The I Hate Metalink thread
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Hi all ,
I work as a Siebel Developer for a Company in the UK.
Now Siebel was never brilliant for its support web site - its search was cranky and you needed to know a few tricks to find what you wanted . But you could find documents, Alerts and get software downloads relatively easily. You could monitor colleagues service requests and in general it worked.
Then Oracle bought them and evenutally transferred it to their support site - Metalink 3 .
My God , I take back everything I ever said about Supportweb , Metalink is just the worst thing in the world ever.
Its poorly designed, you can't find anything without trawling through endless useless bug reports that tell you NOTHING about whether there is a fix, its been fixed, going to be fixed. Some of the document links are broken so you have to type in the document number in and re-search it to bring it up.
Finding documentation is a journey into hell. Nothing seems to be in a logical place and if you look at an entry , pray its not on page 5 of a list because if you need to go back to the list to look further , it takes you all theway back to the first page. ARRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH
The other killer is the software downloads , in their infinite wisdom Oracle have bundled it up into huge downloads, but without too much explaination of whats in the bundle so for a tiny patch you might have to download a gig or 2 of useless software. Or worse download the worng thing entirely .
Trying to use the site is just a joke. For a company thats so big , they really do leave a poor customer experience.
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Amen, brother.
What especially gets to me is when I need something really specific (like what's the right way to call an API) I have to "dumb down" my search or I won't get any hits.
However, this is actually to be expected (in my opinion) as Oracle is in the business of selling Consultants and Services and not Software.
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I was going to mention this as well, but forgot about the edit timeout .
The thing with making the whole self support system so difficult is that it makes it so frustrating that you are just left with a bad taste in your mouth. Surely you want the everyday developers/admins to be evangelists , not despising them.
Personally I use the support site as little as possible - logging an SR is usually as painful as putting up with the problem in the first place. This isn't any change from Siebel as you'd end up repeating the problem 3 or 4 times or supplying endless log files or testing some obscure setting that seems to have no relevance to the problem. The entire philosophy of making life for those supporting their software as difficult as possible is just counter productive . They don't make those paying the bills any easier either , but thats a different story.
To be honest we'd look elsewhere if the pain of moving was any easier .
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The all "new and improved" Metalink is now available. Oracle decided to use Flash so it must be good (after all, Adobe makes it...).
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Nope... I think you'll find its bloated shit... just like everything else to come out of Oracle since version 7.0
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Not for us on Metalink 3 - its still stuck sometime in the early 90's style wise .
Another really irritating trick they pull is to remove the ability to search without any warning , only for it to come back some hours later and then only work crankily. Its very frustrating .
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@Wooly said:
Nope... I think you'll find its bloated shit... just like everything else to come out of Oracle since version 7.0
you obviously didn't get my several months' old joke :(
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Damn the written word.... I couldn't see you smiling and winking as you said it (serveral months ago)...
The explaination seems somewhat lost as winter turns to spring.... <yawn>... is it time to wake up yet...?
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@UriGagarin said:
Another really irritating trick they pull is to remove the ability to search without any warning , only for it to come back some hours later and then only work crankily. Its very frustrating .
Frustrating...? FRUSTRATING?... The word I was looking for was shit... or pants... or a whole lorry load of pants.... frustration is when the wife tells you 5 minutes ain't long... and you thought you'd hung on for a good ten minutes :) hahaha
<sheesh> why must I be the only one to laugh at my own jokes....
La serveuse, peut j'avoir mon manteau maintenant… <sigh>
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Well I don't like to get too overemotional about these things , so when something really crap does happen I can justifiably go off on a real rant.
I think my biggest problem with it is that its so full of little irritations that if a developer was sat next to a user for more than say 5 minutes would realise its not really a very good interface.
Chucking globs of flash/javascript/jave applets/activex/jpegs or whatever is unneccessary, I don't mind a simple interface , but make it work in a simple, consistent and logical manner . Fancy style is often a way to hide poor underlying style, its a sodding support site , it doesn't need all that tat , just make it work properly ....
