First question for you is why you ignored all the warnings and ran beta software on a production machine in direct violation of the Licensing agreement that accompanied the beta?
--Â
Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]
Post all replies to the group to keep the discussion intact. All
unsolicited mail sent to my personal account will be deleted without
reading.
After furious head scratching, ilv-m asked:
| If this is the best that Microsoft can offer, we won't risk the
| liability of any Office 2007 upgrade recommendations to anyone. We
| will depend on customers to insist on taking the risk on a time &
| materials basis.
|
| Wiping all systems down and starting over from scratch with new OS
| installations and all application software is financially acceptable
| to very few.
|
| Why is Windows sooooo very poorly designed that software upgrades are
| not as clean as they once were before the abomination of the registry
| was introduced? Why does Microsoft still use hierarchical database
| technology that virtually everyone else threw out in the 1960's
| because it was known by then how completely out of control such
| databases can get.
|
| It's no wonder that Windows is a heaving, hulking, unreliable pile of
| garbage since it depends so desperately on an absolute disaster of a
| hierarchical database in the form of the registry hives.
|
| Would someone at Microsoft please justify why their product line is
| such a tangled mess that new system software images being built up
| from scratch with many applications may take DAYS to assemble--and
| after they are built are so unbelievably fragile? How can this be
| the best that the software world has to offer when we all should know
| very well how far short of best-practices the whole Microsoft
| approach has become?
|
| Microsoft in this area seems to have become far worse than IBM ever
| was at its most arrogant market-dominating point.
|
|
| "Bob Buckland ?
" wrote:
|
|| There isn't a tool for uninstalling the Office 2007 betas as there
|| were a number of them going on (including the sister product, MS
|| Expression web) at the same time and there is a large number of
|| possible combinations that could be in play.
||
|| When the beta isn't removed through normal procedures, add-remove
|| programs, it's often because the installation was already broken. If
|| you review the Knowledge Base articles for steps to remove a broken
|| 'regular' Office installation manually they're not far different.
|| Broken installations come from adding other software or add-ins over
|| time or using utilities such as computer 'speedup' or 'registry
|| cleaner' ones that are 'helping'.
||
|| There is a risk to relying on time limited beta software, although
|| it is easy to get used to using it and forgetting it's 'test
|| software'.
||
|| For many people the basic steps in the MSKB article, removing all
|| prior betas and related add-ins, from Add/Remove Programs in the
|| Windows control panel, do work to have a clean environment to
|| install the release version of MS Office 2007. It is the quality of
|| operation that is one of the prime reasons for starting clean with
|| release software rather than focusing on 'upgrading' a beta/test
|| software.
||
|| =================
|| || Since this is the Office installation topic, would you kindly post
|| the answer
|| here? This is not a 'misc' type of issue, but a show-stopper for us
|| too.
|| We're glad to see that so many others want this Office 2007
|| installer defect
|| fixed so that hopefully Microsoft will either do that, or provide an
|| automated clean-up tool to deal with the problem.
||
|| The extremely time-consuming manual steps described in the KB's
|| about this
|| problem are ridiculous. The people with the info to write the steps
|| into a KB
|| should have incorporated the clean-up in the Office 2007 RTM
|| installer, or
|| provided an Office 2007 beta wipe-down tool to make sure that
|| Microsoft's
|| best and brightest customers are not angered by this kind of
|| sloppiness.
|| Business is being lost as we and our customers wait for a reasonable
|| solution. The competition for a botched Office 2007 release is to do
|| nothing
|| but stand on Office 2003.
||
|| If we were flying in Microsoft-designed aircraft, with such poor
|| quality control, we would probably all be dead. >> --
||
|| Bob Buckland ?
|| MS Office System Products MVP
||
|| *Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*
