Ooh 'eck. Now I'm the blog Police ?

The Numpty paradox: trying not to insult customers

James O'Neill's blog — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 20:23:34 GMT

A long time ago, in a company far far away, I ran a Novell network (2.15 !). The other administrator

re: Ooh 'eck. Now I'm the blog Police ?

James ONeill — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 15:47:47 GMT

Just a quick note to say that David's comment is not a reaction to Guy's They were both in the unpublished queue at the same time.

re: Ooh 'eck. Now I'm the blog Police ?

David — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 23:16:35 GMT

Regarding: "To me 'wait for SP1' is a way of thinking that belongs to the 1990s."

To my mind, it's a universal truth of software design that the first revision will always be bad. Things are always rushed out the door, even when they're not. I'll admit that I found relatively few headaches in vista, but it's not in full deployment yet. The pivotal point, to me, is that with a product that has been so historically full of management headaches, such as Exchange, it is disheartening to see sp1 expectations along the lines of:

SP1 will fill in the GUI holes that we just didn't have time to complete by RTM, including:

* Public folder configuration

* POP and IMAP configuration

* SendAs permission configuration

* Delegation wizard scenarios

I'll admit that I wasn't on the betas, and though I'm running 2007 on my home network, I haven't used it in any professional setting. But from the outsider's view, the inability to configure, or fully configure, Public Folders, POP, IMAP or do SendAs rights seems to be a solid reason to wait till the Exchange team has had more time to get through the multitude of different facets in Exchange, and smooth them out some.

re: Ooh 'eck. Now I'm the blog Police ?

Guy Adams — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 22:34:11 GMT

I agree fully with your comment:-

"wait for SP1" is a way of thinking that belongs to the 1990s.

Other so called industry experts / consultants which tell theirs and my customers that you must wait for SP1 before upgrading either haven't done much testing with the new line of technologies or are are stuck in the NT4 days.

Exchange 2007 is frankly better out of the box than any previous version was and I would have no hesistation in deploying this to any of my customers.

As for the above post I seem to remember reinstalling a customers XP SP2 machine a few weeks back and there only being 40MB's worth of updates, over a 2Mbps connection this took around 15 mins to download and install which for the amount of updates I thought was quite good. The same situation but connected to a WSUS server took less than half of that.

re: Ooh 'eck. Now I'm the blog Police ?

James ONeill — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 22:01:59 GMT

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/servicepacks.mspx will tell you when the next SP for XP is due.

There is a compromise here: the rule with service packs is that the previous version is only supported for 12 months after the new one is out. Making everyone apply a service pack which is only a roll-up of fixes which they have already is also inconvenient.

Most OEM builds and many corporate builds have the older fixes applied, so very few people have to go through the process you describe, and even fewer have to go through it more than once.

That said downloading 2 1/2 years worth of fixes individually isn't what I'd call a streamllined process.

re: Ooh 'eck. Now I'm the blog Police ?

Jacobyte — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 20:47:03 GMT

Re: service packs

What's happened to service pack 3 for XP Pro?

If I install XP Pro SP2 onto a machine, and then go visit Microsoft Update to patch it, it now takes longer to patch than to install the OS in the first place, even with a fast 20Mbps broadband connection.

Frankly, this is a ridiculous situation and Microsoft should be ashamed that it continues to make it's paying customers put up with this nonsense.