KODO Disgrace - Newgroup Quality

Question

KODO Newsgroup Quality
We are planning to use KODO as the underlying persistence mechanism for an already implemented system. We have updated our persistency wrapper with the JPA compliant KODO since we wanted to be JPA compliant. Everything were fine till we started to use the wrarpper in the real system. We had some problems during the migration.
That shall be disgrace. There is no reply to our posts even more than a month. Maybe this place is not to write such questions, maybe there is a bug, maybe we couldnt clearly explain the problem etc etc.. however our posts does not have even a single negative/positive reply. We are almost on the edge of giving up the decision to use KODO. If the problem is the money, we planned to use it with the end of a successful migration.
Congratulations dear KODO team, and thank you.
Siyamed

Answer 1

We are reading these forums.
Unfortunately, our response times have not been good because we had not set up a responsibility for creating responses. But we do care very much about the concerns raised here, and I am as disturbed as you to find that our Support is not hitting the mark. Rest assured, I’m taking action on this.
Marc Logemann does hit the nail on the head when he identifies these problems as stemming mainly from the transition. Kodo developers used to monitor these user groups, but we’ve assigned the Kodo developers to new product development. In their place, we are training a new Kodo Support Team, but it does take time to put infrastructure in place—which is why our responses… even this one… may seem sluggish in this transition phase. Once people are in place with the expertise needed, I think you’ll find our responses to be both swift and knowledgeable.
However, that isn’t an excuse. The truth is, it was never our intention to ignore developers, even during this transition period. We do still have support structures in place for Kodo. Our support team is not quite up to the level of the original Kodo engineers, it is true, but we expected them to meet the need during this transition.
I think the major disconnect here is that Kodo users have been used to receiving support in a different way than we anticipated, and in a different way than we are used to providing it. However, we should have done a better job of familiarizing long-time Kodo users like you with the processes BEA has in place for customers to raise and escalate concerns and get issue resolution. We should have been more prepared for the culture you already have in place.
Luckily, that is easily remedied. We are working to get everyone educated about our Support channels. We are also in the process of building a strong infrastructure to provide Kodo users with BEA’s normal level of comprehensive support. And we expect to be able to regularly review forums such as this one.
As for our support of Kodo as a stand-alone product: it is absolutely not in question. BEA’s resource commitment to Kodo is very strong. We do not intend to change the things that make Kodo most successful. I’ve copied and pasted a few bullet points below to indicate how we are working internally to bring Kodo support up to date.
Here are some of the commitments BEA is making to Kodo:
a.     More BEA Support engineers assigned to Kodo (and currently coming up to speed) than the size of the entire original SolarMetric engineering team prior to acquisition.
b.     Kodo Support engineers training in all regions worldwide. This enables us to provide business hour support including phone support in EMEA and APAC as well as in the Americas.
c.     24x7 Production Support, another first for Kodo customers. Previous SolarMetric support was email-only and on a 12x5 basis (10 AM – 10 PM EST).
d.     We have been focusing the expertise of the Kodo Engineers on product development: This year, the BEA Kodo team delivered a major release for EJB3 (Kodo 4.0) and released that technology to the open source community via Open JPA. We are also nearing the release for JDO2 (Kodo 4.1).
e.     Adding staff and additional trainings in preparation for future releases of Kodo.
I hope this answers some of the questions raised here. I encourage you to contact me if you have concerns about the support you are receiving from BEA.
Thanks for offering us feedback and for your support of Kodo.
Terry Clearkin
WW SVP, BEA Support