Can we move this community into the 21st century?
Robert Stinnett Sep 26, 2018 12:31 PMMajor frustration point, that I have brought up for years at BMC Exchange, local user groups, anyone at BMC who visits, R&D -- you name it. Seems like "lots of people agree", but nothing is getting done about it.
First, we need a better way of getting ideas and enhancement requests out there. About 3 years ago now at the last big BMC Exchange event, they did this huge wall of post-it notes with stickies for all BMC products. For Control-M alone we probably had at least 100 stickies up on that thing. People would come by, move them up or down (think: voting) and add new ones. It was wonderful - it was direct feedback from real customers about what we wanted!
Today, we still have to type in these god-awful RFE forms that are about as useful as a TPS Report. They go into some invisible, silent filing cabinet somewhere that nobody else sees. Years go by, and you don't hear any feedback. Why in the world can't we get a digital sticky board so people can start sharing/posting ideas and enhancements like we had at Exchange all those years ago? Even this Ideation thing -- it hasn't made it to Control-M yet. WHY!?
Second, we need a community Slack channel for customers to join. Chef does this, and its a great success. Sometimes we just want to share information or ask "Hey, has anyone ran into this before?" and just need a one-line answer. The communities site is nice, but just isn't interactive or real time. We need something more modern and more universally accepted.
Third, there has got to be a better way to share content with others. Take for instance the new jobsascode.io website -- I love it! But then you go to controlm.github.io and want to contribute something and you are redirected to automation-api-getting-started and then out of nowhere you find another automation-api-community-solutions. It's like a wild goose chase - and even the support folks are telling us "Well, we never heard of that community-solutions one either!"
Finally, there is no doubt that Jobs as Code is huge -- and kudos on the new jobsascode.io website. However, you need to really get with the community contributions and testing of what you are releasing. The latest OVA release for workbench doesn't work (has a port error, verified by support), and the one that is linked in the API docs takes you to an older OVA that is running the 9.0.5 release of the CLI, instead of the 9.18.100. So pretty much out of date and doesn't match the documentation. Stuff like this shouldn't happen, and when it does we need a way for the community to jump in and get pull requests or whatever else out there to get it fixed ASAP!
Hopefully this post makes it farther than my feedback over the years that up until now really hasn't seen the light of day. Not asking that we move a mountain here, but let's at least rush into this new era of workload automation using modern tool sets and making sure we are collaborating the best we can to fully embrace the whole DevOps mentality.
Robert