grrrr…bloody Sun
I’ve not ranted much on here about Sun and the tales of woe that make up the Sun Java Enterprise system communication suite that they sold us this time last year but here goes…
It’s a smart setup and has some *very* nice features. It also however has shit loads of bugs. Simple things that are amazingly difficult to believe got through beta testing (users can’t login if they have a “+” symbol in their password anyone?) and some are much more involved and subtle but in general, they are making progress.
Communications Express is (as web clients go) not too bad. Unfortunatly, it’s also not that good… Sun really need to work at fixing the bugs that are there already instead of releasing new versions and introducing new features. It’s getting there but rather slower than we had hoped.
Directory server and Messaging server seem pretty robust (although half of our front end machines are currently down due to a problem with patching that Sun are thinking about…). Calendar server seems ok and the bugs that we have found have been pretty rapidly fixed.
Sun are pushing this suite as a real alternative to Microsoft Exchange. One thing that is pretty key to sell to this group of users is the outlook connector. Now on version 7 (which confusingly is the 2nd major release) it is finally beginning to look promising. Again, it’s still rather two buggy IMHO and I doubt Microsoft are quaking just yet.
One thing that is really beginning to piss me off is the whole American focus to the products. Sure, Sun is a US company but they are selling the product to non-US markets so they really need to concentrate on helping us out. A great example of this is the training courses - version 6.2 of JES is now out yet the training courses for the previous version are still not all available. Also, when we bought the product we got 10 training credits. In the US these are worth $1000 each towards training courses. No one at Sun could tell us how much ours were worth and when they finally came back to us they tell us that the credits are only meant to have a 6 month life and have therefore timed out. Things did appear to be looking up when they booked a couple of us onto a course but then today I get the following email:
iPlanet Infrastructure Products for Sun ONE: Core Concepts
This course has been automatically cancelled due to non-receipt of payment details.
Please note, Sun Educational Services is not responsible for any travel and/or hotel costs you may incur as a result of this cancellation.
Great. So a dept in Sun have billed another dept in Sun and they have failed to pay in time???
Piss up. Brewery.
