Trurl

I'm not sure if there's any point in posting on a dead thread but here goes. I say squeeze them until they bleed. Management knew full well the state of the project from the developers working on it. They should suffer the consequences for treating their customers like a bunch of idiots (no offense) making the workplace unbearable.

We used to have a saying about CC4, I think it sums it up brilliantly - "Well intentioned but fundamentally flawed". And that's just the design, the implementation is another can of worms.

Good luck, mate. I don't want to sound negative, but I seriously doubt any CC4 upgrade can be classified as 'fine'.

Right, I was planning to put together some words on why, in my opinion, CC4 turned out to be such a disaster for quite some time now. First of all, a few disclamers. One, I wasn't fired from RM , so it's not bitterness. Two, I left the company some time ago now so my info can be a bit out of date. It was a mistake to make the management console a desktop app instead of a web app. The overhead of transfering the data back and forth between the server and client is crippling performance. Secondly, the key compoents (user management, computer management) should have been developed with very high performance in mind. Lots of other services depend on user/computer data to operate. User management is still the old CC3 stuff underneath, which wasn't particularily fast in the first place. This is just a small fraction of the problems with CC4, most of them are due to organizational dysfunction. The individual devs are often very skilled but RM's managerial ineptidude is dragging them down. But that's a topic for another post.

Yes, I really am an ex-RM employee (can't think of a way to prove it TBH). I'll try to type something up about those architectural problems later (when I get home).

Yep, I'm not even sure if it's at all possible to make CC4 work ok (stable, fast). There are some really deep architectural problems with it.

Partially. CC3 was quite dated, still COM based, the management console was written in VB. Some CC4 components are just wrappers around old CC3 components, but a lot of it is new. New frameworks were developed specially for CC4, when we started writing the actual product those frameworks were still far from finished. RM's outsourcing facility in India has its fair share of problems too. The failure to deliver CC4 on time and to a sufficient level of quality is just a manifestation of the systemic problems within the company.

I am an ex-RM employee and I must say CC4 was the most abysmal software project I ever worked on. It was severely understaffed, the requirements remained fluid. That's why it seems it's been slapped together in a hurry. The project itself was the reason I decided to leave the company. It was all smoke and mirrors, The early demo builds were specially tailored for the demos. The developers knew full well what was going to happen when they released. Management chose to ignore that and released anyway. I wouldn't count on it. The people responsible have strategically maneuvered themselves away from this disaster in time. Best of luck and I hope they sort it out eventually.