The bottom line, or at least one of the bottom lines: "Foresight" on the part of the developers as to not write applications which will, all too soon, out live their usefulness ~ imho.

quote:

David, I have one more question I would like IBI to answer.
Many years ago, I took the Top Gun class...

The IB 'Top Gun' class is a milestone in my career.

The information I gained, enabled me to meet my users requirements more completely and quickly, and most importantly helped to make development fun. (Please don't tell my manager about the 'fun' part. )

I'd be happy to submit your question, and report back with I what I hear from the 'Ask Gerry' session. (Hope you don't mind the very small edits made.):

quote:

Many years ago, I took the Top Gun class – 'Everything you wanted to know about FOCUS internals but were afraid to ask'.

Without a doubt, and there is not even a close second, the most valuable IBI class I ever took.

The instructor covered TABLE, TABLEF, MODIFY, COMBINE, Dialogue Manager, etc. I realize that some of the class material is no longer valid anymore for most of us, e.g., CRTFORM in MODIFY, but it was a fantastic class.

I learned more in that one class that I have in all FUSE (yes I go back that far), SUMMITS, and other IBI classes combined.

Why are internals classes no longer offered?

Thank you jg!

quote:

Originally posted by Doug:

quote:

Originally posted by jgelona (posted Sat May 16 2015 10:50):
... IMO, App Studio and Dev Studio should be for developers not end users.

But, if the end users don't have the tools, like App Studio and Dev Studio , what would they use to develop their own reports?

I haven't used it much myself, but I think InfoAssist/InfoDiscovery are for the end user. Keep Dev/AppStudio to the developers, letting them keep the code access. Also, if the developer creates reporting objects, KPIs, reports, and even a generic Ad Hoc tool for the user(s), giving them what they need as much as possible, then they shouldn't have any need for Dev/AppStudio. They go into ONLY the portal they are assigned to, that has sufficient pages to give them the information they need via an Ad Hoc tool, KPIs they can drag and drop into panels, canned/prebuilt reports/graphs, etc. IBI's choice to introduce the "deer-in-the-headlights" end users to a tool they shouldn't even be using by pushing the GUI tool layers to the point that the developers suffer is truly "upsetting".

Gerry might be on the hot seat while answering questions about his vision for App/Dev Studio and InfoAssist/InfoDiscovery.

quote:

Originally posted by Doug:

quote:

Originally posted by jgelona (posted Sat May 16 2015 10:50):
... IMO, App Studio and Dev Studio should be for developers not end users.

But, if the end users don't have the tools, like App Studio and Dev Studio, what would they use to develop their own reports?

Except for a very few exceptions (may 2 or 3 users out of several thousand), my users are completely incapable of developing reports and getting the correct results, which is the important part.

Working with financial, sales, banking, accounting and just about any other type of data is child's play compared to working with Child Welfare Data. There are 2 rules when working with Child Welfare data. The first is "The rules are there are no rules". Rule 2 is "See rule number 1". In 40 years of system design, programming, etc. the only thing I have ever worked on that was close to the chaos of Child Welfare was Natural Gas Marketing because the rules changed every month. Child Welfare terminology is very generic, so a seemingly simple question like "How many children are in Foster Care" could have a different meaning to 10 different people.

To ask users to develop reports in this environment is folly and destined to failure.

I currently have one "developer" that is really a user that wants to be a developer. He has some ability but no formal IT training of any kind. He's had a few online App Studio classes (I want him to go to the App Studio boot camp but that is not something I can authorize). But he does not like the GUI and this is who the GUI was designed for, correct? I realize a sample of 1 is not big, but I haven't meet anyone at Summit or a local user group meeting that really likes the GUI. It may be useful for building the final report, but when the report has a 1000 lines of code to collect data for the report, the GUI is worthless.

What's so funny to me is selling the users on the ease and convenience of coding in the GUI, yet the users often aren't savvy to know when a loop or (more complicated) dialogue manager coding could be required to create a solution.

And they can very nicely use the JOIN GUI tool to join two three million row tables on uncommon columns and wait a week for a response.

I've been doing this since 1977 and have seen exactly 1 user who can do his own reports. Every other time, the users say "Isn't that what you IT guys are supposed to do"?

Well, yeah, it is.

I'm starting to feel very sorry for Kathleen Butler who has invited a bunch of us to breakfast at Summit to discuss this thread !!

I have seen power users in business units successfully use WebFOCUS/FOCUS over the years. I worked at a large company pre-WebFOCUS through to WebFOCUS and we had many sub groups of business power users embedded in their larger business units who developed reports using the older green screen tools. With the conversion to WebFOCUS they moved on to Report Assist and Reporting objects.

The trick is to have someone with developer expertise available for questions and assistance and to set the data up for them as much as possible and management open to allowing their staff to go to training.

The newer tools, Info Assist and Info Discovery are pointed toward these folks.

There will always be just 'users' who will used guided adhoc and other pre-developed reports and will never take to creating their own reports, because they believe it's not their job.

The truth about any tool where someone with a business role will need to create their own reports/applications is, they will need to go to training and they will need to sign up for learning how to use the tool and grow that knowledge. The business area will also need to sign up for maintaining that knowledge in their business unit. In order for this model to be successful, they need development and data support preferably from a group in IT.

Msondra,

I couldn't really have said it better. Thanks for covering what I was going to say. The effectiveness of your end user community is directly related to how easy you can make the data to understand. As I have found myself saying a lot at work lately, "how do I lower the bar to make adoption easier". The closer you can make something to drag field a,b,c, and hit tun, the more successful your end user community will be. Yes it is our job to write reports. But if you can get away from the simple ones and focus on the complex ones that push the boundaries of what you can do, that's a good healthy environment. You will always have the user that feels they need to look at data from another perspective as someone else. That will never change. And they aren't necessarily wrong. But if you don't provide them with a way to explore their perapective, they will just dump into excel anyways, and you've just lost your ability to help guide things in the right direction.

Per my earlier posts on this thread, I submitted our thread's two questions, to the 'Ask Gerry' session at Summit 2015.

While I didn't make a transcription, I did want to share my notes..

quote:

First question:
Many years ago, I took the Top Gun class – 'Everything you wanted to know about FOCUS internals but were afraid to ask'.

Without a doubt, and there is not even a close second, the most valuable IBI class I ever took.

The instructor covered TABLE, TABLEF, MODIFY, COMBINE, Dialogue Manager, etc. I realize that some of the class material is no longer valid anymore for most of us, e.g., CRTFORM in MODIFY, but it was a fantastic class.

I learned more in that one class that I have in all FUSE (yes I go back that far), SUMMITS, and other IBI classes combined.

Why are internals classes no longer offered?

Gerry, from my notes:
We do still offer this type of class. It is called 'Boot Camp' class, and it is a one-week offering. Don't worry we don't really send you to Quantico.

quote:

Second question:
Will Information Builders continue to support the professional developer, as it has in the past? This question is being asked in the context of what seems like a recent emphasis on supporting the end-user, at the exclusion of the developer. My specific concern, shared by many of my colleagues on Focal Point, is that the elegance, power, and ease of coding directly in the WebFOCUS language, by developers, is no longer appreciated, or understood, by the folks at IB.

Gerry, from my notes:
The context of a recent emphasis on the end-user is true, as seen in our recent product releases and announcements.

The language is becoming very complex, and so it is hard to remember everything. Think of the GUI as being a 'recognition tool'.

Rest assured that all our new features go into the language. So 'what's new' goes into the language.

A best practice that we have seen is to do initial development in the GUI, and then feel free to further develop/maintain in the text editor. Or if you are good at remembering, feel free to use the text editor only.

Also, as George mentioned, several of us on this thread, who were also at Summit, were invited to an informal breakfast panel. Dan Ortolani, Kathleen Butler, and other senior folks from IB, were on hand to listen and share views. While I wasn't in a position to take notes on the entire meeting, I did take the following related note from a comment by Dan...

Dan, from my notes:
While the competitive business environment requires IB to continue to supply the best end-user tools, IB is also committed to continue to support core large-scale enterprise-wide applications. Development tools and language both continue to be a high priority.

quote:

A best practice that we have seen is to do initial development in the GUI, and then feel free to further develop/maintain in the text editor. Or if you are good at remembering, feel free to use the text editor only.

If I can add to that, what stuck in my mind is that Gerry said that ALL the code is still available via the text editor. What he didn't mention is that at least on the html side it is forbidden to mess with it. I don't do html myself, as many here, like Francis, do, so I don't pretend to know what I'm talking about on that score, but that's how I remember it.

quote:

While the competitive business environment requires IB to continue to supply the best end-user tools, IB is also committed to continue to support core large-scale enterprise-wide applications. Development tools and language both continue to be a high priority.

However Dan also emphasised that they are focusing on the power user / business analyst and therefore the GUI interface will be top of their mind.

That's understandable in a world where pretty design seems to win out over pure functionality every time (see iPhone vs BlackBerry) and they need to remain competitive. IBI is facing increasing pressure from below in the form of open-enterprise free or nearly-free solutions and lower cost solutions like Tableau which have pretty GUIs and they need to keep up.

On another topic:

I work for a very small company and the cost of WebOCUS maintenance causes a major row every year that it comes up. I suggested (again) that IBI make an effort to address the very real needs of smaller enterprises who often require the same BI tools as large corporations by offering WF with limited capabilities and a lower price point. I suggested allowing fewer joins, or data adapters, or even lines of output as examples of the sort of limitations I have in mind. Dan gave the impression that this would be a distinctly downmarket approach for them (despite that fact that there are thousands of small businesses relative to the relatively few large enterprises). He did say they offer a very stripped down version through 3rd party specialist vendors but it doesn't show up on a google search.

(Personally I think IBI should look at the iPhone / BlackBerry situation and think again. Even IBM has come to its senses and prices IBM Notes - which we use extensively for all kinds of application development - much more competitively than Exchange for small businesses)

I intend to post to this thread eventually with my take aways from Summit 2015 both generally and from the special breakfast meeting. After I fight the battle to catch back up from being away for a week, I would like to make a thoughtful reply (unlike, perhaps, some of my others). So I will make my reply at an unspecified later date. As a side note, I found it interesting that many of us having special conversations with IBI were from the Chicago area.

quote:

Gerry, from my notes:We do still offer this type of class. It is called 'Boot Camp' class, and it is a one-week offering. Don't worry we don't really send you to Quantico.

I figured that is what he would say. Gerry should probably read the course description for 'Boot Camp'. It is nothing like 'Top Gun'. It is more like a boot camp for the GUI, not the FOCUS language. Thanks for asking.

Ha!

I think that those who develop in the text editor will still develop in the text editor, as much as possible.

Tomsweb,

I would love to continue using the HTML Text editor... Oh wait, they removed it... I guess Gerry wasn't completely acurate on that response...

If only glib replies were illegal. It is sad that this product is changing in a direction that seems misdirected. Maybe they'll learn from mistakes.

quote:

Originally posted by Tomsweb:
If only glib replies were illegal. It is sad that this product is changing in a direction that seems misdirected. Maybe they'll learn from mistakes.

Watch this thread:
http://forums.informationbuild...1057331/m/2527077676