Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Request for the ILM product Team

So here I am, pounding away at creating a synchronization solution for a client. One of the last things you might want to do before committing a bunch of changes to their directory is verify the pending exports before you actually export.

Now there is functionality to do that: by searching the connector space and filtering for pending exports. But anyone who has used this knows that the window where the results are shown is small and you have to scroll through them to view more than a few objects at a time. Not very handy if you have a lot of changes going on. To make things worse, there's no 'Save to a file' button anywhere so you can review this table in something more comfortable like Excel. Now that's not totally true, because there in a CSExport.exe tool that can be found in the ...\bin\ folder that you can use to create a file. Unfortunately the file is XML. What am I supposed to do with a 90 meg XML file that has over 250,000 changes in it??? And why is this even in XML format anyways? I would love to know what they were thinking when they decided to make it XML. Why not make it in a text or CSV format, I say. So I take with huge XML file and try to open it, now the only application I know that open this is a way that will ultimately make sense to me is Excel. You wanna know how long it takes to open a file of this size? No you don't... OK it takes about 30-45 minutes and it pretty much uses all the resources on the computer too, so I can't do much else but wait around and think about writing a blog about it. Once it finally finishes I save it in TXT for XLS format, then it opens in a jiffy next time.

So here's my ask, ILM product team: Can you put a button on the GUI search result window that allows users to export that result into a file? And give us options with file formats, just like we've become accustomed to in the past with every other product Microsoft offers. At the very least, if you won't put a button on the ILM UI, would you could you please allow for different file formats in the CSExport.exe tool?