I've been doing a lot of development work here lately, I mean a lot. Looking at different technologies and implementing them into XPages or at least attempting to. One of my tasks was trying to learn about OAuth and working with connections. I downloaded and installed the IBM Social Business Toolkit and SDK. I then followed several tutorials out on the web (most of them from IBM) trying to authenticate to GreenHouse with no luck. I ran into issue after issue. I got it all the way to being asked to login by GreenHouse and was given some "rotating outage" error message. Well, that can't be right, GreenHouse is up. So I reached out to a couple of different IBMers trying to determine what I was doing wrong. I spent several days on this and was at my wits end. Lastly I spoke with Niklas and was informed that the public OAuth for GreenHouse was currently not enabled. This really baffled me and actually made me quite angry. What made me angry I guess was that all of these tutorials, the SBT documentation and various other documentation explaining how to get a token from GreenHouse was all from IBM. The error messages are quite cryptic as to what the problem was or in some cases wasn't.

So, with that background, on to my request.... IBM, why or why can't you provide a friendly error message? I spent days trying to get something to work that wasn't even turned on. Why not inform me via an error message that this feature is currently disabled? Don't get me wrong here, I'm not complaining about the service being disabled. I have no problem with a service being disabled because it's not ready for prime time yet or because of some other matter. Just let me know before I spend days trying to determine why it's not working.

Rant Off