RedDot Upgrades from Hell

Upgrades from Hell. Congrats, the new RedDot release wrecks your three years of development.

I’m getting depressed just writing this. You never know what kind of hell the latest upgrade from RedDot is going to plunge you into.

A couple of examples. This is from a Gilbane analyst (who is too polite to mention RedDot – but I’m not).

"For a vendor to deliver a solid CMS product with a buggy search interface to toggle between keyword and metadata search is one thing. My client spent months getting it to work so that users could seek by keyword or on explicit metadata fields. They rolled it out and it was “OK,” if not great. But after much discussion with the vendor about the bugs, my client was pressured into adopting an upgrade to “solve the problem.” Unfortunately, the upgrade was an experience from hell, but worse was the fact that the old search controls no longer worked and there was no way to search metadata any longer. Having predicated the procurement on being able to search metadata… well, you get the picture."

View his complete commentary here.


Here’s an example from a user group:

We recently upgraded to 7.5.1.31 currently running on 2003 SP 2 and
Sql 2005 sp1 (on a separate box) since the upgrade to 7.5 the
performance has died. RedDot runs really fast and then suddenly
freezes for all users. View it here

What this Means

This is the usual scenario. You have a really important web site. And, the RedDot server throws an annoying but not deadly bug. Something like “when I delete a page, RedDot sometimes deletes it and sometimes doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, it ends up in Google and my boss gets angry.”

So you call RedDot support and they say – oh, we can solve that. Just upgrade to the latest version. Which you dutifully do. Then all hells breaks loose:

• Your painstakingly developed, tested and refined publication packages stop publishing
  
  
• The wysiwig editor used by Macintosh users suddenly stops
  
  
• The page naming script you wrote is ignored and RedDot just publishes everything as page numbers
  
  
• Etc.

In my experience, any new release is as likely to introduce bugs as fix bugs. If you’re thinking about buying RedDot, ask your rep how many installations are still running RedDot CMS version 4 or 5. You’ll be amazed how many people refuse to upgrade or have gotten rid of the system entirely and replace it with something more reliable.