How to fail: discourage feedback

by Volker Weber

Pulling this from a chat with a business partner:

still customers wont deploy standard - unstable and a hog

This reminded me of "the rules". The problems were visible then. But you were not supposed to talk about them.

Comments

I'm sure there are customer who won't deploy Standard, but there are thousands who have - every one of the organisations that I work with have deployed the Standard client to the vast majority of their user base.

Sure it isn't perfect, but it is light years ahead of the version 7 and earlier Notes clients.

Stuart McIntyre, 2010-11-23

John didn't say you couldn't bitch. He said you couldn't bitch if you put the beta in production and it broke. Big damn difference.

Timothy Briley, 2010-11-23

Stuart, I hear you. I hear IBM. But I see different things. I am seeing lots of users on terminal servers. And those companies are not doubling their servers so they can run Standard. The problem was always there. It got better. You don't need ten times the servers, you only need twice as many.

Volker Weber, 2010-11-23

We are one of these companies with our user base on Terminal Servers (10,000) and I agree with Volker on this (we roll out the Base now). And even if it got better compared to the first release of 8 regarding performance I still do not see that IBM takes terminal server environments fully into consideration when designing new features - e.g. why is there still no support for ID Vault on Citrix?

Gaby Spaszewski, 2010-11-24

IBM support Citrix Terminal Server at all.

But like Gaby wrote, features like ID Vault, Quickr Connectors are not supported on Citrix !

Also issues regarding performance and user data space are not in a deep focus. Nevertheless we start with the Base Client (because of our Windows 32-bit environment) and we will go as soon as possible to the Standard Client. But when this time will come, may we step directly to a Lotus 9 Cloud Browser-based Client and we only need a browser front end.

Reinhard Steurer, 2010-11-24

@Gaby @Reinhard There is no doubt that Notes 8.x is a heavy bit of software - it has a large footprint and needs a fair amount of memory.

BUT... I'm always curious at how Citrix escapes any criticism re: scaling and performance management. To my eye, the Citrix infrastructure model (and user experience) leaves a heck of a lot to be desired, yet it seems such a fixture in organisations who then complain about scalability and support for what is a niche platform at this stage.

Having said that, IBM needs to ramp up support across the board for the Connectors (not least for 64-bit Windows and Mac).

Stuart McIntyre, 2010-11-24

Stuart, Citrix seems to run other software as well. In case of Notes, customers deploy the Basic client, which looks last century. Not good for those migration discussions that are popping up everywhere. Just happened again a few weeks ago, without much fanfare. 80 thousand clients gone.

What I am trying to say is that this was pretty obvious more than three years ago. But one was supposed to look the other way, or point fingers at others. Like Citrix. This. Does. Not. Work.

Volker Weber, 2010-11-24

Fair point, Vowe. Wouldn't disagree, feedback (whether positive or negative) is vital, as is acting on it.

Stuart McIntyre, 2010-11-24

Same here, we are right on the verge of 8.52 Standard rollout, with desastrous consequences for the Citrix-Environment, whose size we did have to double. But that was pretty clear right from the first tests we conducted.
But Basic was never even discussed (apart from the Users on the ~100 PowerPC-Macs we still have).

Fridolin Koch, 2010-11-24

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