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MIXIT's avatar
MIXIT
Level 6
12 years ago

Very disappointed with Symantec

I have been a loyal partner with Symantec for some years now, and still to this day support them.  I am invested in their products, I sell their products, and I promote Symantec.  I have always felt the Symantec Connect forums are unparalelled.  I also think Symantec's committment to partner education via the webcasts they do (or did, I haven't gotten any emails about tem in a fe wmonths now come to think of it) has been fantastic. 

However, two things of late have had me wondering if I am over-valuing my relationship with Symantec.  1.  The Backup Exec 2012 fiasco - I just learned last week that they don't even support Windows Server 2012 as a media server and that this won't happen until 2014.  In fact up until just recently, prior to SP2 for BE 2012, WS2012 was not supported even via RAWS, so essentially you could not back up Server 2012 as a Symantec customer.  Wow, that is a gallactic drop of the ball on that one.  Also this situation means that Symantec has made it impossible for 100% of small business customres with only 1 server to buy a new server with OEM WS 2012 and put BE on it.  I do wish Symantec well in the recovery of this issue though. 

2.  Just a minor thing in the grand scheme yet it's indicative of the company's need for a serious kick in the backside to wake up and get with it:  I go to fileconnect.symantec.com from any computer running Internet Explorer 10, and I get a message that my browser is out of date.  And I cannot proceed at that point.  I had sometime this or last year complained about how antiquated the FileConnect design was, and it seems others may have too since some time recently it has been improved which is great, but this nonsense of not supporting visitors that are using the current version of IE is ridiculous and I think this has been this way for weeks now.  Hire a web design consulting firm if you can't do it yourself. 

Again, it's minor, but then again so is a tiny crack in the dam before the whole thing caves in.  Stuff like this, this lack of attention to detail, gives me pause.  It concerns me greatly that a company that sells a range of security products for example is so far behind the curve on many other aspects of things.  I mean, and not to get into too great detail, but the fact that so many Symantec security products still rely on Java code, the world's most exploited code package, isn't giving me a good feeling.  I plead ignorance on the specifics of how that can be exploited, I just know Java is a virtual open door for viruses and hackers and Symantec uses it for their management interface on SEP and perhaps other stuff too.  It seems logical to think a backdoor can be exploited to bypass or modify functions of SEP as a result (again though, I don't know if that's the case, I'm just imagining it must be)

Anyway i suppose I'll go and use my XP machine with IE8 to download BE 2012 now, to install on the very server that had Server 2012 on it but I had to just rebuild to 2008 R2 after finding BE doesn't support 2012.  Yes, a bit of bitterness there but not much. 

I still support Symantec and am optimistic about seeing things improve, but you just went from an overall A to A+ over the past 5 years to now a B rating.  Still room to improvve but still room to fall further. 

 

North America
Partners
Windows Server (2003-2008)

5 Replies

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  • MIXIT's avatar
    MIXIT
    Level 6
    12 years ago

    A blog?  I've never written one :) Well, I was having a bad day the day I posted that one above.  The points are still valid though.  If I recall, that day I was trying to download the bE files and for reasons that make little sense to me, thhe ysplit the file in two, then make a .cmd file so you can join them.  Is this to avoid malware scanners blocking it? who knows, but in either case that day, all the files I went to download would come in as .zip so wouldn't work, I had ot manually rename to that filename.zip.1of2 and 2of2 extensions. 

    I'd say, just post the file already, one file.  MIcrosoft does this (albeit poorly as well, as sometimes they post .img which you can't load to a VM in 2008 R2), but I digress with that. 

    I'll keep that blog idea in mind, I just think maybe now's not the best time to really hassle poor Symantec, they're practically falling apart at the upper management level.  But I will save this blog idea for a future "grievance" :) Thanks for the idea. 

  • CraigV's avatar
    CraigV
    Moderator
    12 years ago

    ...it was exactly the same with BE 2010 R3 when they split the ISO. I gave up eventually as the command never ran, no matter if I followed the instructions or not.

    I simply started downloading the full ISO when necessary.

    Thanks!

  • MIXIT's avatar
    MIXIT
    Level 6
    12 years ago

    Just to add though, if you were in the mindset of wanting to post a blog or what not, feel free to quote me as desired.  I mainly dont' want to give Symantec a hard time due to the timing of things - their restructuring and all that, but after just re-reading my initial post, I noted that I did tone down the irritation I was feeling that day but the points are still very valid.  But right now there's no time to carefully compose a nice blog entry :) So feel free to quote if you happen to be doing one yourself. 

  • MIXIT's avatar
    MIXIT
    Level 6
    12 years ago

    Wow you replied quickly - we're both sitting here typing away at the same time probably. 

    I hadn't seen an option for the full iso, maybe at the time there was none and now there s, or something. 

    In any case, I'd be curious why they think there's any need for the file splitting.

    Oh and just to add to this - they did implement some kind of new download manager, where it brought up another IE window with progress bars for each file being downloaded - very nice, except, once a file finished it started all over again. 

    I hadn't realized this at first, but after seeing some files finish and waiting on others to do so, I'd come back later to see that the original ones were again downloading.  I'm on a 45Mbps connection so they move quickly and were recycling over and over .  Not sure if they've fixed that by now.