CrashTestChix

Some final thoughts about Lotusphere 2010.  I am excited about Project Vulcan and the offerings for LotusLive.  The LotusKnows campaign was everywhere at Lotusphere and definitely seems to be making traction for the brand.  It was quite apparent that efforts are being made to stay competitive. 

However, I, as a customer, did not come away with the warm fuzzies.   In other words,  I did not hear much if anything said about improvement with regards to product quality assurance testing, and product reliability either in the 8.5.x code stream or in relation to Project Vulcan or Notes/Domino X. 

Granted, reliability is assumed.   But I can recall Lotusphere’s in the past where it was stated on stage -- that an effort would be made to reduce the number of PMRs and that before code went out the door, it would be thoroughly tested.  Lip service?  Maybe.  But shouldn't this be something we hear every year?

While I returned to the office this week energized by Lotusphere, I was also frustrated by having to face several back to back server crashes.  We as administrators act as the front line for IBM/Lotus to our users and more importantly to our senior staff.  Senior managers who for the most part don’t understand that servers can occasionally fail.  They just don’t want them to crash ever! 

So as I understand that it is next to impossible to eliminate failures entirely, can it not be a goal to reduce crashes to some extent.  Or perhaps we as customers need to send every crash up to support so that they understand the extent that servers do hang or fail?   Would IBM Support’s servers handle all the NSDs that are generated on a daily basis if we all added CRASH_SEND_TOIBM=1 to our servers?  Probably not! 

As a suggestion, perhaps more customers can be involved in the managed beta programs or as active partners in quality assurance programs as a means of reducing license fees.  We all have a lot to gain by actively providing feedback through such mechanisms.  Just a thought!