Poor communication from Digi

Good morning, all. I logged into the forums this morning to report a problem with iDigi and realized there have been some major changes to the products I use that I wasn’t aware of. I think Digi is doing a really poor job of keeping their users in the loop. This doesn’t really belong in this specific forum, but I don’t see a better place for discussing general issues related to Digi and the support process.

First, the forum software got upgraded from Jive (which I never liked) to this mvnForum (which I’ve never heard of, but which is obviously a clone of phpBB and vBulletin). I’m happy to see that my profile and posts have been preserved, but all of my thread and forum watches were nuked. I hadn’t noticed I was no longer receiving emails with updates of new posts, but now I realize things have been quiet for quite some time. I never got any kind of notification from Digi about the upgrade or how it would impact me.

Second, I see that iDigi Dia has been upgraded, first to 1.1.17, and then to 1.2.19 (!), and I don’t see any mention of the development process in the forums. Perhaps I missed them, and if so I apologize, but it shouldn’t be hard to find. 1.2.x seems to have some huge changes, and I haven’t ascertained what the impact is going to be to my drivers and presentations, but it looks substantial. Given that this is now billed as the default version when you go to idigi.com, I would have thought that there’d be some communication to developers and users to give them a heads up, and perhaps help with the transition to the new system.

Finally, while looking for reasons why my iDigi ConnectWare uploads might no longer be working, I see that the firmware for my ConnectPort X4 has been upgraded, and that upgrade impacts Dia. It’s a minor impact, and fortunately there’s a note that I need to be running Dia 1.1.17 before upgrading to the new firmware, but I think there should be more proactive communication with users that there is new software available, and how it impacts us.

I think that Digi is doing great work with Dia and iDigi, but that’s completely lost on me if I don’t know what’s happening. I’m becoming more reluctant to continue using Dia, iDigi, and the ConnectPort gateway because I feel like I need to do way too much work to stay on top of changes. It seems like the primary/only source of information is this forum. If I’m mistaken, please point me in the right direction. If I’m not, there is a startling lack of discussion on these topics.

Thanks for listening,
Brian

Hi Brian,

I would’ve replied to this earlier, but I just noticed my notifications about new posts were lost as well.

I agree that more communication needs to be made about plans and releases. I think one challenge within Digi is that it is common for people to get busy dealing with a particular release or a certain customer, and kind of get caught up detailing plans in day to day conversation, forgetting that there are others out there who might want to stay in the loop. Digi can offer every technological innovation and simplicity of solution possible, but it won’t matter if people don’t feel included and aware of what is happening. The information is available by going out and asking questions, but it’s not always easy to put it together based on readily available information.

I’m not sure if it has changed since you posted this, but when I login to developer.idigi.com, I see on the side both the 1.1.x release and the 1.2.x release. The 1.1.x releases should be pretty compatible between releases, and the release notes are included under the doc folder. The 1.2.x release is significant, but that is why it’s available early on the side, along with some notes that detail the changes between it and the 1.1.x releases, so people can choose to upgrade to it when they are ready.

Do you have any suggestions on ways to be kept up to date, and the sort of things you’d like to hear about? Maybe some ideas are blogs from the main development areas, or a simple page/forum post that includes things that are in progress.

Thanks for your feedback.
Chris

Hi All,

I thought I would chime in on this discussion. (I don’t work for Digi, by the way

I understand your concern and was also worried about a major Release of Dia when I am in the middle of finalizing a new implementation to a customer. I was tempted to stay with the older release, but after I read the Release Notes, it looked very positive and I took the plunge of upgrading. So far, the only impact was that the rci_handler.py was changed to return a formatted local time value instread of the plain timestamp:

timestamp = time.asctime(time.localtime(sample.timestamp))

My host was expecting a timestamp value as before and I had to go in and modify the rci_handler.py to to leave it as a timestamp so as not to have to modify my host logic.

timestamp = sample.timestamp

So far, I have not had any other issues with the new release. The error messages seem better and I really like the new documentation that is provided - that was really needed. A major new feature is the service to check for “Out of Memory” and reboot the gateway if below a certain value. I have had problems with having to manually reboot the gateway when I had a software bug that ate up memory.

The communication to the users could be better, but I’ll take the fixes as fast as they can get them to us!