Flexibility - Extensibility - Part 1 - UB Net Director

Years ago, I worked for a company now disappeared: Ungermann-Bass (then renamed UB networks, but I will simply write UB).

UB on which I could write a complete book  titled “How great ideas can fail thanks to sucking managers” had one of the first usable Network Management products (Net Director).  The persisting, damned choice of OS/2 instead of Windows could be the start of a chapter, the reluctance to open the product to third parties and to manage other vendors devices could be a nice piece of text too… 

Their addiction to management hypes was great (and expensive), I am still hesitating which one was the most irrelevant (writing book is not that easy). Among the perks: we received great motivation via UB TV (VHS tapes) that we were ‘obliged’ to look at during the office hours. Sorry, I don’t have any copies of the one with Squadrons of Flying jets illustrating one of our most elusive core values : working through team work !

Anyway, a lot of software people seem to have difficulties to imagine that their design will not satisfy the end users. Net Director had provision for three extra fields in the database per managed device. I don’t remember their exact names, it was something like comment 1, 2 ,3. 20 year ago that was extensibility… at least for UB.

A big governmental customer wanted to use Net Director as a core to their operations. Basically they wanted to put inventory information, location etc in the system. They did the legitimate request for the product to be enhanced and asked for 7 more fields. The enhancement request was a lengthy process at UB and I am still pretty sure that it took more money to discuss these kinds of enhancements than to please customers by doing them (one more chapter of the book). A couple of paragraphs will cover the fact that a colleague and I, travelled to California to put these 7 extra text boxes and a scroll bar on a window. I really did nice trips for them, and I must say I loved the bay area…

To be continued...