Alternatives to ALDON Change Management

[rpgKnight]

We use Aldon. I find it difficult to use and difficult to configure. I dread having to create a new release. Their support team is often not friendly and I hate having to call them. I fear promoting objects/code etc., especially if it fails because debugging it is sometimes a nightmare and when it becomes a nightmare I am forced to call the support line and lately I wait and wait and wait for a response and when I finally get called it is an hour after I have gone home.

Change management is necessary in our environment. We need it but we need it to be easier to use.

What are the alternatives to Aldon?

[tomholden]

Re: Alternatives to ALDON Change Management

Turnover by Softlanding is very good, MKS Integrator (i haven't used just know it exists) and ChangeFit which you can find a lot more on by searching these forums (or wait for Kit to chime in )

but regardless of your choice you're still going to have to do some config on the environments and no matter what the product your environment has more to do with the pains of setting it all up than the product itself.

[DeadManWalks]

Re: Alternatives to ALDON Change Management

I Have a file with costs.

[tomholden]

Re: Alternatives to ALDON Change Management

show off!!!!

[MichaelCatalani]

Re: Alternatives to ALDON Change Management

The cool thing about Turnover was that they (at least used to) sent a box of turnovers made by hand from a local bakery to you after purchasing their product. They were some kind of tasty. My wife keeps asking me when I'm going to buy their software again.

I currently use Aldon. I've used others like Turnover and Implementer. Many of these products were initially developed before SOX, so they were geared more towards the shops that needed them (complicated environments) and who could afford them (ie larger shops with many developers). Larger shops could usually swing an administrator to keep up with the product and help out the developers in interfacing with the vendor with any issues. Nowadays a shop of any size is required to utilize change management, and those shops dont always have a warm body to assign as an admin for the product. So the developers have to deal with configuring the product and resolving any issues themselves. Thats just additional work for the developers, and dealing with issues at the exact moment they can least afford to deal with any non-development issues.

Aldon has done a very good job of moving our web related programs and service programs into production without any issues. Thats important, because I designed the website backend so that we could push enhancements and fixes into production while the website was live and active. I dont want to have to take the application server down to deal with a production push. (So far, we havent.) We probably push a couple of production moves per day. We've pushed a couple of massive moves without issues as well, while the website was being hammered.

That being said, Aldon does have some quirks I wish they would fix. If your task has a lot of objects (my current one for the website has around 400), then it would be nice to be able to sort the objects in the task by type. Also, it requires you to always key a task number in for a new object, even though it should always use the task I am working in. It would also be nice if it examined the object you are creating and at least populate the object creation fields with some likely default values. For example, if I created a new RPGLE program in my dev library, and I create that as a new object in Aldon, it would be nice if it automatically defaulted the object creation fields to *PGM / *RPGLE / *BND instead of having to key all of that in.

[DeadManWalks]

Re: Alternatives to ALDON Change Management

Having used Turnover in 2 different shops, I find it very nice. One environment used a second system to promote to. The product is brutally expensive. There are other products that over a better bang for the buck.

[kitvb1]

Re: Alternatives to ALDON Change Management

Vendor Reply about ChangefIT.

ChangefIT is reasonably new on the market (first lisense issued just over 2 years ago) so may not contain some features that you require/use in your shop. But that being said, ChangefIT is developing quite rapidly and does have some very nice features.

In reply to some points raised in this thread:
1. Configuration: Extremely simple should take ca. 15 minutes after installation - add your environments, teams, users, and library lists (used for compilation only and can be imported from Infor S21 and PRMS) - and you're ready to go.
2. Support: The average time from receiving a Service Request to the issuing of a PTF (where a problem has been identified) is about 4 hours. In an extreme case where 2 were reported at the same time, one PTF was issued within 2.5 hours and the other was issued before 07:30 the next morning.
3. Task numbering: New tasks are automagically numbered. Once allocated to a source (or object), ChangefIT knows what the Task number is, you do not have to type it in when promoting.
4. IT Audits: None of our customers have reported any negative reports whatsoever. But I feel that I should state that the primary objective of ChangefIT is to increase the IT Dept's productivity... it is not aimed purely to meet SOX requirements.
5. Users: There is no limit on number of users or teams.
6. Pricing: The price stated previously is approximately the USD price and is per serial number (discounted for more than 2 serial numbers). A Maintenance Plan costs +- USD 375/pa. We have no automatic annual price increase. If we do a minor update, no price increase - for a major update, the price is adjusted accordingly.

On a side note, DeskfIT was developed with a specific customer's requirement in mind in that it contains an optional authorization system (e.g. Fault Reports do not require authorization while Change Requests required Dept, Divisional, and IT approval). Now with the new version released last month, bigger ChangefIT projects can be split into smaller projects and be tracked using DeskfIT. This is great for project management and especially for phased implementation projects.

[gue_brett]

Re: Alternatives to ALDON Change Management

Hi rpgKnight!

We use ChangefIt now over 2 years. One year without payment only for testing and now one year as an regular customer.
But I have to comment ChangefIt is all cent worth. It is really cheap but is it not in vain. Configuration takes only few minutes and this about we don't use any CMS before, so we had no experiences on this issue. So it ist also easy to use and me and my colleagues (which don't know nothing about CMS) use ChangefIt all the day without problems and is normal included in daily work.
And also the other tools offered by Ecofit are very useful like DeskfIt where our users bring in problems and annoyances by self and XrefIt which we now use instead of Xref which was canceled by IBM some years ago. With XrefIt you get an quick overview where an Object (program, phys./log. file, etc.) ist used.

And last but not least, if there is one of the rarely situations where a problem is with ChangefIt, support is really quick and competent. One time they come on our box by using a Team-Viewer-Session and problem was fixed very quick. Also very quick available are PTF's over night which fixes problems. I've never seen such a quick support before.

So I hope it helps you to decide,
Guenter