You really made my day by this post. Thank you.

The local sales reps and SE’s here are fantastic, so I’m sure I’ll be able to work with them to get access to the program.

I’m so excited now, I can’t wait to give it a whirl!

Thanks so much,

Pamela

We completely understand your position. It seems this is not just the case for JES, throughout the industry, software deployments have become increasingly painful due to the growing number of inter-product dependencies, complexity of solutions, and the level of expertise required.

Yes Sun software is really Enterprise Class out passing the competition, however it is true that we do need to improve Architect, Sys Admin, developer experience when installing and deploying Sun Software.

Consequently, we have started a new program internally called
EZOffering that provides a flexible way to deploy on-demand solutions.
The idea is that on one DVD, you have Solaris 10 and the all JES
stack. When the DVD is booted onto a machine, the OS and all the JES
components are installed onto the disk. Then we automatically self deploy an “offering” (you can call this a last-mile configuration) that configures all the necessary components together. The interesting thing about this
is that:
o You have several Pre-Selected configurations pre-qualified
o Based on Sun engineering best practices
o It is highly predictable, deploying in minutes what could take you days
o It is customizable as you wish with your value add and third party applications

Other companies are already beginning to do similar activities, however we do believe that we are ahead of any other alternatives.

I encourage you to contact your Sun Sales representative and ask him to participate in our EZOffering: Sun Java Web Infrastructure Suite Early Access Program starting at the end of this Month (or at worst send me an e-mail).

Hope to see you participating and getting, helping Sun to move to the next level for Making Complex Software Simple.

Thanks
James

It seems to have no purpose other than to piss off administrators. It certainly doesn’t seem to improve the odds of successfully uninstalling middleware. Once I run a JES uninstall, I pretty well consider the box to be less reliable – I have zero confidence that everything was actually removed.

Pamela

I TOTALLY agree with everything you said here.

I was Netscape Product Specialist for Portugal and, I feel the same way that you do about JES.

I just would leave with another point “Who came up with the idea of the prodreg utility?” I think this is the worst thing that came out from Sun since the original Java Web Server (where reloading the configuration was done by rebooting the machine)

That was a thoughtful answer, thank you so much for taking the time to explain to me some of the issues at hand. I’m really happy to hear that you feel my pain :-)

I’m very exited about the last thing you mentioned – clean characterization of users and use-cases. I think that you could go a long, long way if you could allow administrators to start with more than a single initial profile. If you could have the installer answer a few initial questions, such as whether there is more than one organization involved, and whether delegation is needed, and then confirm with the user what the resulting DIT and install roots could be expected to look like at the *beginning* of the install, I think that a lot of frustration could be avoided.

I love that you would take the time to comment, it gives me confidence that Sun is actively working towards simpler & more intuitive management of their middleware suite.

Cheers,

Pamela

Without going into detail or make forward looking statements, here is what we think will happen to integrated installs in short order:
1. Good defaults
2. Remembering data
3. Clean characterization of users and use-cases (read – making it easy for most users and having the the rest make choices in the myraid cases that you mention (read your-rope-to-hang))

prabhat