Scenes from the Engine Room

Contracts, Commitments, and … !@#$?

August 17th, 2009 by allums

About two weeks ago, on Wednesday, August 5, I had an “unfun” conversation.  One that I and every engineer here at WebWorks.com labored to avoid.  Our contract licensing system encountered a glitch and a customer was left in a lurch.

Where are my keys!?!

Gulp!

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2009.2 – Confluence and Continuous Improvement

July 22nd, 2009 by allums

Whew!

We’re putting a bow on our 2009.2 release and prepping it to roll out next week.  ePublisher 2009.2 includes support for FrameMaker 9 and a new wiki format, Atlassian’s Confluence.  We’re a bit delayed from our original ship date of 2009-06-30.  This was caused first by our Q1 slip implementing our new contract licensing service.  That has been going very well, though there is a bit of FUD out there which we are working to correct.  The second cause for the delay involves our documentation.  Hooray!

Why the heck would I be happy about a documentation delay?

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Just a few more to go…

May 8th, 2009 by allums

We’re down to 85 key assets on 40 accounts left to review.  The sales team has been plowing through the list and done a great job so far.  About half the list is comprised of international accounts which may require feedback from our partners to get right.

Thank you for your feedback and patience as we complete this transition.

1 day key problem corrected

May 8th, 2009 by allums

Seems the license server was handing out 1 day keys to all permanent license users.  Not what we were going for there.  The issue has been corrected and you should start seeing the designed “30 keys with 15 day updates” behavior.

Thanks to Marcus Baake and Franz-Josef Knelangen for identifying this issue.

1 day keys?!?

May 8th, 2009 by allums

We’re seeing some odd behavior from the licensing system where it is issuing 1 day keys.  That is not expected behavior.

Sigh…

Is Friday over yet?

Getting the (licensing) kinks out…

May 7th, 2009 by allums

Here’s where we are today.  It’s a combination of good, bad, and everything in between.

Good: We sent out a large number of 2009.1 upgrade emails yesterday.
Bad: Some of those contracts were missing capability assignments.  So users would encounter “You have 0 keys” messages.

Good: Fixed missing capability assignments.  Customers can activate these changes by clicking the “Update” button in the license dialog.
Bad: Still have a number of contracts to create/review by hand.

Good: Whole team is engaged, especially our sales group.
Bad: Some folks are wondering where their 2009.1 update info is at?

Good: We’re sending out an email blast to let people know “what’s up”.
Bad: We’ve got a few 2008.2 users who need key updates.  Please contact us if you haven’t heard from us by now.

Good: We will finish this thing on Friday.

Come on Friday!

2009.1 updates sent!

May 6th, 2009 by allums

At 5:34pm Central, a large segment of the ePublisher user base received update instructions for the 2009.1 release.  If you did not receive those instructions, please check your Spam filters before contacting Customer Service.

There are a number of accounts which could not be automatically migrated to the new licensing scheme.  We are processing through those as quickly as possible and anticipate the bulk of that work will be completed by the end of this week.  We will attempt to send out an automated notice to these customers if possible.

Finally, we are putting up more information about how contract based licensing works over in the documentation wiki. See “Contract Licensing” for more details.

So… close… 2009.1 out later today

May 6th, 2009 by allums

We’re close.  Just working around a problem with invalid email addresses.

2009.1 emails going out on Wednesday

May 5th, 2009 by allums

We’ve migrated a large portion of our legacy licensing information into the new system.  We should be sending out the first batch of upgrade notifications tomorrow.

A couple of notes…

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Getting 2009.1 out the door

May 5th, 2009 by allums

Here’s an update for those of you looking for your copy of ePublisher 2009.1.

We closed out the code tree last week and certified our build (2009.1.20966 if you’re interested).  That was the easy part.  Actually, that was challenging.  We integrated our new licensing technology into the release.  It works great!  Getting it there wasn’t always fun.

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