Actinic Cover

[RuralWeb]

It is not my intention to discourage others from beta testings, my view is that whilst it is useful it should not be viewed with the importance you seem to attach to it, most things should be ironed out well before end-user beta testing. It should be viewed as a challenge to find a bug and not as a final opportunity to reign in bugs that will only get found out in the wild.

Well said jo - V8 was a disaster IMO and Actinic relied far too much on a few members of the forum to fix it for them. Also IMO there are very few designers who push Actinic to the limits in terms of design and functionality that are not active members of the forum and V8 pushed thier support for the product to the limit. Your testers and programmers obviously did not have a clue about how the software was used in real life eg the back tracking on the DW link (template manager in V7 speak) I agree with jo competely and your view that a few people setting up a shop with a couple of products and downloading them is a little short sighted and will result in the vast magority of bugs not being found. As darren said earlier members are not after money but to expect them to go through beta testing again while you sit back is not going to happen this time round.

[Jan]

why else do you think Actinic are working on Enterprise with an Sql database?

Mostly for increased capacity, you can store a lot more products and orders in a SQL server database.

Regards,

[leehack]

Whatever you do on the testing front Chris, please make sure that it is radically different to what we have seen so far. It needs a radical overhaul and rethink. To get 5 designers into a room crash testing this software is going to cost you something like the equivalent of selling 5 or 6 copies of business. If that isn't worth doing, when countered against some of the recent failings and bad press, then i'm living in a different world i'm afraid.

Just make sure we know who they are when you choose them please, i will gladly throw stale tomatoes at them if they fail, instead of at actinic. You will always have the counter 'we listened and it made no difference' too - but that really wouldn't happen IMO.

One further point to consider too, i understand that as a 'big wig' you cannot know everything going on, that is impossible and noone expects that, but please pay more attention to what the forum tells you, than what a proud developer (or their manager) tells you. A prime example would be a V7 upgrade to V8, i can pretty much guarantee that you think that process is OK, it is actually very poor and not worth even trying. It was stated months and months ago, that snapshots from all over the place were tested and they were fine. YET when we try it with real sites, it is not the case at all. You need to work on real sites, not made up pretend ones, that is often useless. Most designers can get their hands on 20-50 different site designs, for that alone they would be worth having in a test team.

[chris ashdown]

I would add to that Lee in that it's often better if you wish to test things or write and instructional manual to have no prior knowledge of the product and then you are starting at the same place as your basic customers, who will fill a book doing stupid things the developers never thought about

So basically involve a selection of abilities in testing from the start

[Jan]

Well in this case, I'll choose to disagree, not on the question of why Actinic developed in SQL server, but to say that in my opinion additional capacity is a far bigger benefit than improved speed, I'm sure Chris won't mind :-)

Regards,

[completerookie]

but is the "bigger capacity" for just a few select users.

in theory, theres some much more pressing issues than sorting out a few "big players"

[Darren B]

which he only became aware of in April this year, according to my mole!

that would be like the PROTX issue no one told them about then either

[wjcampbe]

but is the "bigger capacity" for just a few select users.

in theory, theres some much more pressing issues than sorting out a few "big players"

Lighten up Kevin - ALL successful business concentrate on the customers who spend most.

As Mr Actinic, where would you focus?

Joe Average - the guy who buys one copy of catalog, takes out cover and coasts along version by version, spending half of every 2nd day on this forum airing his gripes that he did not get a £10,000 customisation service FOC with his latest version.

Serious Sam - who bought Multi user some two years ago, and is now up to 20 additional covers and ready to add more if the proggy can be beefed up a bit.

[Jan]

Hi Jan,
the speed problem of V8 MU MS, which he only became aware of in April this year,

I believe that the issue that came to light in April wasn't that Multiuser was slow, but that it was unusually slow for some sites, V8 is slower than V7, but the multiuser processing is more or less the same. There are lots of V8 MU sites out there are running fine, Actinic ran a special upgrade offer for upgrading from V7 to V8 multiuser and I think that this increased the number of MU installations significantly.

It's likely that your problems are caused by your particular setup - so networking issues, usage issues or something about the way your store is setup, which is good because potentially it is fixable. Its's possible though that what you are seeing is just the speed difference between V8 and V7.

Regards,