BE 11d what a waste of time

[Clive_Hunt]

So, we have been given a free upgrade to BE 11d. So yesterday evening I sit down with a glass of wine and a good book whilst the upgrade takes place. As I have recently purchased the MS Exchange Agent for BE 10.1d I thought that this would be included in the free upgrade.

Fingers crossed all goes well.

Some 2 hours later and it appears that it has completed. But upon closer inspection - why can I not connect to the exchange information store?

It appears that the agent has not been upgraded. So on to Symantec Support this morning placing a call at 9am for a 2 hour response time callback. Still nothing by 2pm, so I ring again, only to be told that because there is no support agreement with the recently purchased Exchange Agent, that this functionality will now not work under the new version of BE.

What!!! I exclaim. So a recently purchased product that is still in its 12 month period does not include the free upgrade?

This is correct I am told.

So now I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place, do I buy the support and stick with the 11d for now, not backing up the exchange? or do I revert back to 10.1d which looks like its going to be a nightmare to accomplish?

Apparently, I'm going to lose all my job scheduling data and may lose my catalog files even though they have been backed up during the upgrade process.

PLEASE SYMANTEC - WHEN OFFERING FREE UPGRADES DO THIS -

Tell YOUR CUSTOMERS that they need to purchase upgrades for all relevant products and do not ASSUME that they will understand what is required.

NEVER assume as it makes an "ASS" out of "U and ME".

There must be another way, I wish Veritas hadn't sold out, it used to be such a good product.

CliveSRT

[Kevin_Nickson]

Clive, this story sounds all too familiar. I too am in the same position as you are. I'm running three backup servers; one for Exchange, one for SQL, and one for file backups. I upgraded my file backup server to 11d only to find out I won't have Exchange support.

I guess I should be glad I figured that out before upgrading my Exchange backup server.

[Clive_Hunt]

Spent yesterday evening, removing 11d and reinstalling 10.1d. |I had to recreate the jobs and some other data, but we had a successful backup last night of everything, including the exchange server.

Symantec need to test their products fully before releasing them for general use, i know that certain aspects will not be found in the standard testing process but there are some gaping holes in this release that i could drive a bus through, not least the documentation.

If people are having problems with 11d and they can roll back to the previous version then I would strongly suggest to do so.

[Dennis_Thornton]

Unfortunately Symantec/Veritas really falls down when it comes to communication with customers. Intentional or not, they're treating their customers as the proverbial mushroom (without the feeding).

Recently I was shopping for an enterprise antivirus/anti spyware solution. We specifically didn't include Symantec in our consideration because of the 11d fiasco and lack of quality support. Another vendor got our business.

[Clive_Hunt]

Dennis, we are in the market for the same type of product, if you don't mind me asking, who did you settle for in the end?

[Dennis_Thornton]

We went with Trend. They're not superman with support & design, but they're several steps above Symantec's BE support.