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Posts tagged CA Clarity PPM
CA.com Online Communities
Jul 18th
At the CA Regional Exchange this year (CARE), CA Technologies went live with a new website for CA.com. The CA.com Online Communities 
have been designed to allow customers to help customers. Of the software vendors I’ve worked with, CA understands the value in social media, online communities, and even offline community involvement. Local and global user groups had already existed with CA and their primary means of communication was email, webcasts, and message boards. What the new site will allow is a more personal and integrated control set. Individual members can now have a unique and customizable profile, a wall similar to Facebook, their own blog, rss feed content, and more (coming soon). The groups both global and regional have far better capabilities than they used to. This includes event calendars, blogs, welcome statement, membership listing, member ‘mass’ emailer, and individual message boards.
The new site without question shows the potential and in my mind, helps to make CA an even better software or technology vendor. If you’re a manager or someone who makes or influences purchasing decisions. Before you buy, you need to ask yourself, “How is this application supported?” Know the user base, know if there are communities and individuals outside of your company actively involved with the application and if there are local groups, join them! I guarantee that not only will your organization and IT resources be better prepared to handle problems, but they will also be better prepared for projects that impact or contribute to the effected application and as a result, make the application more successful in your organization. I could dig even deeper here and state that it’s possible your ROI time may be decreased simply due to the community support and how they end up helping you.
For example, the Clarity Global Community has just over 3,000 members. Not all of them monitor the message boards mind you, but a great number do and are routinely posting and replying to one another. Let’s say you have run into an issue in your QA environment, have scanned the logs, and know what code or term you want to search for. You have three general places to find your answer prior to opening a support case with CA. First, search the CA knowledge-base. Second, search the user community message boards and blogs. Third, search Google. Please do understand that possible answers or solutions in the forums should be tested thoroughly in your lower environments before considering them a successful fix. In many cases it may not be a bad idea to open a CA support ticket even if you think you have solved your problem because CA support will let you know if your resolution is a supported function. Lastly, reporting your fixes to CA is a good idea as it could help expand their online knowledge-base.
I can’t express enough how helpful user community message boards are to customer satisfaction and productivity. As I said previously, if you’re ever considering a software purchase, know what the quality of the support is like for that specific vendor and how many people who are out there that can help in solving your potential issues. It makes an incredible difference. CA Technologies has taken a great step in enhancing their user community and in time it can only get better.
CA World 2010
May 25th
After submitting an idea I had for community expansion, CA made me customer committee member for CA World 2010. I mildly participated in event planning, attended pre-conference calls, and had insider information on most CA World happenings. My primary goal for this event was to network with fellow community officers and members and expand user community participation. Secondary, I wanted to learn the CA Clarity roadmap, explore cloud computing, and get an understanding for CA’s role, if any, in social media and collaboration.
The Big News: CA is now ‘CA Technologies’ and is investing heavily in SaaS.
The CA Regional Exchange (CARE) was fantastic. In fact, the networking aspect of my visit went very well. I was able to attend invite-only meetings with CA community management, business analysts, and web developers on CA’s new online portal. Because I am an advocate on social media and enterprise collaboration in general, CA also asked me to participate in an open forum discussion. It was the most rewarding aspect of the conference for me. I knew I had made some good points throughout the hour-long discussion when multiple attendees, from different countries, either messaged me or chatted with me, lending positive remarks about my points. In one reply I had made, I received applause. The topics I brought up included social media strategy and personal branding. The venue was on a stage with about 130 in attendance. I’m the guy in the chair to the far right below.
Social Media Discussion
From my perspective, it does seem as if CA Technologies is focusing as an organization on customer satisfaction and fulfillment. From a community perspective and even product perspective, CA is listening to their customers, as they are clearly enhancing the Clarity application based on user feedback. CA marketing is greatly pushing two mantras or themes. One being ‘partner’ not a vendor, the other being, ‘we can’. CA is also leaping into cloud computing as that topic was the hottest of the conference. They are growing their SaaS offerings and the majority of their new customers are choosing SaaS solutions. For those not familiar, CA has branded their SaaS offerings as On-Demand. ie. CA Clarity PPM On-Demand vs. CA Clarity PPM
Clarity and the word Kilimanjaro never came up. I could tell based on attending CA World 2008 that MUCH had changed in the user interface and CA was greatly expanding usability, simplicity, and integration. In Clarity 12.1, the next major release set for the end of August, is including a new graphical interface that sits on top of Xog and allows drag and drop like table matching from an SAP database to the Clarity database. The goal would be to build xml feeds using SAP or Oracle templates as needed. For Clarity v13 and On Demand, the user interface has changed and includes a larger footprint as the left side navigation menu auto hides when you’re not using it, the binocular browse is gone as you click in a cell, begin typing and it autosenses the value you’re looking for. Overall, there are multiple user interface enhancements and I’ll need to obtain CA documentation on in order to specify them in greater detail. One breakthrough I had at CA World was in regard to dashboards that call web services, connect to external and internal data, and then display the information needed. I spoke to a local vendor out of New Jersey that specializes in the dashboard creation and web service connections. Although using web service calls to another database is more of a tactical decision, rather then importing the data into the Clarity database directly, from a visibility perspective, it may be best to explore the use of web services as they can help in automation, productivity, and even increase data visibility.
Clarity’s release model has changed. CA understands the complexity in putting out quarterly releases for on-premise customers. As a result, customers who do NOT subscribe to the SaaS solution will only receive major product updates and releases annually. I’m assuming hot fixes would be thrown into that mix as needed but in most if not all cases, CA would not want or ask their on-premise customers to install their own updates throughout the year. For Clarity On Demand, CA manages and publishes all changes. With On Demand, CA will auto release 3-4 updates per year and also align major releases at the exact time an on-premise customer would receive their release, keeping major releases in synch. The advantage for the On Demand customer would be, they get the latest and greatest enhancements first, they have a 24/7 web or cloud environment, and no disaster recovery worries. CA with a SaaS solution does all technical management of the application environments. This allows the customer to focus on ‘doing’, not managing. With that in mind, I’m not sure if Clarity On Demand is something that aligns to my organization’s needs but we will investigate it. As such, I’m going to get a 30-day Clarity On Demand trial setup that includes the new user interface for us to test out. Note, Clarity 12.1 will NOT have the new interface, only the On Demand product will. CA will release the new interface to on-premise customers with Clarity v13 set for spring (June) 2011.
Summary:
CA World 2010 was good, the keynotes given by James Cameron and CA management were awesome, and the Maroon 5 concert topped it all off. I found myself running to session after session, meeting after meeting, and there was actually too much to do. That’s a bad thing for me because I missed many things I wanted to participate in and research. The CA Regional Exchange (CARE) was by far the biggest reward I got from the event and if the opportunity is there next time, I would like to only attend CARE and not CA World. Because I have been fortunate to go two years in a row, I’d rather send a co-worker in my place for the next one. As long as I am a leader in the user communities, I will continue to attend CARE which runs over a weekend. I did tweet a lot from CA World, and users of Twitter can follow the hashtags #CAWorld and #CA_RE to read countless ‘live’ posts made by many event attendees including myself. People tweeted in the middle of sessions as they learned product information, they tweeted quotes from the keynote speakers, pics from the concert, you name it. It was awesome and even made the Twitter people into a tight knit group. Using Twitter at an event was a great way to meet people as well as take notes on the event. I’ve written this entire summary without even reading through my Twitter timeline. I’m going to see if I can extract or report on my Twitter timeline and attach it to this summary, maybe as an additional post. It’s an innovative look at event participation and a very fast way to record notes and share them with the world in an instant. Why do I love that opportunity? It allows the people who can’t attend CA World to follow what’s happening based on tweets. I could stay home, follow hashtags on Twitter for the next CA World and learn an awful lot about CA’s product news and information, speakers, and celebrations. Lastly, I’m going to try and get PowerPoint copies of all event sessions. I’m guessing for legal reasons I shouldn’t share those though. CA World 2010 was great. It was the best IT or technology event I have ever attended and contributed to.
Clarity Groups w/Memberships SQL
May 25th
Not exactly a complex query but I’ve been asked by a couple of people how to display the security groups used in CA Clarity along with the members or users associated to those groups. The SQL query below returns the security group name, user’s last and first names, username/login, and status. Of course, there are better ways to report this but at least here is the rough idea. Please note, a basic NSQL output is also provided below for portlet creation. Please build on this or expand it as needed.
SQL:
SELECT G.ID,V.GROUP_NAME,U.LAST_NAME,U.FIRST_NAME,U.USER_NAME,CASE WHEN USER_STATUS_ID = 200 THEN ‘Active’ WHEN USER_STATUS_ID = 201 THEN ‘In-Active’ ELSE ‘Locked’ END AS STATUSID
FROM CMN_SEC_USERS U, CMN_SEC_USER_GROUPS G, CMN_SEC_GROUPS_V V
WHERE U.ID = G.USER_ID
AND G.GROUP_ID = V.ID
AND V.LANGUAGE_CODE = ‘EN’
ORDER BY U.LAST_NAME
NSQL:
SELECT
@SELECT:DIM:USER_DEF:IMPLIED:RG:G.ID:GID@,
@SELECT:DIM_PROP:USER_DEF:IMPLIED:RG:V.GROUP_NAME:GROUPNAME@,
@SELECT:DIM_PROP:USER_DEF:IMPLIED:RG:U.LAST_NAME:LASTNAME@,
@SELECT:DIM_PROP:USER_DEF:IMPLIED:RG:U.FIRST_NAME:FIRSTNAME@,
@SELECT:DIM_PROP:USER_DEF:IMPLIED:RG:U.USER_NAME:USERNAME@,
@SELECT:DIM_PROP:USER_DEF:IMPLIED:RG:CASE WHEN USER_STATUS_ID = 200 THEN ‘Active’ WHEN USER_STATUS_ID = 201 THEN ‘In-Active’ ELSE ‘Locked’ END:STATUSID@
FROM CMN_SEC_USERS U, CMN_SEC_USER_GROUPS G, CMN_SEC_GROUPS_V V
WHERE U.ID = G.USER_ID
AND G.GROUP_ID = V.ID
AND V.LANGUAGE_CODE = ‘EN’
AND @FILTER@
CA World 2010 Planning
Feb 3rd
This year marks a special time in my career. The momentum started last summer when I was elected communications officer for the CA Clarity Global User Community. Since that time I have molded into my enterprise Clarity Application Owner role well and decided to submit an idea for CA World 2010. To my surprise, I was fortunate enough to have my idea selected for CA World participation. Not only was my idea selected but CA made me the customer committee member to assist in CA World 2010 planning. What was my idea? The CA User Forums are extremely valuable to Clarity technical and functional specialists. Clarity specific forum participation is higher than any other CA application. My thought was to setup a booth or table completely dedicated to expanding the user forums and community. To reach out to as many CA customers as possible, regardless of which product they used, and do everything possible to communicate the benefits of using the user forums and how it has benefited Clarity customers.
The content found in the user forum is quite in depth. The more users who participate, the more companies get involved, and the more problems become solved with little to no CA support interaction. The forum is primarily customers solving problems for other customers. This not only benefits CA as the application is becoming more successful for their customers but it also tells them common areas customers have issues or may want to customize, or areas that need further enhancements, etc. It also benefits each forum user by means of social networking. Update your forum profile with valid contact information and you now have the opportunity to network with other Clarity resources in many organizations.
Contributing to the company and application you support can be very rewarding. One really cool thing I got to directly impact for the CA World ROI kit is CA’s validation memo. When visiting the CA World 2010 website we want the interested candidates to have any and all content available to help them attend CA World and obtain approval from their manager to attend. The validation memo didn’t exist until I suggested providing reasons why an individual would want to attend and how can they sell their manager on it in a pre-filled document or template. Not every attendee knows how to properly justify the expense and attendance to such a conference so why not help him or her in the process? To follow up that I also feel it’s beneficial to provide the attendee with a conference summary template because many managers also want some form of write-up covering what you’ve learned from the conference. I plan on writing up my own summary template and sharing it once we’re closer to the event. Check out the validation memo here, I am a proud contributor. It’s inspiring to see your ideas come to life and CA has been so good to me in considering my feedback that my opinion of their company and products has skyrocketed. Nowhere, have I ever been given this level of opportunity.
I plan on blogging and tweeting from CA World 2010 this year and am hoping to expand the CA user community. Be on the lookout for a few related blog posts as we get closer to the event. Thank you for this opportunity CA.
Incidents + Training + Enhancements = Swamped
Jan 20th
My top issues for this week are:
1.) OBS org structure communication process. HR to SAP to Clarity channel needs to be established in order to understand org and feed impacts to Clarity.
2.) Major breakthrough last week as I was able to code direct access to our OnDemand or UPK modules and topics. If you don’t know what UPK is you should. Check out: http://bit.ly/6UMLcF
What I was able to do is use the out of box Clarity help section to embed ‘snippets’ of how-to video in a VERY integrated fashion. Huge for usability and productivity and highly recommended. Alternatively, you could look into CA’s CAPA product.
3.) Virtual Training class this week on XML Open Gateway, WSDL, and GEL scripting. It’s cool stuff but I’m afraid I might not be benefiting 100% from the course considering all of the time I’ve had to spend on open issues.
What’s to come?
- News on the upcoming Clarity Global User Community Webcast
- Continue CA World 2010 Planning (This year will be incredible!)
- Perhaps a vacation would be nice…. ya right.
Creating a Read-Only Attribute
Jan 12th
This is pretty simple and straightforward and most Clarity admins most likely know it but I figured I’d share anyways. If you simply want to create a duplicate of an existing numeric field but make it read only you’ll need to do the following:
Example:
Attribute = z_planned_cost ; Type: Money
Attribute = z_planned_cost_calc ; Type: Calculated / Number ; Formula: (z_planned_cost+0)
Assign the new read-only field where ever you’d like and it will simply reference the data contained in z_planned_cost for that specific project.
Why would you want a read-only numeric field? Well if you want PM’s to be able to read certain attributes that only the Portfolio Manager has control over, creating a read-only pointer to a specific data attribute can achieve that.