[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] Beta doesn't mean production folks - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"
Sat, May 17 2008 23:27 bradley

Beta doesn't mean production folks

http://www.vladville.com/2008/05/my-note-of-apology-to-microsoft.html

If I remember right, when I was logging into the online version of Quickbooks, they indicated that for several hours tonight the online banking would be non functional as they did an update.  Now in Vlad's world that's apparently inexcusible.  Also inexcusible is the 24 hours that the BETA (remember what beta stands for boys and girls) of the Microsoft Hosted Exchange platform might be down this weekend.

Remember boys and girls that BETAs mean "don't put your production networks on this sucker unless you are getting major kickbacks from the vendor.

In fairness Vlad should point out in full disclosure that the more Microsoft screws up hosted Exchange, the more he benefits.  So far from my review of their hosted offerings, the major issue that I see is the agility one.  Sign up for hosted email hygiene and it's several days before they contact you.  That's not the speed of normal small business.  We're "here's the credit card, can you have it done by yesterday?" world. 

In more full disclosure, I signed up for that Microsoft beta of SharePoint and Exchange and I forwarded that "we're going to be down for an upgrade for our beta for 24 hours" to Vlad.  To Brenden, rather than firing the Microsoft person that sent out that email, or informed folks that the Beta would be possibly offline for 24 hours, how about firing the person's assets that put production email systems on a beta.  I got that email and didn't CARE, because no production system was on that beta system.

Personally I think we all need to take a chill pill, myself included.  It's easy to take pot shots at Microsoft these days.  But one thing we shouldn't be taking pot shots at is when a BETA informs folks that it's going to make an upgrade.

As for me I'm checking it out and seeing out it works.  Participating in a beta.... you know where you test things out and don't run production stuff on them?

Filed under:

# re: Beta doesn't mean production folks

Sunday, May 18, 2008 5:15 AM by Vlad Mazek

Susan,

I think you missed the point of the post, and it being the final nail in the coffin of all my Microsoft bitching. It isn't that this one service was being down for 24 hours, it's that Microsoft has blended the lines of alpha, CTP, beta, release candidate, release, power pack 1, service pack re-release, pulled patch, broken patch, blah. Across the board, it seems to be a mismanaged, directionless company going after one hot thing after another while its base crumbles and they absolutely refuse to do anything about it.

As much as I benefit from their incompetence in the areas that I compete with Microsoft with, I lose in the areas where I rely on Microsoft to write solid software.

That entire blog post was my apology and hope to move beyond trying to hold Microsoft accountable because Microsoft simply seems to have given up. To take one section out of it and blow it up into how it's just BETA software that shouldn't be relied upon discounts the very problem that the entire Microsoft 2.0 of web services, specialized servers, Vista, 3 years of Antigen, god knows how many years of OneCare, file servers corrupting files and then losing the server backup options... are all indication of a broken company that has all but given up and ran out of steam in who it is competing with and on what grounds.

-Vlad

# re: Beta doesn't mean production folks

Sunday, May 18, 2008 10:26 AM by Amy B

Such is the world of hosted apps. We no longer get to choose when maintenance is done and for how long the system will be down. When you host you gain and you lose. Be prepared to deal with reality folks.

Vlad lives in a glass house: "We are conducting maintenance on our Offsite Backups architecture. 08:00–14:00 EST is our slowest time of the day and we’ll have the systems back online in time for the nightly backups."

Sure he's chosen the slowest time. Doesn't mean that my backup didn't fail that day, it did. Did I gripe? No. Stuff happens and when I agreed to be hosted I agreed to lose control of the maintenance schedule. That's life.

# re: Beta doesn't mean production folks

Sunday, May 18, 2008 1:07 PM by bradley

So why is it that I like Vista?  That Yoda's only gotten stuck rebooting once?  "File servers" is just one product Home Server that you wrote off long ago.  It's doing things with NTFS that probably shouldn't have done.

Meanwhile I'm using Vista here and like it.

Like I said, you just too a pot shot for a maintenance window on a beta product.

# re: Beta doesn't mean production folks

Monday, May 19, 2008 12:35 AM by Chris Knight

Guys, they're just labels. One person's beta is another person's release.

Until the whole qualitative process of software is standardised (which will never happen), then the labels are meaningless. Look at MS - it used to be v3 was sane people's v1. Then look at Win2008 - organisations went production on Beta 3.

Beta means "caution, road works ahead". If you run production on beta, then you may have problems and you need to be prepared to spend time debugging it.

And I'm happier with Gmail's Beta than I am with OWA 2003 production...

Understand the risks and plan/execute accordinly.