RE: Another opinion on InfoCenter -- MIDRANGE-L

Thanks, Darel, for your response. It is always good to see IBMers respond here, as you can.

I'm glad to see that y'all know what we've seen from the start - the V5R3 version was several orders of magnitude slower, etc. I look forward to any improvements.

It does seem that no one had actually done a "real-world" test on some of this stuff. I mean to go to a site that is not inside the walls at IBM. And try to use this turkey. It had to be obvious that there were problems from day 1. But I don't know that for sure. I do know that even using it with a local installation from the CD or an iSeries was painful.

Anyway, thanks for listening.

Vern

At 10:01 PM 5/11/2005, you wrote:

Thanks everyone for the ongoing concern in quality Information Centers.
You may or may not know that the iSeries Information Center team developed
the first several evolutions of the Information Center framework.  No one
is more aware than we are of the how the recent JRE version defects and
inconsistencies have cut that framework off at the knees.  Further, you are
correct in noticing that there are now two basic implementations of
InfoCenter frameworks within IBM.  Indeed, this second implementation has
benefited from a number of lessons learned from the iSeries InfoCenter
framework - lessons on what to do as well as what not to do.

The newer InfoCenter framework is a relatively recent development with
respect to the iSeries releases.  In fact there was very minimal usage of
the newer framework when the V5R3 iSeries Information Center site GA'd -
maybe only one product was using it.  Since then, this second framework has
matured and has been hardened in a number of InfoCenter deployments and we
now feel more confident in its capability to serve our iSeries customer
set.  No other set of IBM customers is more experienced with Information
Centers and no other set understands the importance of having them function
correctly than iSeries customers.  I trust that you understand that the
notion that flipping a switch to migrate from one architecture to another
mid-release is as unrealistic here as it is in any other real world
development environment.

I am not permitted to publicly declare any definite commitments to deliver
specific function.  However, you can rest assured that we have been
isolating and mitigating a number of the problems with the iSeries
Information Center website over the past few months and are working on
others even as I type this.  These modifications are occurring within the
existing framework for the short term.  A longer term solution will
probably see the iSeries Information Center migrate to this newer
InfoCenter framework discussed above.

To be frank, I hope that you see (or trust) that we're doing the best we
can with the time and resources available to us.  I also expect that you
will see an upturn in the near future.

Regards,
Darel