I thought this was post worthy. I also thought it was worthy of my “Tech Rant” post tag. So, inadvertantly, my last two entries have been tech rants. Wheee! You can imagine my life with computers has been frustrating recently.
So, on to the meat of the problem. Symantec rushes products to market without adequate testing. Take Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition 10.0. Since its release (I can’t recall exactly when) not too long ago, we’ve had two updated “Maintenance Releases” (one over the summer and one this past November) and numerous “Point Patch” and “Maintenance Patch” updates.
My most recent frustration with this came this week when I attempted to build a Symantec AntiVirus installer that would also either slipstream the most recent Point Patch (PP1 for MR2 of SAV 10.0…ugh, see what I mean??). It took me the greater portion of Wednesday to get something working that I was satisfied with. Then, around 3:30 on Wednesday afternoon, I found an email in my inbox informing me that “Maintenance Patch 1″ was released and that it included the updates found in “Point Patch 1,” plus some other updates and bug fixes. I let out a groan and contemplated weeping for a few minutes about the fact that my entire morning plus the greater part of my afternoon had just been wasted.
Well, at the time of this writing, I have built a new installer that incorporates the new “Maintenance Patch,” and have tested it rather extensively. Every thing seems to be working with it. I hate to declare it “officially” ready for release, however, as I’m sure that as soon as I do, Symantec will release another patch. Most definitely a very frustrating behavoir.
Tags: AntiVirus2 Comments
2 responses so far ↓
Amen! I’m totally confused by all the Maintenance Releases and Point Patches, and how they relate. A clearly written Symantec KB article is nowhere to be found either…
I completely agree with your rant. I administrate a NT network with Windows 200 clients (about 6k of them) and everytime I seem to have a handle on the version they are all running, Symantec releases another patch. As far as the installer is concerned, I thought of the idea of doing it, but I didn’t know you could. Is it the same way as building a Microsoft Administration Point installer?