Patanjali Sokaris

29 Jul 2007 7:51 AM

I am part of the invited beta 2.0 test, but this one is very poor compared to the 1.5 beta which was very smooth to install and use (more so than the production version).

I have tried three times to convey this through the official problem reporting tool but the following message is displayed after all the data is collected:

"An unknown application error occurred. Please try again in a few minutes."

Waste of my time if I cannot report the problems that I have encountered. So I post them here:

1. Red icon. Tried all recommended actions (including repair exe), but still cannot update itself. Several days.

2. Backups fail (Yellow), though some is done, sometimes! Since installation!

3. Tuneup virus scan can run for almost a day and show just 20% done. Since installation.

4. The help is still not context-sensitive (as in 1.5). This provides a poor user experience because the current help just dumps at a very generic help page and the search facility doesn't even know essential keywords let alone anything approaching the actual problem scenario. I have had to do a general Internet search to get something approaching an answer.

I would expect a beta to basically do its job. The 1.5 beta seemed to. Both betas have been simple to install as compared to the 1.5 release. However, this beta is basically broken as it does not seem to be doing some of its major functions. I am not sure it is actually protecting anything now.

The only thing that stops me going back to the bought 1.5 is the thought of going through the tortuous procedure three times. The purchased 25 digit ID would not register until I had jumped in and out of several unhelpful pages. As a technical writer I am used to deconstructing user interface processes, but I doubt whether I could acurately describe how I managed to get them installed. It was easy to get lost amonst being bounced back and forth between failed registration and USELESS help pages.

I think your team needs to get professional help writers as the current help pages (beta and production) are very wordy and lack focus. The search fails to enable direct lookup of help relevant to the actual problem at hand, basically because it does not cover the range of problem scenarios.

rhalbheer

29 Jul 2007 5:42 PM

Hi Patanjali,

this is definitely not the experience we want you to have (obviously :-)).

I will start to work on it but please give me some days. I am on vacation in the Swiss alps at the moment and will not be able to reach out to the product teams until the end of the week. I would appreciate if you could send me a mail to roger.halbheer@microsoft.com in order for me to have your contact to get back to you privately

Roger

Guhan

31 Jul 2007 11:59 PM

Hi Patanjali,

Thank you for taking the time to try out the V2 Beta. Our apologies for the issues you're running into--as Roger mentions, this is most definitely not the experience that we want you to have with the Beta!

We'd love to get more details on each of the issues you ran into. Some of them may have already been fixed in a Beta refresh that we hope to release in the next few weeks, but we'd like to get more information from you to be sure. Needless to say, we are working very hard on addressing any reported issues, and will not release the final product till we're satisfied with the quality.

We do have active OneCare Beta forums (http://forums.microsoft.com/windowsonecare) that the entire OneCare team reads and is active on--it'd be great if you could you post your experiences over there. If you prefer to mail us directly, we'd be very happy to hear from you: ocbeta@microsoft.com.

Thank you again for taking the time to try out the Beta and post your comments--we really appreciate your feedback.

Thanks

Guhan

Development Lead, Windows Live OneCare, Microsoft