OH GOD HALP

[Jay 2K Winger]

Details obfuscated per Client policy and site policy.

So The Client's secure network runs on Old Network Environment (ONE), and we've been gradually working on upgrading everyone to the new network environment, ENVY. We've been dealing with all sorts of obstinate folks that want to put off their upgrade. (These are the same people who'd probably prefer we used slabs of stone and chisels.)

There are two ways to put off the upgrade. The first, and easiest, is to delay it, by rescheduling the ENVY upgrade through a self-service site on The Client's intranet. Many people take advantage of this, and have been just continually rescheduling it. The second way to put it off is to submit for deferral, which puts you on a list in the system so you don't get the upgrade reminders.

Deferral is mostly used for specific Client locations or groups that won't or cannot upgrade for [reasons].

Well, a notice popped up in the IT email lists today. Starting Monday, there will be forced ENVY upgrade going out. Unless you are on the deferral lists, you will be forced to upgrade to ENVY.

I can understand why The Client is doing it. The company that made the framework on which ONE ran is no longer supporting that framework, so it's a necessity that we upgrade to the newer framework on which ENVY runs.

I'm somewhat lucky, because I'm off work until Wednesday, so I'll miss being at ground zero of the atomic bomb of FURY that will inevitably drop on the IT Service Desk come Monday morning. I'll still have to wade through waist-deep fallout when I get back in, though.

Pray for me and my fellow ITSD drones.

[Tama]

Waist-deep in the complaints of old people and cheap people, huh? Glad I'm not on ground zero too...

[TopEndDave]

We've been dealing with all sorts of obstinate folks that want to put off their upgrade. (These are the same people who'd probably prefer we used slabs of stone and chisels.)

At my work place, we have been dealing with the same sort of people at our who are avoiding being upgraded from XP to 7. They also don't like Office 2007/2010 due to the ribbon bar and are getting Office Search Tools installed. Office Search Tools is an unsupported Office plugin from Microsoft Development Labs. It breaks other mission critical Office plugins. The Obstinate insist that we make Office Search Tools work with the other plugins or else they will not upgrade.

That threat is not a problem as your client's management has decided to isolate all Win XP computers on the network after support runs out for XP. They will still complain but my company doesn't run the first level help desk. So it is Someone Else's problem.

[EricKei]

I will admit that I resisted moving from XP to 7 for the longest time (I managed to bypass Vista entirely), but once they got most of the kinks worked out, I became a happy convert Still stinging from the 30 minutes of my life that I wasted having WinMe on my comp -- that's how long it took to go from "first bootup after installation" to "first (and last) BSOD" ...

Besides, they can just turn off Aero and it will LOOK a heck of a lot like XP. I would say that, even with the user-made mods out there that do much to alleviate the issues, going from XP directly to 8 would be MUCH more of a drastic shift. Note that MS is preparing to release a patch that brings back their own version of the Start Menu.

I can understand the need to change over, though, as support for XP has been sunsetted.

[Tama]

If they did that, I would gladly go to 8.

I don't like touchscreens on a computer, that is what my tablet is for.

[wagegoth]

So many conversions in my life.

There was one group that refused to move from Lotus Notes to Outlook because it wouldn't do a whole long list of things they wanted. Except that Outlook could do all those things. And our document database program would interface with Outlook but not Notes.

The ones I always, always hate, are the ones who refuse to switch from Wordperfect to Word. Yes, I know Word can have a steep learning curve, while Wordperfect is much more like typing, but all our macros run in Word, and since we do most of the documents, not you, suck it up and learn the basics.

Let's not even go into the first conversion I worked on where we went from colored cards in a giant wooden box to a computerized system.

[BearLeeBadenaugh]

Conversions are so much fun, aren't they?

Back in 2002 we got a contract to upgrade a large grocery store's POS system and put in all new checkout lanes. The old NCR system they had was amazing, in a bad way. The mainframe was about the size of a large fridge and had a companion hard drive rack that looked more like a washing machine. So old that the hard drive platters had user-serviceable bearings and an areal density about that of microfiche(hyperbole, but I want to say they were about 10 megabytes per 18" platter).

Couldn't be programmed normally or anything like that, of course. We eventually gave up trying to figure it out and cheated. We wound up contacting the retired NCR engineer who had designed and built the system and he helped me write a program that would enable us to "print" the database, at which point it was just playing with CSV's.

Somewhere I still have one of those hard drive platters, I need to dig it up and hang it on the wall or somethin. Gave one to the engineer and he turned it into a clock.

[Tama]

Oh, the things engineers will build...