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IQA Business Objects spec changes, undocumented by ASI

Posted May 6th, 2008 by JB

I have just discovered that with the upgrade to iMIS 15.0. ASI has decided to drop the IQA Business Object of 'Contact' and replaced it with 'NetContact'. After about 1 hour looking through IQA for this object (an object that I have been using since 10.4) I finally gave up.

Like a good boy I went through the http://docs.imis.com to see what I should be using and what happened to 'Contact'. No such luck.

My question to everyone is how are we as a community suppose to get iMIS end users using IQA when ASI changes the business objects and does not document the changes? how are we suppose to train and trust the system in which the foundation (IQA BO) specs changes just as often as the data they contain?

~JB

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netcontact

On May 8th, 2008 jon guenther says:

so did you find it? i was looking for it as well.

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No. Contact has been removed

On May 8th, 2008 JB says:

Doesn't that suck?
The most important IQA Business Object not to touch was the one that they wiped out. ASI says to use NetContact.

All queries that were built with Contact have been switched over which is good but the fact is went undocumented was very very bad. I know I personally lost hours of my time trying to figure out what is going on.

Hopefully posts like this will help save time for others in the community.

With all these communities and avenues for ASI to communicate to their customers and solution providers. I wonder why the silent treatment when it comes to spec changes and known issues?? This does not help the cause and inherent fear that everyone has when it comes to upgrading important software. Software that many membership based organizations invested and centered their entire business procedures around. For these organizations, If iMIS breaks their business hurts. We should all remember and respect that fact when dealing ideas to 'improve' iMIS :)

~JB

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JB, I think you're

On May 15th, 2008 Eric Means says:

JB, I think you're absolutely right about the need for a certain level of transparency in these sorts of changes. Not to excuse it, but 15.0 in particular was a very complex release and many areas could no doubt have been handled better. :)

Just for completeness, NetContact is a bridge between the old (Name) and new (ContactMain) contact tables as we move away from the legacy schema. In the 15.2 release, NetContact will be obsolete and the Contact object will return. In the meantime, Contact has been hidden in order to reduce the number of distinct Contact-type objects (two--CsContact and NetContact--is bad enough--it was felt three was just overly confusing).

Going forward, BOD is an increasingly important part of the ASI toolset, and we will need to be much better about communicating differences between versions, both differences in the tool and differences in the objects we provide. This will be even more important once we start supporting BOD upgrades between versions (that is, allowing you to customize ASI-provided objects and preserve those changes when you upgrade, to the extent possible).

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