It seems like every application or OS upgrade creates at least one compatibility issue requiring another upgrade… Sometimes, it seems like it just never ends. What’s worse is it seems like no matter how testing done, there’s still some show-stopping issue that pops up in the middle of deployment. Anyone else feel the same way?

We began rolling out Windows Vista back in February. Of course, I spent quite a while testing various things, even ran it on my machine a few weeks before the first user got it. All of our important apps - mainly Shelby and EMS seemed to work fine.

The first group was at a remote site, which accesses Shelby and EMS via terminal services. Everything worked great there. A couple of weeks later, we rolled out a few machines at our main site and the users began complaining about EMS not working. Turns out you could log in and navigate all the screens fine, but as soon as you tried to actually do much, there were lots of nasty errors. A quick look at the change logs online revealed we simple needed to upgrade from 10.0 to 10.1 - no big deal.

Fast forward to yesterday. It’s spring break, things are pretty slow arround the office, so it’s a good time to take EMS down and do the upgrade. Everything went fine until we tried to run some custom reports and were greeted with a nasty error about DLL’s being the wrong version. The report in question are actually a custom DLL that the software vendor developed for us. A quick call to support revealed that they would need to re-compile the custom app for version 10.1, which will take 7 business days. So, we ended up having to revert back to 10.0 for now.

Isn’t new technology great? :-\