seen? How about Danske Bank, Iguess you are one of the testers as wll, what have you then seen and experienced?

Well, if you have those nice "web enabled clients", what is the future "life" for Get.Services then? Will the product be a future Asset Management and Service Management "merged into one product" appliance or what? I find the possabilities quite exiting .....

Scary areas !! How about ReportCenter with Crystal Reports 9.2 running in an environment with Danish versions of Windows XP's. The ODBC driver will that one ever be a truly level 2 compliant, bootomline it acts pretty weird in some cases.

Finally we have IBM Support in the background with Jørgen K. Larsen and Janni Krüger working like hell, hopefully that team will grow even more so the presure can be taken off the two individuals. They are doing a very good job.

Hm, the Peregrine User Group Nordic event in Gothenburg in September 2004 could be quite an event.

//Steen Jensen, System Management Consultant AIX and Linux
Payment Business Services in Denmark

[tommy]

Good to hear. Sorry I wasn't there to say Hi.

Did they show anything about accessing data through XML schemas and browser? If they got this right everybody can kiss the ODBC driver goodbye!

[sjensen]

Yes one person was missing and that was you.

[kobear]

Just to let everyone know, I just got back from 5.1 tailoring training in San Diego, and they gave us a sneak peek at SC 6. I was thouroughly impessed!

The new client communicates with the server via SOAP/XML Schema, and has an option to view the XML transactions on the client. This SOAP implementation is also open to any XML consumer, so you can write your own client to SC if you so choose. VERY impressive.

Also, there is no longer any Java client - only HTML, SC3270, and Win32. Although I got mixed answers on the Win32 client - trainer said it is Win32, Support said it is writen in Java. Regardless, SOAP layer is writen in Eclipse, which is IBM Java development tool, so that is Java.

[Jassen]

When I went to the SC6 presentation at IBM Warwick, another of the cool things they hopefully got right in 6 was the use of javascripting to enhance/replace some format controls. They demonstrated a fairly simple thing that worked.

Also being .net compliant, browser interface xml and soap, all looks good.

Just a pity we had to pull out of Beta testing due to issues with resourcing

[kobear]

Yeah - I saw many examples of Javascript througout the app. By their own admission, there is nothing that you can do with Javascript that you cannot do with system language, so it is more of a listed feature to attract new customers.

Also, their own Help Desk is running the 6 server as a back-end, with a 5.2 client. They claim that the 5.2 client is the only one that will work with a 6 back-end - besides of course the 6 client :wink:

I was trying to get them to give me a tour of the pure web client (DHTML), but noone on their support desk had a server installed. Incidentally, they said the web client can be served by IIS (Microsoft), Apache, and Websphere.

[tommy]

Ohh it almost sound to good to be true.....

[kobear]

I hear ya!

Also - I expect that they will GA it at Synergy. They said they usually want 4-6 weeks of problem free operation on their own Help Desk installation before they go GA. It seems rather cooincidental that they installed 6 server 7 weeks before Synergy...

[fid509]

When it walks like a duck and it kwacks like a duck, there is a strong possibility it is a duck. :lol:
Last year I saw briefly a SC 6 BETA running with a customer and neither him or me were very impressed with the speed of the application. Any comments on that or is it something that improved with later versions? I have the experience that all java applications are slower just because it is written in java.

[tommy]

Yes that is also my biggest concern with the parts developed in Eclipse.

[kobear]

True about java. I am not a big fan of java clients such as the one Peregrine has out now for 5.x.

However, thinking more about it, I think only the middleware (SOAP/XML interface) is writen in java. The SC RAD app layer is almost exactly the same as 5.1 - the only reason that you would have to run an upgrade utility is because they added the javascript panels in alot of places that systemn code can be put in.

It was pretty interesting to see a traditional client (eg: tcp socket connection over 12670) working with a server end that was designed with SOAP interface in mind.