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List of bad software

stevef1

By stevef1
in How do you do....it?

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stevef1

stevef1

Posted
Posted

New(ish) to this site so don’t know if this has been suggested (or done before) so if it then just ignore this post.

How about a list of naff, bad or just plain annoying software that is a pain to install on networks (or standalone)

 

 

stevef1

ITWombat

ITWombat

Posted
Posted

Remember people, after the Sophos debacle we have to be objective.

 

You must give reasoned argument with your fear and loathing: "Brand X is utter crap because ....."

MkII

MkII

Posted
Posted

ok, SIMS .net

 

- Vastly over priced compared to other solutions

 

- Capita seem to not care about their education business until spurred into action by competititors.

 

- Bloated and Archaic..

 

- Crazy upgrades.. why do all the revised PDFs have to be copied down every update - no one ever reads them, surely hosting them on the central server would make sense.

Upgrades have always been the bain of our lives. To put it bluntly, it's implemented very poorly, we all know that.

No other S/W upgrade demands such hand holding. We plan to start upgrades early evening, to give ourselves space should we need to make an early start the next day to get everything fixed.

 

- Support is very bad sometimes in my experience. It has taken me months of chasing, only to get referred to the next update, which seems to cancel all previous queries automatically, resolved or not.

 

- Some very poor bugs sometimes. Things that should be caught at testing. No one's perfect, but there seem to be too many obvious and very fundamental mistakes.

 

 

 

Those are just some of the bad points of course. There are good points too.

_Bat_

_Bat_

Posted
Posted

Digiblue:-

 

- Good piece of software for the kids

 

- 99% impossible to deploy over a network

 

- Installing across a network has so far required a visit to each machine by every technician I am aware of on this forum that has used this software, including myself

 

- E-mailing digiblue simply got the response "you can place the installer program on a share on the server, but installing the software still requires a visit to each machine". Wow, a fat lot of help they are. In other words, they are aware of the issue, but do nothing about it!

 

- E-mail their tech support is very difficult. They seem to have several websites, many of which seem to be no longer maintained as e-mails I sent to specified addresses on some of the websites got returned. It was only due to luck I eventually found the correct address.

 

- I had to manually install the program on a number of PCs, would have been many more if I wasn't just about to create a new image for pretty much the entire school. That could have taken up an awful lot of time.

SimpleSi

SimpleSi

Posted
Posted

Ok its 2:44 am, and I'm just back from my birthday bash but why do people get hung up about Digiblue?

 

Its a product designed and engineered for a standalone PC.

 

It does what is say on the packet very well - its an excellent piece of software.

 

It is not designed to be deployed automatically over a network.

 

It doesn't pretend that it should.

 

Leave it alone :)

 

regards

Simon

becktonboy

becktonboy

Posted
Posted

Don't know about you simon but most of the software I have running on my network didn't come in a network version. Some educational software houses care that the majority of schools want to run their applications across a network and go out of their way to help (Sherston, 2Simple - the latter even produce CC3 msis, how helpful is that!?).

 

No-one has accused db of claiming to be anything other than a standalone piece of software. I agree the software is very good. It's precisely because the software is well suited to the Primary environment that teachers want to use it and ICT coordinators want to be able to install it quickly and easily on a variety of workstations - and that's where the complaint comes in: it is a total nightmare, has been for years, and db have to my knowledge been of no real help to anyone, despite the thousands of mails they must have received asking for help.

 

I refuse to run around 50 or 60 machines (or have my tech do it) installing drivers for lovely little cameras that never get used as a result.

Midget

Midget

Posted
Posted
Remember people, after the Sophos debacle we have to be objective.You must give reasoned argument with your fear and loathing: "Brand X is utter crap because ....."

 

ok then

 

Nelson Thorne is utter crap because it doesn't work unless you remove the Flash/IE security and it almost lost me my job as i didn't get it working straight away like all the other software I was presented with.

 

 

as for digital blue. why do you need it on more than 1 machine per classroom of the dept using it?

MkII

MkII

Posted
Posted

Dance eJay

 

- Frustrated by this on top of everything else because our Music Dept went it alone and bought 15 standalone copies of this, when the network version is cheaper!

 

- Very poorly written piece of software...

Uses the windows temp folder to run the program, so if like us, you restrict that to stop kids downloading games using IE and runing them from it, eJay doesn't work.

 

- Crashes hard and often - Updates actually make this worse.

 

- Wont play well with Daemon Tools

 

[This list would be better wikified so that anyone could ammend these descriptions, I know pople will have more complaints about this piece of software!]

_Bat_

_Bat_

Posted
Posted
Ok its 2:44 am, and I'm just back from my birthday bash but why do people get hung up about Digiblue?

 

Its a product designed and engineered for a standalone PC.

 

It does what is say on the packet very well - its an excellent piece of software.

 

It is not designed to be deployed automatically over a network.

 

It doesn't pretend that it should.

 

Leave it alone :)

 

regards

Simon

 

I agree with what becktonboy said. Digiblue are determined that there will be no way to deploy it over a network... they are quite happy to leave it that way. But why? I'm sure their biggest customer base is schools, who incidently, tend to run computer networks often with way too many clients to be running around the school installing it on each one manually.

 

as for digital blue. why do you need it on more than 1 machine per classroom of the dept using it?

 

Well in my case, primary schools don't really work like that AND I have to do what I have been asked to do.

 

In my case, in one school I had to install the software on every teacher laptop (probably around 20+) and on all 30 machines in the ICT suite and then on all 24 computers in the classrooms. In the end I managed to persuade them to drop the classroom PCs (apart from a select few) and I was creating a new image for the ICT Suite PCs, so no trouble there so that just left the laptops.

Midget

Midget

Posted
Posted
That's just pointless, will all of those people even use DB on those machines? And why the hell do primary school teachers need laptops?
Joedetic

Joedetic

Posted
Posted

SpeedStep II.

 

Horrid piece of software for CNC embroidary. It never liked to behave properly and required one of those rediculous license dongle things being plugged into the appropriate machine via RS232 serial port...and it was a bugger to get working in a stable state from the server.

Joedetic

Joedetic

Posted
Posted

DT Department's choice...nothing to do with me lol.

 

I had nothign to do with software purchasing anyway....*student tech* :)

 

I think they had the machine to go with it or something like that anyway.

strawberry

strawberry

Posted
Posted
TextEase Studio CT gets my vote... one PC at a time :(

 

you can network this i think, its a pain, but you can, give the tech guys a phone.

 

i agree about thornes nelson!

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