Brian France wrote: > I'm surmising that y'all, like us, have multiple user id's for support at > www.ibm.com/support. We have several people here that have opened PMR's over > the past many many years. A couple of weeks back I went in to open an issue > and found that I was no longer entitled to z/OS. What I found out was that > only one person in my group could open a z/OS related PMR. After some > questions to many IBM'ers my id was set back, no one knowing why the change > had occurred. In trying to get the rest of my colleagues their access back > I'm told that we will have to pay. That only my ID has Software Xcel and it's > the basic. Well, yes, we knew that. Several years ago we opted to take it as > the only id that could ask HOW to Support questions. Now I'm told that if all > my colleagues are to have id's to open PMR's, which is 7 of us, that we would > have to move to SoftwareXcel Enterprise and the quote is quite an eye popper. > So, long story short, I'm interested in the rest of ya... Any one seen this > yet? Hell, even CA doesn't charge for userid's to open problem support > records for software we are already paying support on.
So it sounds like they've lost the distinction between HOWTO and bug reports. That would be a big step backward, and indeed irritating. I do understand the *theory* behind this: if every Tom, Dick, and Jane at every IBM customer can open PMRs, they'll be swamped with Stupid User questions, and not get any real bugs fixed. But that doesn't justify forcing it all through one ID: if they're going to do that, they're basically encouraging shared IDs, which is a bad idea (and likely prohibited by their TOS, but that's another issue). Limiting it to some reasonable number - maybe ten - IDs per installation might make sense, but we all know that in large shops, the DB2 guys and the sysprogs may not even know each other's names, so one is ludicrous. The fact that nobody at your end knew about the change isn't good, either. If this had been a 3AM SEV1, things could have gotten nasty... Surely one of the good IBMers on this list can find the real scoop. If this is really the policy, then it needs work. -- ...phsiii Phil Smith III [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Voltage Security, Inc. www.voltage.com<http://www.voltage.com/> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
