Trend & Symantec - top of my ****list this week

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Soooo...

In the past week I have been working on two upgrades at work - one is rolling out Trend's EUQ service to replace our SurfControl mail filter (ruined since Websense bought them), the other is upgrading Symantec Backup Exec (another perfectly good product ruined after Symantec bought Veritas) from 10d to 12.

The Trend change was handled jointly by me and my manager, the Backup Exec upgrade was solely my baby. Both of them were an absolute nightmare. Admittedly, I hate everything Trend do with a passion and always have - but something that sholud have been ridiculously easy (it took about 37 seconds when I provisioned a similar service on an Ironmail appliance in my last job) turned into a ten day mission - involving Trend first and second line support (utterly clueless), snapshotting and vaping/recreating dozens of VMs, rearchitecting DMZ/LAN mail delivery and - finally - a WebEx with Trend's product specialists - who admitted their documentation was completely inaccurate, pointed us in the right direction and told us they'd re-write it. During this time, the Trend support site was down for three days - with no announcement as to why - and we must have wasted, between us, about fifty working hours on it all.

The Backup Exec upgrade was just as bad - I ended up with an upgrade that ruined the install so badly that I couldn't even open the UI afterward without setting all the BE services to manual and then starting them all individually (not the best situation to be in for a mssion critical product like a backup server). On top of that, I'm not getting a nasty looking message about running unlicensed for having multiple tape drives (never a problem before - looks like its yet another (ahem) 'extra' I'm going to have to purchase, I had to re-do all my backup & maint jobs because they all failed to run after the upgrade and - to top it all off - Symantec have changed their forums & support site over to some unspeakably hideous blog-type thing - which has orphaned all links to Google searches, rendered pretty much every aspect of their 'support' framework unusable, and has seemingly everyone who uses it up in arms about the sheer crapness of it all.

Most weeks I love working in IT. This week I don't.

 

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How annoyed did you get during these upgrades?

 

That sucks!!!!!

I know what you mean by the Symantec forums utter crap!