Managing repositories should be in VIPM Free

[Steen Schmidt]

Hi.

 

I have used VIPM Free for a year and a half for non-commercial use (free toolsets for the LV Tools Network for instance).

 

That might change shortly as I've started my own company (GPower). The current feature division between Free and Pro makes it impossible for me to use VIPM commercially though. Let me explain:

 

Specifically I'd like to publish VIPs to a network location of my own choice, instead of just using the LabVIEW Tools Network. I could buy VIPM Pro and use dropbox for instance, or some other always-online site. That's fine for me. But currently there is the same requirement for any customer of mine, if they would like to access such a repository they would also have to buy VIPM Pro, simply because I've chosen to distribute my tools with VIPM. I've already lost one potential customer from this, as they have 20+ developers that could have used my tools. They are not prepared to fork out 10k USD to access my VIPs, and my margin isn't great enough to purchase the necessary VIPM Pro licenses to give to my customers.

 

So, what to do?

 

I could continue to use VIPM (Pro for myself) and make my customers monitor the network storage for VIP-changes manually, make them download the VIPs manually etc. There goes much of the advantage of using VIPM at all.

 

...or I could go back to the old way of distributing my tools; a self-inflating zip with mnu-files and so on. All the palette-editor tools are in place with LabVIEW, and self-inflating zips can be scripted in high detail for free today.

 

Wouldn't it be wise to let VIPM Free be able to at least access remote repositories? You could still need Pro to build and upload the packages perhaps.

 

Best regards,

Steen

[Michael Aivaliotis]

Thanks for your feedback. This is a feature request we'll investigate.

[RocketHacker]

I have also just discovered this...here's my thoughts:

• The lack of this feature is NOT covered in http://jki.net/vipm/compare nor the user manual. you can only find it by trying it out in the application. Not my favorite way to uncover a limitation...
  
• Your website states that if I buy pro i can "Use a VI Package Repository to share company add-ons and reusable code with your team". this is very misleading.
  
• I have purchased one Pro license and i'm evaluating it's worth to our team. If this eval goes well, I'm buying pro versions for our hard core LV developers (12 people) and setting up the LV tinkerers (100 people) with the free version. There is zero chance that we will be buying pro versions for the tinkerers. I cannot justify purchasing pro versions for them just so that they can use one feature.
  
• We run LV dev environment on all of our deployment machines (30 machines and growing). I understand that this is an atypical use case under your model (and NIs model). again, i cannot justify purchasing pro versions for these machines just so that we can use one feature.
  
• I would be perfectly happy if you increased the cost of the pro version and added this feature to the free version. I don't mind paying for developer features for developers, but i don't like being forced to buy the Cadillac version just to get basic features.
  
• As far as my eval is going, this is the ONLY potential blocker. If it wasn't here, I'd be rushing to move forward.
  

 

Overall, I would like to really commend you on your product. It really solves some super tough LV issues in a quite elegant way. I look forward to the future power you will bestow upon us. (-:

[Michael Aivaliotis]

Thanks for your feedback.

 

As far as pricing for your use-case. We have other options available that we can discuss offline. Please submit a request here and we can discuss further:

 

http://support.jki.net/anonymous_requests/new