Business Plus Upgrading fiasco

[Confused Sally]

having been on Business v 10 for sometime, we decided to upgrade to Businessplus so that we could have multi-user functionality.
We also have EPOS so have invested heavily in Actinic Software and support. So far we have spent much of the past two weeks on the 'phone with support - the machines (main till / administrator) and the lap top (user) are now both working painfully slowly, either one falls over and switches itself off on occaisions, error messages are rife and for a while our customers were unable to order through the site without getting weird error messages.

I am at the end of my tether. apparently both my Actinic Business and EPOS Link should have been upgraded prior to the Business Plus upgrade, yet this was not made clear when I ordered or when I called support prior to doing the Business plus upgrade to be walked through it, I called specifically to ask if there was anything I should do prior to upgrading. We do not do anything clever with our site, no code / html changes, just basic additions of products and sections, I wanted something that would be simple with no headaches - 8years on and it feels like it has been one long headache.

My fingers and toes are crossed that Support can sort this out, in the mean time some work I am desperate to get done (information that needsto be on the website for a certain date) is all on hold, my staff have been tied up on the phone to support not doing the work i actually need them to do.
No longer Confused - just Depressed about the whole thing

[Mike Hughes]

Hi Sally. There's not much I can do or say to help you on this. It sounds like an awful situation to be in and I hope you manage to get it sorted soon.

Mike

[Jan]

Hi Sally,

Sounds like you have been through the ringer with this one. Hope it's improving.

There are lots of people on here that can help, with the closing itself, that might be down to the inactivity timeout, you can set this to a large number to reduce that.

For the other issues, could you give any more specifics?

Regards,

[Krithika]

Hello Sally

Sorry to hear about the issues you are having. I will have a chat with support and post an update.

Regards

[Confused Sally]

with the closing itself, that might be down to the inactivity timeout, you can set this to a large number to reduce that.

For the other issues, could you give any more specifics?

Regards,

We have changed the time out to the highest number and that has reduced the closing down but not completely.
When we deleted a product on the user machine and purged on the admin machine it threw up lots of error messages about missing images like it was still trying to trace the path.
Curreently unable to upload site at all - getting permission error messages and small low space messages, have checked with my hosting who say everything is fine at their end, all the permissions are set correctly although they did say we had a lot of files but were only up to 50% capacity on our space use.

These are todays issues but there have been lots prior. should have kept a daily record but I am sure support have one!

Sally

[Krithika]

Sally

The issue has been escalated to development who are investigating this further. The support team member you had initially contacted will be in touch with you with further updates.

Regards

[Confused Sally]

Latest Update

On Friday which was the last time I managed to do anything on Actinic Business Plus I managed to publish - hurray! Today I caome in, make a few product additions and attempt to publish. Apparently a file is now missing from my Common file - this has bnow been put back (!) but how did it vanish? I didn't touch anything!
Am now attempting to publish again - it is still going 2 hours on and so far 6000 of 1600 basefiles have been checked - ho hum it is going to be a long night. Development are working on it!

[Confused Sally]

Continuing Issues

This problem remains unresolved. Currently my customers are having trouble ordering. We cannot currently retrieve orders. We are getting error messages about duplicate images. The site seems to have generated several versions of the sites folder - one in shared docs, two in the C drive of the main computer, all accessible through the network, apparently this is normal, but it seems to play havoc with the image file routing. We are now on our 4th week of problems - and the problems are getting worse, at least last week we were still getting orders - will these customers come back? Who knows - What has this cost me? - (not including previous costs of versions of Actinic and support costs) well so far £1040.00 for upgrade and extra network key. A member of staff so far 2 1/2 days a week, lost orders - unquantifiable.
Last week we were told we had been put up the Support tree and were now a priority - this took almost 3 weeks apparently. Do I sound fed up? Disappointed and at a loss what to do, I want to abandon Actinic but my investment is so heavy now I am stuck - someone tell me of a better system because this really cannot be the best there is out there can it?

[Confused Sally]

This is an email i have just received

Name:Sara Davies

Message:
Hi,
Im trying to order from your website but your website will not let me add to my basket. I really need the items to make a present and its so annoying that the only website I find that has the things I need is not working.

Why on earth do you bother to have a website if you cannot keep it working - the internet is becoming full of rubbish websites like yours. Im certainly going to tell people to keep away from your website if they happen to find it.

[Confused Sally]

Im certainly going to tell people to keep away from your website if they happen to find it.

Thanks Actinic - you are doing a grand job of screwing up my business

[Confused Sally]

And another is any one from Actinic going to reply to me?

Name:Hazel
Email Address:not@given.com
Message:
A General Script Error Occurred

Error: Error opening the index './acatalog/stock.fil'. No such file or directory. The web site is probably being updated.
Press the Browser back button and try again or contact the site owner.

I am not updating the site

[Confused Sally]

I Want my Money Back

I want my money back - I would like the money for my staff time, lost sleep, lost orders and general stress.

[guccij]

The site seems to have generated several versions of the sites folder - one in shared docs, two in the C drive of the main computer, all accessible through the network, apparently this is normal, but it seems to play havoc with the image file routing.

This isn't normal. On your multiple uninstalls and reinstalls, did someone select a different file location? You may have had an error message saying something like "there are already files in that location. Please delete them before continuing." Perhaps then someone chose a different, custom location for the install? I'm not saying this is a solution, simply that it is an area to look at.

[guccij]

And to the rude potential customer, ignore them. She's probably horrible to everyone in real life.

[Mike Hughes]

Hi Sally,

I can't believe this hasn't been sorted yet. Is there no fallback solution with Business Plus? Normally, worst case, you can install a clean copy of actinic onto another PC (or do a clean install of Actinic) import your snapshot and off you go again.

The customers will calm down and come back. They're probably just as frustrated as you are. You might want to consider taking the site down temporarily until things get sorted and leaving a short message explaining the situation. At least this will avoid customers getting frustrated and feeling that they're wasting their time.

Has this been escalated higher within Actinic? I assume you have actinic cover and this is supposed to provide fast track response for critical issues and a guaranteed escalation procedure. By now I'd expect CB to be on the case.

I wish there was some way I could help but this isn't the kind of thing I know about.

Mike

Ps. has your site always been like this? the cgi-bin isn't on the same domain as the site: tnp.hostinguk.com?