Commercial and Industrial Property (CIP) IT manager Julian Moorhouse was concerned about changes to the beta version of a security backup software product but never expected that his comments posted in an online forum would lead to a meeting with Symantec.
Moorehouse told Computerworld Australia that he had signed up to be a beta tester of Backup Exec 2012 in early 2012. The Sydney-based design and construction company has been a customer of the security vendor since 2009.
After migrating his production environment to the beta version, Moorehouse encountered some problems.
“One of the major changes was to server backups. In the old days, you could backup everything in one job. Now, you needed to backup each server separately and that did throw me a bit,” he said.
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He posted some comments about the problems on an online forum in April 2012.
“The issues with crashing came about because they had put so many new features into the new version. It did disrupt my backups when we first installed the product so I posted information about that,” he said.
Within a few days, Moorehouse received a message from Symantec’s head office in the United States, followed by a teleconference with user interface designers, product managers and the director of engineering.
“They were extremely interested in what I had to say which was quite a shock,” he said. “It’s not the kind of response I would have expected from the likes of Symantec.”
In addition, some of the changes he suggested ended up in the final version of the software.
Aside from daily backups, he plans to use the software to allow physical-to-virtual server conversions at CIP.
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