RE: Change Management

[Joe Teff <jteff19@xxxxxxx>]

> We're investigating Change management systems - Aldon, Silvon, Thenon 
> (the 3 greek gods of change!). They all look very similar in function. 
> Anybody got opinions good, bad or ugly? Hopefully the sales people for 
> these companies won't answer! 

I've used the Silvon package in the past with a good deal of success. It has
been a while but I'll try to include all the high points and low points (some
of these issues can probably be blamed on setup and lack of training).

Good:
   We had two separate data libraries because the two divisions wanted their
       data totally separate - not by a company number in the files. We had a
       test environment for both and a QA environment for both. The package
       handled this well.
   It supported multiple checkouts with conflict management, though this was
       a little confusing at times.
   You could easily see what was checked out, by who and for what.
   The learning curve was fairly short.
   There was a hook into Hawkeye, so all checkouts, checkins, promotions were
       immediately available to that tool.

Poor:
   Obsoleting objects required a two-step process - checkout and then checkin -
      instead of a single step.
   There was no inquiry to view all of the change activity for a specific 
object (for
      example, you couldn't see all of the checkouts, checkins, promotions for a
      program). This is something that is very nice when trying to resolve why 
an
      error may be occurring.

I can't recall any other specifics at this time, though overall I was satisfied 
with
the product.

Joe Teff
Information Technology Consultant
IBM Certified Specialist - AS/400 RPG Programmer
Quality Data Systems
Minneapolis, MN

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