Recently I encountered a situation with a client who wanted to upgrade a critical piece of software present in their infrastructure.It was a classic thick client/server accounting application utilizing SQL Server on the backend. The organization considered this to be a legacy application, albeit one that was still key and in heavy use, but only within one department of a half-dozen people.The client wanted to upgrade to the latest version of the application to take advantage of new features that the vendor had introduced in their latest release. They were also getting ready to do a hardware refresh with an switch from Windows XP to Windows 7.There were several problems that I had to tackle alongside their in-house IT team:The installed version of the application was two versions behind the current version.The current version was itself scheduled to be replaced by a newer version within three months.The installed version only ran against SQL Server 2000.The current version only ran against SQL Server 2005 or 2008.The installed version ran on Windows 7, but not without breaking a feature that required a cumbersome workaround.The new features the client wanted were present in the current version, but they wanted to go with the "within three months" version.There was no direct upgrade path from the installed version to the "within three months" version.There was a direct upgrade path from the installed version to the current version, thankfully.No support contract or software maintenance agreement was in place with the vendor. In fact, the product had been bought out by another vendor!The last item was the most surprising until I found out the reasoning. It was simply because this piece of software got lost within the organization. After a series of mergers and acquisitions, the department that used the application continued to do so without any issues. Any issues they encountered were minor and they were always able to get their work done. IT had performed software in...
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In this blog, I hope to highlight some of my experiences firsthand as they happen in the hopes that if the same should happen to you, you'll know how to deal with it and be able to look like an IT superhero....
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