If the broken promises of 1996 brought on a cardiac arrest, then customers at IPROF found the Roseville engineers interested in developing a product pulse in rhythm with customer needs for enhancements. Becky Carroll, Installed Base Marketing Manager for the division, told attendees at the MPE and Database Roundtable to wake up from that 1996 nightmare.
"We've seen the light," Carroll said. "I'd like you to remember all that [un promising] was before we were working as closely with CSY."
Carroll said that last year's structure in HP encouraged a "silo" model for the SST and CSY divisions, where projects and budgets didn't cross over. "It's not a silo anymore," Carroll said.
The manager was glad to identify the engineers in charge of several products still vital to HP 3000 shops. Charlie Phipps, based in Ft. Collins (charlie_phipps@hp.com), is now handling the HP Open DeskManager e-mail product. Customers say that Desk lags behind the functionality of OpenMail, especially in its client capabilities (See "HP's Desk customers ponder uncertain product fate" in our November 1996 issue).
Customers also asked about the future of Glance Plus, a performance tool whose client module HP was slow to upgrade to Windows 95 last year. Carroll said Glance "is going to be around as long as you need it." Glance is one of several products managed by Heather Goudey (heather_goudey@hp.com), who's also in charge of engineers implementing improvements to HP 3000 compilers, Query and products in the Rapid family such as Transact.
Promises on specific enhancements were not part of the Roseville engineers' communique at IPROF. But customers were excited and encouraged by the dialog taking place, especially after the bleak exchange during last year's HP World meetings.
Ken Sletten, chairman of the SIGIMAGE group and former chair of the SIGRAPID special interest group, singled out the improvement in relations between 3000 customers and Roseville.
"It's been a tremendous turnaround, especially in the CSY-Roseville area," Sletten said. "They're actually appearing together, and they've been talking for the last six months. I think that's really worked out great."
Goudey defined the RAPID strategy as managing Transact as a mainstream compiler. SIGRAPID co-chair Cecile Chi said "this was a most welcome reversal of Jon Goulden's statement at HP World 1996 that Transact would not be enhanced to keep up with Image enhancements." HP also plans to support Dynamic Master Dataset Expansion in Transact once the feature is implemented in IMAGE/SQL. (See related SIGIMAGE sto ry in this issue.)
Goudey presented an update on the RAPID products at IPROF, and listed four potential enhancements to Transact: support for Image/SQL B-trees, "Open" Transact, support of IMAGE/SQL Date and Time data types, and support for VPlus scrollable pick lists.
While the IMAGE and VPlus enhancements have been discussed in the past, the concept of an "open" Transact was new. This is the ability to pass base-IDs and file-IDs into Transact programs that are called from programs in other languages, where the databases and files may be opened by the calling programs. Customers have requested the enhancement to integrate the use of C, Java and other front-end network server programs with Transact. Programs written in these other languages can pass off the database I/O work to a Transact subprogram.
B-tree support in Transact was described as a potential enhancement, but customers said it appears HP has already done considerable investigation. The Mode 1 option of B-trees (use of a wild card) already works with the latest release of Transact. HP said the Mode 4 option (the use of relational operators and ranges) will require some work. HP doesn't plan to enhance Dictionary or Inform to support B-trees.
The Roseville group also made a presentation as part of the SIGIMAGE meeting at IPRO. Their objective was to identify which of its products most immediately need to support any forthcoming date/time Datatypes in IMAGE/SQL. As expected, the most critical need is also the most complex to deliver -- support for Query. But customers remarked that having anyone from SST ask which of its products need to support IMAGE enhancements -- before the enhancements were delivered -- was considerable progress.
SST reported Transact, Dictionary and Inform are all Year 2000 compliant. A General Release Patch for Inform A.11.00, available Jan. 17, is now on hold until problems are resolved. The patch will provide an enhancement to INFORM to enable it to accept an element in a group more than once. A new Transact Quick Reference Guide is also available.
Discussion of support for VPlus scrollable pick lists "is also encouraging," according to Chi, but details can't be discussed until firm specifications appear from HP's VPlus engineers in the Bangalore, India operations of CSY. Those engineers have been busy with Year 2000 enhancements to VPlus, which is set for delivery in the MPE/iX 5.5 Express 2 release expected at the end of April. HP said VPlus enhancements for scrollable picklists won't appear until after MPE/iX 6.0, now set for late 1997 or early 1998 delivery. A third-party solution for this functionality has been offered since last fall from Silton Information Systems (See our Tes tDrive of November 1996 for details).
Customers and Roseville engineers did engage in detailed discusssion of implementing B-tree support which led to two additional enhancement requests:
Define "INDEXED" items in the Dictionary with DICTDBM, for use by DICTDBC; and develop a way to set the MODE parameter for DBFIND before using retrieval verbs. Customers said the latter enhancement would be useful for third-party indexing tools as well as for B-trees.