Thanks to Tricia Callahan at the Gates Foundation for sponsoring this meeting. 

Northwest Remedy User Group Meeting
January 18th, 2000, at 6pm

• Remedy has undergone a radical change in direction, as evidenced by the products announced at RUG. This change reflects its race with its competitors, and with competing products, in an attempt to gain market share on a broader scope. The new focus is on pre-packaged applications (HD, CRM, ERP, etc.), instead of the build-to-fit software they began with.
• Louise feels that this change in focus abandons their original customer base. Their consulting base is bent toward supporting their pre-packaged applications, leaving little to support custom applications. These applications are not built with the customers in mind, but with competitiveness in the market in mind. Kind of a me-too mindset. Further, there does not appear to be any business process engineering in place in Remedy’s development environment.
• Support is not up to standard because they don’t have a good handle on the demand, either at the quality or the quantity end. Larry Garlick especially does not seem to understand the root of the problem.
• Help Desk v2.0 was designed to be a template from which a custom application could be built, not a fully functional, stand-alone application. Versions 3.0 & 4.0 of HD are a departure from that.
• Remedy is still the most flexible software of its type around, but stay away from the applications – they’re just too problematic, especially in the more complex applications. Putting them on NT is even worse, because the Windows as an Operating System is not as stable as UNIX. Louise also cautioned us to not use Push Fields Actions instead of Macros on an NT platform. Apparently, they’re not as fast as macros, due to NT’s lack of multi-threading capability.
• HD 4.0 was not Y2K ready until December; the Feb 29 date still is not patched, and the Sybase port is still not fixed. There are many open bugs in HD 4.0.
• Help Desk & CRM were too much work in one application. CRM and HD 4.0 are basically the same application, with different supporting forms. It didn’t seem to be developed entirely by Remedy, but no one seems to know exactly who did what. Could some of it have been developed by Remedy consultants who couldn’t get placed in the field? HD’s Escalations are too bullet-proof, making problem diagnosis next to impossible. There are too many hard-coded processes. The RAPP servers are a good example of this. It’s almost impossible to "see under the hood" of these functions.
• The highly-advertised six week implementations of HD don’t include data, or testing, or other "extras", and are truly only applicable in best-case scenarios. It almost always takes more time than that. She told of needing three weeks to program a change to assignments that would, in an average custom application, have taken a few hours to a day. The reasons for this increase in time are the complexity of Help Desk, and the fact that no usable documentation exists for it to tell the developer what is related to or dependent upon what else. One often has to make a change, and then check the log files to see what complained about it.
• When Remedy was young, some partnerships with customers were informal arrangements, but now they have become more formal, due to Remedy’s increased size and customer base.
• Remedy is attempting to restore the consulting base, with a new RAC manager. It is hoped that the certification of consultants will again take place in a standard way. The current process of certification is too subjective to the whim of the person in charge. Remedy’s internal RACs get special classes not available to outside RACs. In return, Remedy expects said RACs to be "good soldiers", who talk up the company’s products.

• Tricia showed some screen shots from their application. It included functions for tracking Staff, Assets, LAN mapping, Warehouse inventory (on intranet), and New Hire setups (similar to Remedy At Work). All featured the extensive use of Remedy v4.0 function and features. The Gates Foundation uses Remedy extensively, and want to use it as the connecting application to all other applications and functions. They are currently evalutaing options for reporting.
• Joseph led many of the attendees on a tour of the site.

• South Park is going to Beta. There was no discussion on this issue.

• Calendar
• We plan on having the year scheduled out, rather than scheduling time and place one month at a time. Look to Web site for details.
• Hosting a meeting
• Details on sheet.
• Member Bios
• We will reform those, and spend more time in the March meeting discussing how to format and publish them.
• Next Meeting time/date/location
• Joint meeting with Help Desk Institute local chapter. IT Masters and Enhancement Technologies will present. Tentative location is at Pemco Insurance, and it will likely be on a Thursday. Details should be firmed up by the end of January.

 
For comments or questions on this Northwest Remedy User Group website  
please email Geoff Endresen  at nwrug@geoffe.com