There's a lot of worse things for a company to do than stand up in a
public forum and make themselves accountable.  Double if someone does so
under a personal ID, and makes themselves vulnerable to personal cheap
shots!

If you have a problem with UNIFY, why don't you state it?  Then we'll
all see the "support problem" first hand (if any....)

I used to work for a branch of AT&T that used Unify a lot,
we got lots of support -- but they could never fix anything.

We started off with Unify 1.0, and when I left we were trying
to get Unify 4.0 to do something besides dump core.  A representative
of Unify, providing us GOLD level support, said (and I quote):
"uh, try copying it to another spot on the disk and see if that works".

If you have to choose between Unify/Accell and another product,
the choice is clear:  get the other product.

/\ndy
--

| Capricorn Labs       UUCP: {isc-br,philabs,oliveb,yale}!bunker!caplabs!andy
|                       BIX: andyh

Let the cheap shots begin.

This is too much, I just have to comment.  It is interesting to note
that "version 1" has to be something we shipped from an apartment in
1982 and that this group was clearly still using the product at least
seven years later, so it must have done something more than dump
core.   And I would venture to say that in seven years we probably
fixed something.  But Andy is clearly expressing frustration with
us and I will accept that.

I will say though that if you read comp.databases you get the feeling
that none of the Tools/DBMS vendors can be completely proud of the
support that they have given over the years.  I think that we all
need to increase our investment in this area, and I am doing that at
Unify.

--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Nicolas Nierenberg                      "No matter where you go,
Unify Corp.                              there you are."

As a consultant who works with both Unify 4.0 and Unify 2000, I think your
comments are inaccurate and too general. It sounds like you had an experience
with Unify some time ago (since 4.0 has been out for several years)

Yes, in past years Unify has had major problems with their support and
customer service organizations. In my experience, this has improved greatly
in the last year or so.

I have found the quality of their products to be very good. I have clients
using Unify with 386's, Suns, Titan's, Mips, etc - they have minimal problems
with the products. In general, I find their product solid, powerful and
easy to use. I'd certainly rather be developing an application with a tool
like ACCELL than Oracle's brain damaged front-end utilities.

I choose to use Unify for my clients becuase of the quality of their products
and the features. I can develop easily maintainable, powerful applications
with great performance using UNIFY and ACCELL. I'm not an employee of Unify
nor do I consult directly for them. I just like their products.

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|   Karen Woolley                                 (415) 551-7458              |
|   KT Systems                                                                |
|   UUCP:  uunet...!{pacbell, lll-winken}!chumley!ktsys386!karen              |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
--

 +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
 |   Karen Woolley                                 (415) 551-7458              |
 |   KT Systems                                                                |
 |   UUCP:  uunet...!{pacbell, lll-winken}!chumley!ktsys386!karen              |
 +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

True, it was some time ago, I have had no experience with Unify
since.  If they have improved their product and service since,
great.

Also, AT&T was much more into Accell than Unify.  Unify per se
did not have one-tenth the bugs and inconsistancies as Accell.

/\ndy
--

| Capricorn Labs       UUCP: {isc-br,philabs,oliveb,yale}!bunker!caplabs!andy
|                       BIX: andyh

I have been using Accell IDS for about 4 years now.  This product is very
stable.  I would say I havent called Unify for tech support in about a year and
a half now.  I will agree their response time to problems needs a little work
but I dont think you can knock the product because of it.  They seem to be
making great improvements in this area as well.  One thing I think hurts
Unify's image is that they seem to release new versions before they have been
tested properly.  We tried upgrading  to the new SQL product.  It was full of
bugs.  We decided since we have had so much success with IDS we would stay with
it.  

BTW: I am in no way associated with Unify.

Have you ever noticed...  [No wait, you used that whole Andy Rooney
thing before, try Ronald Reagan!]

Well [sigh] there they go again.

I'm not going to knock Unify's products.  They have competitive
products and their customer support probably isn't that much worse
than some other companies.  But what gets my knickers in a knot is
the way Unify burns bandwidth doing damage control on the Net.
[Notice I'm not taking a personal "cheap shot" by mentioning Mark
or Nico by name... OOPs! 8-) ]

Isn't the use of Net resources by a commercial company for things
like image promotion supposed to be, like, a "Bad Thing?"
--

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