Yippee!

The Steganos story so far: problems, issues, silence from "customer service" (sic), emailed then spoke to CEO...

After another couple of weeks of silence - surprising in that the CEO seemed to appreciate my position - I sent him another email (pointing out it had been a while since I heard from him and months since I had anything useful from "customer service") and a short while later the UK Sales Manager called me.

All hail Victoria Satterly! She listened, she had read the previous emails, she took notes (and she managed my telephonic windbagging very nicely) and she promised to get back to me within 2 working days.

And she did - she even had some answers directly from the Development Team! OK, so some of the problems aren't fixed - but some may be very soon (August?) - and some had no answers yet, but at least I know what the situation is - which, in the case of the failure to write >2GB Portable Safes to DVD means it's worth developing a work-around.

Information! Dontcha love it?

Steganos is slowly dragging itself out of the stone-age - which on the other hand fortunately means that they haven't even heard of such things as "Expectation Management". What does "Expecation Management" mean? For the benefit of the uninitiated /non-consultant /non-business breed it means simply "giving the customer bad news - late".

"Expectation Management" is worse than a euphemism: it is prima facie evidence of a breakdown in communication - if you have good relations and communication with your customer or client you simply don't need to "manage" their expectations (i.e. tell them the job is going to be late, go over-budget, fail to meet the specification, etc. or all of the foregoing).

"Expectation Management" is, in my opinion symptomatic of a dysfunctional organisational, of a culture of acceptable self-delusion. I think I could even make an argument that it is worse than lying as it smacks of incompetence and cowardice, whereas a liar has to be brave and competent - even if they are relaxed about ethics. I have always told people in business that I hate surprises: if you screw up or something goes wrong, tell me - and tell me immediately! - and I will support you for your honesty; if on the other hand I find out that you screwed up - and know it - and concealed it, then I will... be very unpleasant in a harsh but caringly businesslike way... I might read you some of my poetry for instance.

If - when? - I build a business empire I will make "Expectation Management" taboo...

along with a few other things about which more some other time.

Live Long and Grow Radishes!

Steganos Safe 2007 - The Saga Continues

Remember that I told them there was a bug?

"Impossible!" they say.

One large heap of irony later...

"I have to confirm that is a bug in our encryption engine that an UDF file cannot be larger than 2GB. As far as Dev-Team told me right now, they are working for a fix. If this is available, Steganos Update will inform you about automatically and offer you to download. No need to remind, we know what we have to do."

So that's OK then... except it isn't: despite going to look for updates at just about every possible opportunity, thereby causing Vista to annoy me with yet more dialog boxes, the updater finds nothing - despite the fact that at the time there was an update.

Is it fixed? Don't know; they don't seem to publish a change log. There was an update, as I said (9.0.6); I got it, and now I have a whole heap of other little issues - one of which just might have been my fault - but like so many other software vendors, the idea of wiping their own arses when I uninstall (i.e. clean up the registry properly) seems beneath the dignity of such impeccable German software developers.

I can't seem to find out how to completely remove the damn thing just so I can start again.

And do I get any satisfaction from the sogennante "support" department? Nope.

However, I have tracked down the CEO of Steganos and have said he is my next port of call.

CEO's are usually able to fix things, but it is rather sad that one has to attempt the equivalent of low earth orbit insertion using an elastic band and a pair of swimming goggles to resolve what should be resolvable at much lower levels.

I'll let you know what happens...

Beginnings.

Dear AK at Prompt Communications has been so patient as I struggle to obtain satisfaction from Steganos GmbH concerning some technical issues with Safe 2007... unfortunately her email template kept reminding me that they track blogs for their clients and so I finally succumbed and decided to start one.

What can you expect now you are here?

Not sure yet. I'm struggling with Microsoft Vista Home Premium on this new Rock Xtreme laptop (nice!) and all the applications and doodads I need to make my life technologically satisfying, and a blog seems like a nice way to highlight some observations.

What else? Oh yes... "IT" - The Book (and I'd like to big-up all my mates here, especially Dean for only making gentle fun of me over this)...

I have now been writing IT for rather too long. Occasionally friends and family ask "How's it going" and I tell them what the word count is - as if that tells them anything. Occasionally, new acquaintances ask "What's it about?", or "What sort of a book is it?" - and then the trouble starts... I'm damned if I know.

Hopefully over the coming weeks and months I might be able to work out what IT is about - or what IT is like...

Meanwhile, I keep myself distracted and my procrastination skills in peak form by reading New Scientist to keep on top of the scientific & technical news, writing absurdly tedious Visual Basic for Word and Excel to help me organise all the material in and around IT... and now by blogging too.