Mindalign - the other white meat
Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 9:42AM Imagine living in a corporate world where you had no choice. All for very good reasons, of course, but here is where software (and dreams) come to die.
For instance, the IM client in operation is something called 'Mindalign' (in this case v6.5). Its a POS in almost every sense of the word. Unreliable,. buggy, non-persistent, unfriendly. And today, just to put the chery on the poo-cake that is Mindalign, I got this:
Wait. So if I log out, I lose messages ?
Classy. I guess what I'm saying is before you engage on a long term basis, do one of two things. Either check in advance and make a decision on how much you can tolerate this rubbish, or just lower your expectations. And I mean IBM-Marketing-Lotus-Notes-low, or even Microsoft-reliable-software-low.
After all, its only work.
Reader Comments (5)
Mindalign is persistent as it is a channel based IM system - when you log in you see previous (unseen) IM's on the channel. That said, not sure how it handles Private messages.
That said, my knowledge is historic and most implementations use the Microsoft Live Communication Server on the backend
Ah - for a given value of Persistent. It doesnt want to keep messages more than a few days old, and as the dialog indicates, doesnt appear to persist private messages between individuals between sessions.
We've been using Skype for 8+ years - and have a single chat within HADSL that has been going that long. And Skype is Free (for a given value of Free). Imagine if they did an enterprise version.. ;-)
---* Bill
Another new interesting fact today.They cant upgrade this (and various other equally bad systems) till they upgrade from IE6.
Now thats what I call lock-in!
---* Bill
From WikiPedia:
Aditi Technologies has taken ownership of the intellectual property rights for MindAlign 6, an application for enterprise group chat, from Parlano, which was acquired by Microsoft.
As part of the deal, Aditi has also acquired 56 customers who currently use MindAlign 6, including 5 of the top 7 global banks according to Forbes.
The product is business critical for these companies, as many of their divisions rely on it as their main communication channel and inter-team collaboration mechanism, where email is too slow to be effective.
With this launch pad, the company aims to enter the enterprise collaboration space, and focus on building product IP-based solutions for global financial services institutions. It'll also work closely with Microsoft to help customers move to the Office Communications Server 2007 platform in the future,
So it will most likely become: "Microsoft-reliable-software-low"
It's a funny thing but I was told that I couldn't use eroom with IE7, I had to stick with IE6. So I did a little checking and came across the Microsoft User Agent String Utility. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9517db9c-3c0d-47fe-bd04-fad82a9aac9f&displaylang=en
eroom worked perfectly.
I wonder how much the "We can't move from IE6" is driven by IS Malaise and how much is really "Can't Move"!
Back in 1994 when I was working with PWC in the RBS, to deploy a Notes3 infrastructure for their "Rennaisance activity" database (Rennaisance was the 1990's activity to recover the banking business in the wake of the Black Friday fallout), a conversation with the IT director was related to me. "The last thing I need in the world is Lotus Notes". Nice I thought. I had to roll out Netware versions of my 3.1 servers because NetBios was "Banned" on the network.
Then I was told that I had to run TCP/IP over the WAN for my servers. Ever tried to configure Netware 3.1 for TCP/IP with Notes 3.1 on top.... Fun stuff, the IP manual was about 8 pages of "JDI" and no explanations.
6 Months later the bank embarked on a massive program of replacing all the Branch Back Office 4700 equipment with OS/2. Which, of course, didn't have NetBios disabled.
Banks are a funny place to work. I've never sorted out what they really want.......