Planview

As a grumpy old software engineer, I complain about other people's software a lot, as shown in this blog. But I must say, Planview has to be on top of the pile for being arrogant, stupid and time-wasting. I am no management expert -- I am not even a manager, but this message is a bit too much -- I don't know what you think.

The problem is caused by me closing the lid on my laptop before I finished what I was doing. When I came back to it, the session apparently timed out. I clicked on something and was shown this message implying that I might be treated as a criminal -- One would expect that a leader in an industry could at least be able to tell a simple timed out session from a criminal attack.

As for what I was doing, well -- I don't even want to go there. Here is my take on Planview: If your company is planning to implement this software and you have any say in that decision process at all, fight against it with all you have got. You will thank yourself down the road if you still work for the same organization.

Random Ranting on Cisco Prime LMS

Cisco Prime LMS is the company's LAN Management Solution software, re-branded from the CiscoWorks label. I am sure there are many reason for the re-branding for marketing reasons, but one of them, I believe, is that CiscoWorks has never worked very well.

Cisco has a decent reputation with its networking gears, with the company's long history in the industry. What surprises me is that, Cisco's software (which is running all those iron boxes) are of such low quality that it is almost shocking.

Case in point: Cisco Prime LMS, which is at version 4.2 as of this writing. LMS also has had a long history. I am not into all the details but from what I have learned from working with it: there are a few main modules that Cisco has acquired from other companies -- the Campus Manager (CM), the Resource Management Essentials (RME), Device Fault Manager (DFM), Internetwork Performance Monitor (IPM), CiscoView, and more recently the Health and Utilization Monitor (HUM) is added into the mix. Before version 4, those modules are clearly displayed in CiscoWorks portal as distinctively independent pieces with visible overlaps and confusing user interface layouts. For example, many of those modules do Reports. I as the user of LMS need to know exactly where to go to create what report.

Although things have not changed much under the hood, so to speak, LMS 4.x versions have done a better job in presenting a more unified user interface over those modules that still function pretty much the same way they used to. The main menu is now organized into functional activities: Monitor, Inventory, Configuration, Reports, Admin and Work Centers -- These are now the main UI menu components.

Judging from what I have heard from others, it is not my ignorance of the product alone that makes it so difficult to use. The software is at version 4.2 at this point, to expect it to not break down randomly should not be an unreachable goal. But that just seems to keep happening.

A minor case of quality problem: I want to run a script to export the user tracking data. Since that data is then fed to other scripts that I don't control, I need to use a custom layout for the export so that I don't break other people's scripts.

I created the layout in the Report Designer. When I tried to use the layout, I got an error message saying that ERROR UTCLI: Error loading preferences. custom-ut-export-layout is not a valid layout name for this user.

Since there seems to be no way to allow a custom layout designed by one user to be used by another -- at least I have not been able to find that if it does exist, I deleted the layout. Logged out of my session. Logged back in under the user account in my script. Re-designed the layout with the same name. Re-ran my script. I got the same error.

I logged back in as the script user, went to the Custom Layouts page. My layout was nowhere to be found.

I logged out. Logged back in as myself. No custom layout of that name, or in fact, no layout besides the three standard ones in the list.

Out of ideas, I restarted the LMS. Logged back in, still nothing.

Logged back in as the script user, created the custom layout with a different name. I made a copy of it just in case. I logged out then back in again. Nothing. Both copies of my layouts are gone.

To make sure that I didn't confuse LMS, I restarted it, then repeated my steps. Still the same result: No custom layout.

At this point, I seem to have lost the capability to create custom layout with no clue about what I did wrong to get into such a bind. Maybe because I reused the layout name between two users? If that was a bad thing to do, I certainly did not receive a warning from the software.

I should probably start to look for an open source alternative to LMS.