So THAT'S what happened to all of the prisoners...

[Alan Kirk]

... the ones held in the dungeon of the former Applix support.

They've found a new way of "disappearing" them. It's called "Not Planned".

No-one TELLS us that they're "Not Planned", mind you, and now that everyone has been migrated over to Insight they're probably hoping that we'll forget about them.

And since, when you log in to Applix support and click on the prisoner's number, you get a page stating "This page cannot be displayed", they probably also hold a hope that we'll give up and go away.

Yet some of us stay out here with yellow ribbons and candles.

I executed a process in 9.4... and my cursor immediately jumped up to the start of the Dimensions list. "You CANNOT be serious", thinks I, I reported this irritating, annoying, pointless piece of interface (mis)design AGES ago. I even had someone from Applix Australia contact me about it, and I showed him how to reproduce it.

And so I dredge my password out of my memory, log in to Applix Support, and what do I find? Prisoner 362931; "Not Planned". In other words, we can't be bothered fixing our poor design.

Similarly prisoners 363906 and 364257 about how ridiculously difficult it is to modify action buttons in Web... "Not Planned".

But wait for it, for this one will make you choke on your Weeties... Prisoner 356782, ElIsAnc as a worksheet function... "Not Planned". Yes, it's all too frappin' hard to put a wrapper around an API function call, all too hard to ensure that the same functions are available in all areas of the interface, all too easy to just consign such requests to the bin of "Not Planned But We Ain't Gonna Tell You That".

Oh, but not ALL of them have been "Not Planned", some are still open; like prisoner 282467, a request for a version of E_Pick which returns a multiple selection of elements. That's still "Transferred to Product Management." That one dates back to December 2004. Determining whether that's AD or BC is left as an exercise for the reader.

[George Regateiro]

Glad I am not the only one. I received an email from a user the other day from a bug that I am sure that I addresses with Applix. After searching through my emails I found my thread with the support tech where there response when they replicated the error was "That does not work right at all, that needs to be addressed since that is basic error checking". Unfortunately since it has been marked as Not Planned it will not be IBM/Cognos/Applix that will do the fixing, not that i should be suprised since I have not known them to be very vigilant about "basic error checking" .

The most irritating part is that they were marked as not planned with absolutely no notice. This now adds something else to list of complaints that I will address to our account team when they come down next week. Not that it will do any good, but I feel a little better after chewing them out for a little bit.

[Steve Vincent]

funny that, i just got a reply back on SR #: 11-72942743

Detailed Description: Currently TM1 will warn a user when they have 5 or less days to go before their password expires. This in many cases is too short, especially where bank holidays / holidays / sickness comes in to play. The lack of warning causes undue admin work as they are requested to reset passwords.

It would be prefered to have a line in the TM1S.CFG file that allows the admin to set the number of days before a warning, with a default of 5 days if nothing is set.

Logged as an enhancement (TM-4943). FYI 2008-05-23 10:22:01
Closed - moved to Enginerring as enhancement (Jira TM-4943). SR Closed 2008-08-19 14:46:50

Errr, so what's happened to it then? By closed do they mean engineering have it now so we don't need it cluttering up Insight, or have they looked at it and said yer that's a good idea, we've got it for 9.4 SP1, or its TFD and we'll just ignore it...

Come on, a little feedback is all we're asking for here

[Mike L]

Closed - moved to Enginerring as enhancement

Your exasperation with their ignorance of transaction dynamics is well founded. There are three broad criteria for completion of a request:

1. Solution delivered and accepted by requestor.
2. Request withdrawn by requestor.
3. Request denied and requestor notified.

"Kicked the can down the road" is an interim status, not completion.
"Transfer request to other" is incomplete unless the responsibility to close with the requestor as above is accepted by the other and their commitment acknowledged to the requestor. Otherwise, that responsibility still lies with the original requestee.

P.S.: I smiled at the apropos spelling of Engin-err-ing.

[Alan Kirk]

So I endured Insight again this morning, slow, clunky, slow, painful, slow Insight which requires you to log in every time you visit it, slowly, and logged 11-81169101:

The ElIsAnc function is available in TurboIntegrator. It is not available as an Excel worksheet function. In February 2005, which is OVER THREE AND A HALFYEARS AGO, I made a request for ElIsAnc to be made available as a worksheet function. This was raised in the Applix system as Inquiry 283664.

It was subsequently closed when I received the following response from Applix Support:

"This has been requested by several users and the current intention is to add this function as a worksheet function. The issue is currently being tracked as 273789 and is due to be in a release in the Q4/2005 time frame."

It's now Q3 2008.

In May 2007, I again asked what was happening with this request. That was raised as Inquiry 356782. I note that this has now been closed, without any advice having been issued, on the basis that it is "Not Planned".

Could I (and indeed a number of members of the user community) ask:
(a) WHY this exceedingly useful function that dozens of users currently have to work around with reams of relatively slow VBA code is "Not Planned" when it was due three years ago?
(b) WHY you continue to fail to implement a policy of harmonising the TM1 user interface by ensuring that the same functions, with the same names and the same arguments are available, where relevant, in ALL aspects of it; Excel, Rules, TI and the API?

I'll let you know when or if I get a slow, slow answer.

[Alan Kirk]

P.S.: I smiled at the apropos spelling of Engin-err-ing.

Dr. Freud at work.

However since most of us are likely to fall into the category that was ACTUALLY surveyed, I'm more concerned about THIS typo:

In news, the Westpac/Melbourne Institute leading index of economic activity for June will be released, and the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) will release its killed vacancies survey for August.

(From http://business.smh.com.au/business/sto ... -3yd3.html)

[Alan Kirk]

The ElIsAnc function is available in TurboIntegrator. It is not available as an Excel worksheet function. In February 2005, which is OVER THREE AND A HALFYEARS AGO, I made a request for ElIsAnc to be made available as a worksheet function. This was raised in the Applix system as Inquiry 283664.

It was subsequently closed when I received the following response from Applix Support:

"This has been requested by several users and the current intention is to add this function as a worksheet function. The issue is currently being tracked as 273789 and is due to be in a release in the Q4/2005 time frame."

Well, I have a response already. Apparently the request is still on their radar, and is currently being... considered, for want of a better term, for a later release of 9.4. (We can say "9.4", now that the stars are coming out of Eric's eyes. )

However I didn't expect (and nor, Curmudgeon, do I EXPECT to get) an answer to this part of the request:

(b) WHY you continue to fail to implement a policy of harmonising the TM1 user interface by ensuring that the same functions, with the same names and the same arguments are available, where relevant, in ALL aspects of it; Excel, Rules, TI and the API?

THAT part is, quite simply, unfathomable and may well be the subject of the next X Files movie. (If there is one.)

[Mike L]

However I didn't expect (and nor, Curmudgeon, do I EXPECT to get) an answer to this part of the request:

(b) WHY you continue to fail to implement a policy of harmonising the TM1 user interface by ensuring that the same functions, with the same names and the same arguments are available, where relevant, in ALL aspects of it; Excel, Rules, TI and the API?

Easy answer. As remarked in another thread recently, the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing, one or both having become detached from the brain. Of course, that begs the question of what the brain thinks it is doing. I suspect The Brain is too distracted by grand schemes to pay attention to Pinky's dilemma when trying to pick up all the pieces.

[Steve Vincent]

well, credit where credit is due, i replied to the ticket closure (basically asked wtf does that mean) and had a call from Keith Faulkner about it this afternoon. Once something like this is raised in Insight, if its an enhancement request then it gets logged in to a different system (jira) for the engineering team to pick up. Unfortuanetly we as mere users of the software would not be privvy to the status of that request once its been moved, but have been told to ring or email support and quote the jira ref number and they'll get an update for you.

Currently, its just in their queue probably with a lot of other things waiting for someone to have a look in to it, and it has not scheduled inclusion release as yet.

OK so its not perfect, but its a lot better than just disappearing forever in Alcatraz

[Alan Kirk]

Once something like this is raised in Insight, if its an enhancement request then it gets logged in to a different system (jira) for the engineering team to pick up. Unfortuanetly we as mere users of the software would not be privvy to the status of that request once its been moved, but have been told to ring or email support and quote the jira ref number and they'll get an update for you.

{Snip}

OK so its not perfect, but its a lot better than just disappearing forever in Alcatraz

Au contraire... I think that this is EXACTLY like disappearing forever on The Rock. If the requests remain in a system that we CAN see, then we're likely to see them occasionally (on the occasions that we can endure the tedium of getting into Insight) and ask "Hey, what's happening with..."?

If they're shipped off to another system that we CAN'T see, then there may be the hope in Engineering / Product Management / whatever the corresponding Cognos black hole is that we'll just fuhgeddabout it, and they don't need to bother.

Let's face it, when enhncement requests can, {cough} and indeed DO, date back literally YEARS, it's going to be a LOT harder to remember whether / when we made such a request if we don't see them regularly.

(Although when we come across the originating source of the irritation, we're likely to think "Hey, didn't I make a request about this...")

Also, the fact that Jira is hidden from us underscores one thing that we were bitching about with Applix for years; outside of the Forum, we've got no way of knowing who's reported what, what's being worked on, and what's coming up in future releases.

But yes, at least you did get *A* response from them, which I concede wasn't always the case when things were still in Westboro.