Marion's Weblog

As I mentioned in an earlier Blog we are rolling out a new Gnome look and feel across Sun. It will make Gnome look more like JDS. This is the first step to getting everyone at Sun running JDS everywhere. We call this new Gnome look and feel JDS preview. The base version for JDS Preview to be installed on is Solaris9U4(min) and Gnome 2.02.

The rollout has been delayed a couple of times because we really wan to get this right. But now we are good to go, and we will do the roll out next week. If all goes as planned we'll do a third of the SunRay servers Sunday night, and a third each of the next two nights.

The change acceptance work and communications for this has been a fantastic learning experience. We've used multiple methods of communication and repeated the message over and over again. Just some of the methods we've used include: all Sun email from Jonathan Schwartz, cartoon posters featuring the JDS Phantom, phone calls to key influencers, group presentations, ask the expert conference calls, each team member focused on individual conversations with a different key stakeholder group, and a jds-preview-comments alias with personalized responses.

But the most exciting thing about this is that it is working!! I know I shouldn't sound surprised but it always nice to see what you believe in actually work. We are doing multiple conference calls this week to answer people's questions. What is really exciting is that we are getting feedback that people like JDS Preview and are excited to see us beginning to roll out improvements to our user interface. IT so often gets beat up any time there is a change. This time it looks like it will be received as a positive improvement moving us forward. I think it is symbolic of Sun's recovery. It feels good.

Comments:

Hmmm. I'm one of those sceptics, I'm afraid.... Can you tell me what exactly the JDS preview gives us?

Posted by Georg on November 05, 2004 at 04:05 AM PST #

From what I've seen so far, even worse configuration screw-ups than before if you use JDS Preview but also need to log in to a real JDS machine with the same user account :/

Posted by Unknown on November 05, 2004 at 08:21 AM PST #

I enjoy getting feedback. Especially from sceptics. Since JDS Preview is just a new theme for Gnome 2.02 I don't think it makes things worse but I have heard it is a good ideea to use a different user account on a real JDS machine. Georg asked what JDS preview provides. JDS preview gives us a first step toward running Sun on JDS. As people get used to Gnome they will be more ready to transition to JDS on Solaris. It also gives us a more modern looking easily configurable desktop than CDE.

Posted by Marion Vermazen on November 05, 2004 at 04:39 PM PST #

As a shareholder, I think the time spent on creating and rolling out this "JDS Preview" could have been better spent by upgrading everyone to a beta of Solaris 10 right across the company - that way the company would be running on a relatively modern GNOME release (2.6, with bits & pieces from 2.8) and we'd have many more eyes testing builds of Solaris 10 with JDS3, which ultimately will result in a better product for our customers.

Posted by Tim Foster on November 06, 2004 at 09:36 AM PST #

I couldn't agree more with Tim... Here I see only scepticts and disappointment, like I predicted to Marion :-) And, I consider it as a coincident that our sunray servers have got the latest hardware (doubled ;-) shortly before the preview. And clearly I think gnome has some serious trouble running on multiuser environments. We should start work that out.

Posted by Georg on November 11, 2004 at 11:48 PM PST #