My vote of confidence for the new CSC experience

[Rob Huffman]

Hi Team,

As a person who has worked in IT for many years I realize some of the complexities that must be involved

with a change as significant as this major migration that the CSC team has just completed. I think the upside of

the new experience far outweighs any current flaws/bugs we are seeing here. I know how much work that Dan, Vidhya,

Tom and the whole CSC Team have put into making this a better community for all of us, as CSC users, so I just wanted

to add my + vote of support and a big thank-you for all you do to support CSC!!

I'm sure that CSC will continue to be the premier technical support site "bar none"!

Cheers!

Rob

[Dan Lukes · Accepted solution]

I fully agree with first sentence. Unfortunatelly, as a person who has worked in IT for may years I know that not every idea will turn world to be better place.

Just ask average users of Windows 8 how he aprecitate the major UI change. I'm sure so many excelent peoples has spent pile of time to create such new UI for Microsoft.

Dan and others - really so sorry to saying it, nothing personal - but this UI has no new feature I missed in old UI, but lacks several features I apprecitated in old UI. As a result - I need to spent my time to learn new UI. No advantage from it, but disadvantages only.

On the other side, it's not my forum, it's Cisco's forum. I fully recognize Cisco's suvereignty to change it anytime. For any reason or even with no reason.

I'm sure that CSC will continue to be best community forum. It's the only Cisco's community forum, so no way to not to be best ...

[Rob Huffman]

Hi Dan,

I agree with many of your statements here and if I made it seem that the current state of the "new" CSC is better than the "old" CSC then I communicated my thoughts rather poorly.

What I was trying to say here is that I have 100% confidence that the people behind the scenes of CSC like Dan, Vidhya, Litsa, Tom and so many others will work day & night to make this new version equal to and probably better than the old if given some time to resolve the related issues :)

I've been forced by management or circumstances to do upgrades/changes/migrations on systems in the past that I knew were doomed to initial failure and a poor reception from the users involved (like us here @ CSC) but had to push forward anyway. When these "went south" many users wanted to have us fired if not worse, but there was the odd person who understood and continued to offer their support and words of encouragement. In the end, they knew that we would work out all the kinks and everything would move forward as it should. In this discussion, I was attempting to offer my support and consideration for the CSC team as others have done for me in the past.

Even in the first 4 days of the new CSC experience, many of the reported problems have been resolved so I have no doubt that this will continue until all is well again :)

https://supportforums.cisco.com/document/12133706/known-issues

Cheers!

Rob

[Jon Marshall · Accepted solution]

Hi Dan

I agree that at the moment this is certainly not as easy to use as the old site.

Without wishing to sound like an old timer we went through this before when the original site was upgraded to the one we have just changed from (if that makes sense )

At the time some of us felt functionality had been lost but in truth a lot of it was down to people generally not liking change plus having to learn new ways of doing things. I think most of us, certainly me at the time, felt a bit put out losing the site we had used for so long and then having to learn the new way of doing things.

But after ironing out the bugs and getting used to the new ways of doing things the upgrade proved to be well worth it.

There are some major bugs at the moment but even today now that the last post going to the top of the list has been fixed it is already a lot easier to use.

I doubt Dan and the team would have chosen to upgrade if the platform didn't allow them to introduce new features more easily in the future so i think in the long run we will all benefit from it.

As Rob says, Dan and the others won't stop until all the bugs have been fixed. Once the major bugs are fixed i suspect a lot of the functionality that was perhaps missed can easily be reintroduced.

We all use the site differently ie. for me e-mail notfications are vital but others use RSS etc. so for Dan and his team it is not always obvious what is and isn't needed or what is most important but from past experience the one thing i can say for sure is that we are always listened to and if at all possible what we need/want is implemented.

Not wanting to preach but just to say please give it time and if the last upgrade is anything to go by it will be worth it in the long run.

Jon

[Dan Lukes]

At the time some of us felt functionality had been lost but in truth a lot of it was down to people generally not liking change plus having to learn new ways of doing things.

Don't hesitate to name the one - yes, it's me, I know it already, it's not a secret.

Bugs don't frustrate me so much. They needs to be reported and solved - nothing special.

I like to learn new things, but I hate waste my time to learn how to do same old things just using new tool. 

But most of my frustration is based on features considered unimportant (so they will not be reimplemented) and informations lost during migration (the will not reapear even in the case the related feature will be reimplemented later).

But you are true, of course. Show will go on as usual. The UI is dead, long live the UI!

(Note: this message is affected by a not-yet-resolved bug(s). The first paragraph - the quote of part of Jon's message - is formatted as "special contain" style, the ending proclamation is in italics. Such formating is properly displayed in editor, but become invisible when message saved. So imagine the formatting as described here by self please).