Just in case you missed the official announcement...again!:
"We are pleased to announce that Release 8.1 Service Pack 6 was released today, April 17th, 2023 and is now available for upgrades."
And yes, we already have 4 or 5 requests in for it. So the glacier of Manage 2000 client releases continues to press forward.
We have had folks using the knowledgebase for a couple of years and while it is hard to imagine new classic Manage 2000 topics to add to the thousands of KB articles already created, it is pretty obvious that new features in recent service packs deserve some knowledge creation. So, I am trying to remember the lessons of my technical writing course some years back...something about hushing the passive voice.
There is a school of thought that documentation should be done first and that development should drive off of the documentation. What I experience is that knowledge creation drives bug fixes.
When a developer is tasked with knowledge creation and actually has to find simple examples to put into how-tos, things that can go wrong generally do. But that is why the patch system exists, to make Manage 2000 more resilient.
The other great excitement of the moment for me is a client doing beta testing on the web based ProductConfigurator. The ProductConfigurator was introduced in release 7.2. The backend has been used by several clients to process custom front end request, but the standard user interface has never undergone a serious full beta test cycle with feedback to and correction by the development staff.
Driving a web experience off the same SCREEN.BUILD metadata that defines the user interface for PWS CTO.ENTRY is an ambitious undertaking. The payoff for CTO technical folks is HUGE! Their experience, skills, and techniques configuring models with CCVs applies equally to CTO.ENTRY and ProductConfigurator.
Lane and I have been experimenting with adding accumulator CCV types that can render running totals off of QPA.TABLE.CALC results. This supports running pricing displays as users configure an end item.
I feel we are finishing things started long ago. And that is a good feeling.
