Monday, March 05, 2007

Revisiting Scribe

Over a year ago, I gave a review of Scribe Software's Insight. A product I had very high hopes for, but was not panning out in my production environment. I gave them an "F" after using their product, or rather attempting to use their product, for several Months.

My problems with Insight stemmed from two issues. One we attempted to install a trial version of MOM (Microsoft Operations Manager) on that server, only to have the install fail the prerequisites. We rolled it back and thought we were done with it, however we were wrong. During the long arduous troubleshooting of Scribe Insight, we discovered that there was a MOM installation stuck in the registry and had to uninstall it. Luckily it was still in the Add and Remove Programs mmc.

The other issue was that when my VAR installed the SQL server instance that would be used for Scribe they failed to install SP 3a. Once MOM was uninstalled and the SQL server instance upgraded to SP 4. We were able to get Scribe Insight on line.

Scribe is a very powerful integration piece. And after many months of working with Scribe Support people - Bill, Brendan and Larry, I have been able to stabilize Insight and get pretty good results with it.

I can comfortably say that they did not deserve that "F". In fact I can give their Support team a Solid "B+". I hold back on giving them an "A" only because they seem to lose track of some Action Items. They could definitely use MS CRM at their location. If they are reading this ... Call me, I can give you a good price on an installation.

They have pretty good knowledge of their product, and have developers handy if they need more info. On a couple of occasions I had to follow up with them to see where things stood. But if they said they were going to call me at 3pm the next day they did.

I can give their product another "B". Man I would love to give it a higher grade, but it seems overly complicated, at times. Like so many programs the insight seems bent on pushing you to partners and paid support, when with just a little bit of effort the program can be supported by blokes like me right out of the box.

If you are looking for a powerful integration piece, and don't mind a long learning curve, don't shy away from Scribe. I don't think there is much it can't do. Be prepared to spend hours learning the system, and running a lot of tests to see how your results come out. Once you get the hang of it though, expect some dazzling results.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am not going to be original this time, so all I am going to say that your blog rocks, sad that I don't have suck a writing skills