Getting their acts together
Last night I ran the Microsoft Product Evaluator that checks all my Microsoft products for compliance. Great little program - it puts the results in an html document with links to places on the MS site with the relevant upgrades. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/year2k/...
After running the program I found that a few of my programs needed to be updated to make them compliant. Fine, no problem, so off to the Microsoft site I go and started downloading. After several reboots I ran the evaluator again to see that I had indeed a compliant system. Yes - compliant software all down the list except for one item that I had forgotten to download. Back to Microsoft site again to download the forgotten item.
Downloaded, installed and much to my surprise, no reboot! I re-ran the evaluator but this time I was still connected to the Internet. When I re-ran it, the program must have gone off to some database to "update" itself. Imagine my horror to find that most of programs are no longer compliant!
How come? What gives? Well, Microsoft have moved the goal posts again and I'm faced with another round of downloads. To me, this is not on. OK, for me as an individual it will take another couple of hours to get things straight, but what about a company that has 500 PC's to upgrade?
At my company, we are busy installing patches and upgrades to ensure our "off the shelf software" (such as Microsoft Office) is compliant. Is this going to be the case for the rest of the year? Last minute patches and upgrades? I think it's time the big boys got their act together.
As a company, we have an obligation to our customers that our systems are compliant so that we can trade over the millennium period. Thousands of Y2K co-ordinators like me are downloading patches and getting their IT departments to install them. How can this work if no sooner have you upgraded than a new version comes out? When will it end? I have a nasty suspicion that it will end well into the year 2000.
Amateurish
To me this whole business has been handled in a very amateurish way by the leading software houses. Why? Because the Y2K issues have been known for years and all this should have been resolved a long time ago.
