McAfee final straw

I had a big issue today that has finally pushed me over the edge with McAfee products…..

First of all let me qualify why we currently use McAfee products as i know it’s not everyones cup of tea

When we first started the company all of the clients who came on board straight away had McAfee anti-virus. Since we were just starting out we decided to stick with McAfee so we didn’t have to support two different products straight away and so that the client didn’t think we wanted to go and change everything  (and costing them money!) as soon as we started supporting them

We decided that we would review that policy as time went by and evaluate the other major players and decide on a vendor we were happy with

Down the years there have been one or two issues and experiences with bad support but that happens with every vendor right?

So today i’m doing an SBS install and we had purchased “Total Virus Defence” for the client, i started the server install and installed VirusScan before i connected to the Internet. I then installed everything else i wanted and decided to do my Windows Updates (including SP2!! which, touch wood, seems ok)

One of the updates was Internet Explorer 7 (which already had given me some grief)

It’s a high priority update now and i couldn’t immediately see any reason why i shouldn’t install it as after all i really wouldn’t be doing much browsing with it (it’s a server remember!)

To ensure all our anti-virus definitions were current i installed McAfee AutoUpdate Architect. During the configuration, every time i opened a wizard the pages automatically changed as though i was clicking the next button and stopping me from doing anything!

After a bit of digging i found this page which basically tells me that IE7 and UpdateUpdater are not a supported configuration!

Now for those who don’t know…when you buy McAfee products you get a grant number, you login to their site and download the latest version of the software including any documentation. I had downloaded the software and there was no extra documention files, i extracted the zip file and i read through the “read me” file and there is no mention of the fact that IE7 is unsuported. If it had been in there i wouldn’t have installed IE7 in the first place! This was the first time i’d found out there was a problem and i only i found out because went looking for it.

I still haven’t found anywhere else it says the configuration is unsupported

So we also paid for their “gold support” so i thought i’d see what the options were. I tried to login to their support portal and was told by the software that my email address was not valid and i should enter another. Five different addresses later and i knew i had to call someone.

On the main support page is a single telephone number for support. Dialled that number and it’s dead….great!

I had the number for the “gold support manager for the EMEA region” so phoned his direct line and mobile. I’m still waiting for the call back

Eventually we found a number and after being transferred three times and managed to explain the issue to get this answer,

“It doesn’t work with IE7″

Thats it. No details on any patch thats due out. No workaround to configure the software in a different way. Nothing

I was basically told i’d have to “rollback to IE6″

I wasn’t entirely keen on doing this but with the help of this KB article thats what i did.

When i’m doing an SBS install i usually take regular images of the system so i can go back to a point in time but because of the when i’d installed IE7 (at the start) i didn’t really want to lose all that work (i was installing AutoUpdater right towards the end!) so i’ve decided to run with it “as is” at the moment as the event log looks pretty clear and the system is pretty stable at the moment

So thats it for McAfee for me. Too many annoyances and i’ve not been happy with the support for years

We’ll evaluate some different systems in house and support two products until we finally move clients over to something else

So what are you using at your clients? Do you get good support? Is it value for money?

I’m going to look at Trend first i think but any insights would be welcome

Good ol’ Vlad

I love reading Vlad’s blog because he says it as he sees it which is a quality i like as you always know exactly where you stand. My business partner is exactly the same but he wont be blogging anytime soon!

His latest post is the second in the “Vlad’s school of customer service” observations

I’ve been in similar situations myself. You make a call to get support and have to wade through all the crap before you get anywhere

I have to deal with a well known ISP (who will remain nameless) here in the UK and for many years their when you called the business support number it got you through to the same people who did the home user support.

This meant you spent eons in a queue, then when you finally got to speak to someone they refused to talk to you as follow technician and talked to you as though you were an end user

“It is plugged in?”

“Have you tried turning it off and on again” (I quite enjoyed The IT Crowd BTW)

Then when you finally started to get somewhere it was never their fault (it usually was though!)

They must have had a lot of complaints as last i heard the business support desk had been seperated from the home user desk which is a good job. We pay more than home users for business class service so surely it’s unreasonable to ask for business class support!

How Secure Is Your Wireless?

I was driving home from work yesterday and heard a feature on the radio about unsecured wireless access points in homes. It followed the arrest of two people who had been using someone else’s broadband via a wireless connection.

I talk to lots of people through work and you would not believe the amount of people who dont secure their wireless access at home.

When i ask why, i do get some very strange responses but one of my favourites is

“What harm would it do if someone did use it?”

They think it’s all about hackers and breaking into websites and stealing credit card numbers and their quiet little street doesn’t need to worry about that.

While i could give them a hundred reasons i always explain that if someone downloaded “questionable material of an adult nature” from the Internet who will the police be talking to first?

At that point they usually go pale and mutter something about sorting it out as soon as they get home

Would you leave your keys in your car? If your neighbour was tapping your electricty supply would you be angry at that?

Again there are tons of comparable examples i could give.

Setting up security isn’t hard on most modern wireless routers. The instructions usually give a step-by-step guide. Even using WEP would be better than none at all!

Take a few mintues tonight to make sure your wireless connection is secure. If not speak to a geek who can

Dell Vista Express Upgrade Issues Still Going on in April!

** Update **

As always happens in these situations the day after i posted this the upgrade kit arrived in the post.

My Dad is still annoyed that it took four months and probably wont buy anything from Dell for some time (if ever)

*****

I posted a while back about how my Dad had bought a new Dell machine and was waiting for his upgrade to Windows Vista

I spotted a new entry on the Dell blog 

They are blaming “third parties” for the delays.

It says towards the end of the post that they are expecting international orders (UK included) to have shipped by the end of May. First it was “end of February”, then “end of March”. It’s April now and by the time May comes thats a long wait for the consumer who placed orders over Christmas

Customer services are of no help and when looking at the order on the web site it’s just displayed as “in progress”. This has supposedly been changed from “pending” to avoid confusion!!!

Understand that Dell have to deal with third parties but it shouldn’t take four months to keep their customers informed?

I can’t imagine how much business this will loose Dell long term. Yes you can place the blame on other people but the consumer sees it as a Dell logistics problem so they simply wont buy Dell products again

Express Upgrade? Whats express about it?

** Rant warning **

My Dad was looking to buy a new pc. He had a modest budget but was keen on getting Windows Vista

He decided to buy a Dell PC with Windows XP Media Centre Edition installed and take advantage of the Express Upgrade offer so that he could still get Vista

As soon as the pc arrived he placed his order for the upgrade and payed for the carriage.

He heard nothing from Dell for weeks. He sent an email to their customer services department and was told they would be shipping “towards the end of February”

It’s now the middle of March and he’s still waiting for his disk

Now i appreciate there are lots of logistics in getting the orders out.

My point is though if he’d waited a couple more weeks he could have bought the PC with Vista on it. It’s been out for a couple of months now!

Now all he has is a PC that he’s scared to do anything with in as he wants the upgrade process to go as smoothly as possible!

Dell have since apologised on their blog but it’s not really good enough 

Sort it out please!

How does anyone do business?

Good post today from Susanne about problems with distributors.

This is something I have had to learn lots about over the last couple of years as I’ve become more involved on the business side. It’s very frustrating when your account manager isn’t tuned into your needs.

An example of bad management happened recently. I’m not going to be naming names so we’ll call them “Dist X”.

We have had a couple of calls and emails recently from Dist X asking why were hadn’t been using them much.

First thing is we had the same thing about six months ago and we told them some of the issues were

1) Everyone else gives us better credit facilities than you

2) We don’t even know who our account manager is!

So we got our credit facility updated and an account manager was assigned to us. This account manager then hounded us for an order. Letting us know the “offer of the day” and generally being a bit of a pain.

We had a small order to make so thought we would give them a go.

This is where it got even worse. Once we had placed the order the account manager did a disappearing act. Then we got our goods, but we also managed to get an Exchange 2003 media kit we hadn’t asked for. The invoice for this arrived so we asked the account manager to sort it out. They wanted us to fill out lots of paper work to return the item. The guy in charge of our purchasing wasn’t impressed with his staff having work created for them when it wasn’t their error. The account manager eventually told us to dispose of the media kit as it wasn’t worth arranging a collection. We then couldn’t fill out their returns paperwork as they wanted a serial number from the product.

I’m not entirely sure where we are with this now but as a first order they didn’t really do themselves any favours.

As Susanne said we are the small customers but surely we deserve better?

Vista vs Mac?

I usually take articles on PC vs Mac (Linux/Unix/etc) with a pinch of salt.

You can usually tell after a few minutes that the author has already decided the winner before conducting the test.

I came across this article on Znet that i think (just my humble opinion) is not a fair test

The article tries to test how easy it is to move all your settings, documents, applications, etc from system to another.

The systems in question are an existing Windows XP installation onto a new Windows Vista installation and for comparision transferring from an existing Mac OS X installation to a new Mac OS X installation.

Sorry that doesn’t work for me.

I’m not saying the guys results are wrong. But i just think the comparison is unfair.

If you were doing XP to XP vs Mac OS X to Mac OS X, fine…

or Vista to Vista vs Mac OS X to Mac OS X, fine as well.

As we all know while Vista and XP have lots of common roots there are lots of differences in there as well.

If you were comparing an XP to Vista transfer with a Mac OS X to Mac OS Leopard (is that right??) then i think thats fair game.

Transferring to a new system is always a PITA so using this argument in the “my mac is better than your pc” (et al) is a pointless excerise. Most people i know (and i’ll be experiencing this in a couple of weeks as my dad has purchased a new PC and ordered his “Vista Express Upgrade”) would just copy/burn their documents of to USB Drive/CD/DVD and reinstall any apps they needed

Not really sure where i’m going with this one so i’ll stop there! :-S

SharePoint Calendar Missing Events Problem

One our customers recently started using SharePoint. Because of the nature of their business sometimes it feels like SharePoint was developed with them in mind!

One of the things they wanted to do was keep track of room bookings.

Pretty straightforward. They decided to have four seperate calendars (i suggested one calendar with a room field but it was their decision), one for each room. I then created a web part page and dropped a web part for each calendar onto the page. The theory being that at a glance they could see room availability for a particular month.

All seemed well initially and they started added events.

Until i got a call saying “i just hit the save button but it doesn’t show up on the calendar”

WTF?

I tried it myself and she was right. I drilled down into the individual calendar and the missing items were there.

If you want to re-create this for yourself do the following.

 1) Create two new events lists (Calendar 1, Calendar 2)
2) Create a new web part page
3) Place a web part for each of the calendars onto the page
4) Set the view for both web parts to Calendar
5) Create a new event for the first calendar in the NEXT month (e.g 7/2/2007)
6) Repeat step 5 for second calendar
7) Return to the web part page, click the ‘>’ button to select the next
month in the calendar Note that only ONE of the events appears

(BTW this also applies with one calendar and multiple web parts of that calendar)

The problem occurs when you click the > to change the month. If you stay in the current month all is well. I experiented with tweaking the URL and had some success but i couldn’t expect the users to do this.

I searched around and found the follow post. Same issue. Claimed it had been filed as a bug with a MS support. But check out the date..2005

I thought there must be a fix if it had been filed so long ago. I couldn’t find anything so i posted in the managed newsgroups and this is the reply i got

 Thanks for posting in the partner newsgroups.

Yes, this is a limitation when placing multiple calendar view Web Parts on
a page.  We can place multiple event list view web parts on any page but we
cannot use the calendar view for more than one web part. Currently there is
no fix available.  I am sorry for the inconvenience it may cause.

We strive to capture any and all product issues and product feedback so as
to ensure that we are continuously developing Microsoft products to meet
customer needs; this is exactly why feedback such as yours is always taken
very seriously.

Wonderful!

I checked this out in WSS v3 and it works without any problems. The customer has just put a lot of effort into their deployment so i dont think they’ll be wanting to upgrade just yet.

To get around the problem in the end i created a single calendar, added a field for the rooms. Created views for each of the rooms and created a web part page with links to each of the views. Not quite as elegant as what they originally wanted but it’ll do for now

Can’t wait for this to take off!

I haven’t commented anything about the CES as everything has generally been said elsewhere

However i stumbled across a video on Techeblog

It’s basically an LCD screen that shows a different image depending on the angle your viewing from

One of the applications mentioned in the video is that you could have one screen in a car but each passenger sees a different video.

However, i’m excited about this for a different reason.

CINEMA

My other half is profoundly deaf which means that if we want to go and see a film we need a subtitled showing. I dont know how this works over in the states but over here it’s a complete nightmare. Many cinemas are reluctant to show subtitled films (for various reasons i wont go into here as it’s a real bug bear with me and it would make this an even longer post!) and they are never advertised very well so going to see the latest blockbuster becomes a military operation.

I do use the excellent Your Local Cinema site to find out which cinemas are actually screening. It’s rarely our local cinema and we drive on average 25 miles just to see a film. (which is crazy when our local cinema is less than five miles away). We have to plan in advance (usually weeks) so none of this “shall we catch a movie tonight”. This generally means we only visit the cinema three or four times a year and generally have to wait for them on video.

Sorry..started to get into my rant there <blush>

The point i’m making is if we could have a cinema screen with this technology we could have regular screenings where you only see the subtitles if your sitting in certain parts of the cinema. It would mean ANY screening could have subtitles instead of the random few we get now.

Fingers crossed eh?!

SMTP Relaying

Uh oh, two rants in a row!