Adobe Photoshop Starter Edition Unlock Codes

My turn to attack Adobe. I hope our company never gets so big that we forget that the customer is important.
A client has some photos in Photoshop Starter Edition V3.2 and they cannot get to them. The program asks for a registration detail which the user has filled in and submitted several times to Adobe without getting and response. The program needs an unlock code to continue.
We spent some time on the phone waiting for it to be answered - something regular readers of this blog might recognise gets my goat quicker than anything.
A customer support agent eventually was able to give us a code - it did not work.
Later we tried again to get a code - half an hour without response except from the automated phone system rubbish. In this time we googled the issue. A complete forum seems to be devoted to helping people who cannot get an unlock code from Adobe.
Adobe has now ceased support for this product. One forum indicated that support ceased on 30th June and no more registrations were going to be accepted after 31st July. That is appalling.
A product that is only 6 years old may well go out of development but there will be a very large installed base which needs support. A company with a product which gives rise to so much aggravation with registration and unlock problems needs extra support not reduced support.
This sort of issue makes sure that I do not recommend products from this source.
I appreciate that software developers need to protect their investment. I appreciate that this means they might engage in the sort of authentication / registration regimes we see all too frequently but it does not mean that developers should ignore their customer base.
It gives the developer a bad name. It gives the industry a bad name. It is just poor customer relations. It is just bad. All too often it come when companies get too big and remote from their customer base that they cease caring.
As a footnote I would like to say this. If a support organisation cannot field phone calls within a reasonable amount of time - say 30 - 60 seconds - then this smacks of two things. One: they need to take on more staff to make sure customers are not left sitting in automated phone queues. Two: they should improve their products so that they need less support.

Norton removal tools expires

Why do Symantec create a Norton removal tool to remove their incredibly poor software from your machine and then have so that is expires before you can use it.
We have previously added blogs to this page castigating Norton for poor product quality. The last time was to complain that a product that you might use to prevent problems such as Denial of Service (DOS) attacks behaves to deny you your service when the product expires.
So we had a machine in recently that had an old version of Norton on it. We could not remove this using Add/remove programs.
So went to download the removal tool. We had a copy on our server but this failed to run because it reported it had expired. So now the Norton website lists a number of removal tools depending on what was initially installed. Now I don't know what was installed because I cannot run it to find out. Second I am not interested in finding out what was installed I simply want to get rid of it.
I downloaded what looked like the most suitable version but when I ran it it reported that it had expired. I am not going to download the other 9 or 10 variants on NRT just in the off chance one might work.
This is the only product I know where the developer has had to write a special removal tool and even that does not work.
In the end I went through Registry Editor to remove keys that related to Symanec and Norton (well not all because you do have to be a bit careful), then I deleted all the files of the relavant "c:\program files" and "c:\program files\common files" to get rid of the product.
This too is an exercise in how not to do something. The dirt that is left in registry everytime Norton does a live update beggars belief.
What has happened to the company who once had what was arguably the best AV product who now produces what is arguably one of the worst?

Web server based on OpenPanel

We have been experimenting with control panels for web hosting servers.
Commercially we have been running Plesk on our production servers but we needed to make ourselves a server for test purposes.
After a lot of searching we have come across the Openpanel project. We were looking for an open source freeware control panel able to run on Linux (LAMP) servers. From the screen shots this seemed to offer one of the cleanest interfaces around.
We built the server on an old Intel machine. We installed Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS using this simply to build the LAMP server.
We then downloaded and ran the Openpanel install process which ran a smoothly as any we have known. We then configured a domain using Openpanel and were able to FTP a website and view it without problem. The whole process from start to finish = 3 hours tops.
Our gratitude to the Openpanel project team.
We will offer our help to the project should it be needed.

Web server change

For all those who might have been affected; we recently had been experiencing some difficulties with our web server stalling for a few minutes at a time.
There was no obvious reason for this but we need to provide a reliable service to our hosted web users.
We have therefore replaced our old server with a better model (still based on AMD, Fedora and Plesk) and transferred all the data to the new server. For the most part the transfer went well.
We had a few problems with the emails.
The new server no longer accepts short email names so if you have your username entered as say 'fred' you now need to change your settings to 'fred@mydomain.co.uk'.
The new server also need smtp authentication so you need to change the outgoing mail server settings to read 'mail server requires authentication' and then set this to be 'same as pop3 server'.
Any difficulties then phone our support team in the normal way.
We apologise to users that experienced problems but we hope the new server gives a better and more reliable service to all our users.

New Digital Printing from MPL Print

The image just above this box is the cover of a new colour brochure produced by MPL Print on their new Xerox X700 digital printer.
The cover is printed on 300gsm gloss art board, the first insert is on 170gsm gloss art paper, the second insert is on 112gsm simulator (transparent paper) and the final insert is on 160gsm white pulpboard.
There is good colour saturation especially on the rough finished pulpboard.
We have recently had 400 DL size flyers produced on this machine. Litho quality printing without the need for long print runs.
If you are interested in producing short run professional presentation packs the contact MPL on 01708 757999, ask for Steve or Sarah.