The Bleeding Edge

A lot of people like to be on the leading edge of technology. And there's something good about being out there in the front. But there's also that line that you don't want to cross...stay up with the technology but don't be the first to try to use it. Well, unfortunately, we crossed that line with our ambitious upgrades and we are now on the bleeding edge of technology. Attempting to integrate programs that have never been used with Windows Vista into Vista and making them work. And it has presented some issues as you can imagine.

One of the biggest problems with Vista centers around rights. The Program Files folder is locked down completely and I haven't yet found a way to give permissions to even change an INI file as a user. Therefore, for programs that must make changes to the application and aren't Vista-compliant, we have had to install in alternative locations, especially the ProgramData folder. This appears to be fixing some issues. Thankfully, I have a scripting program to push down permissions to client PCs to fix our problems.

The other issue that keeps coming up is the UAC (User Account Control). This thing is just downright annoying...prompting every time an "untrusted" application attempts to run. And there's no way to add a trusted application that I have found yet. The only alternative appears to be to contact these small vendors and tell them to get Vista-compliant or turn off UAC completely. Not sure yet...

We have found that we are the first to try several products with Office 2007 too. It is never good to be the guinea pigs when you're talking about pushing to end-users in 1 week. There's a whole lot of work that needs done and I'm not sure there's enough hours left to complete it. Nevermind the fact that we haven't even finished setting up network shares or migrating data or rights from our Novell servers.

I sent a scathing e-mail yesterday questioning our preparedness for the move going forward starting the 18th. It seems to have stirred up some things here today with the integration group...they have been in a meeting for over 2 hours this morning discussing migration strategy and whether or not we are truly prepared to move forward. On a positive note, I have fixed 4 applications that were having problems this morning. On a not so good note, we still have at least a dozen to fix. And that, I'm afraid, may just be the tip of the iceberg.