{"id":542,"date":"2005-01-31T10:09:00","date_gmt":"2005-01-31T15:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/?p=542"},"modified":"2005-01-31T10:09:00","modified_gmt":"2005-01-31T15:09:00","slug":"unwanted-groove-upgrade-nonexistent-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/2005\/01\/31\/unwanted-groove-upgrade-nonexistent-service\/","title":{"rendered":"Unwanted Groove upgrade, nonexistent service."},"content":{"rendered":"

If you have ever used Groove<\/a>, you will know that it regularly pops up a notification that there is some new version of a widget or installation helper. You click ok and it grabs it and installs it into your Groove client.<\/p>\n

I got one of those notifications last Monday (a week ago today). As is normal, I clicked ok on it, however this time it downloaded a much larger package than usual. It wasn’t until the package finished and required a reboot that it finally came up and told me that I had upgraded from my paid version 2.5 (paid at 2.1 but upgraded to 2.5) to version 3.0, and that I had to either enter a valid 3.0 key or accept that I would now be limited to 3 spaces (I have 5 active spaces) and that various essential features would start to disappear over the next month (file replication for instance) unless I converted my new “Trial” software to a full license.<\/p>\n

No problem, thought I, I’ll just contact Groove and have them right this for me, tell me how to downgrade and still use my data.<\/p>\n

I consulted their site to get support. I have a login, but I could not find any indication how to actually get support. See if you can tell how to get support for a problem like mine (without paying) from this page: http:\/\/www.groove.net\/index.cfm\/pagename\/SupportOptions\/<\/p>\n

Finally, I used the problem reporting link that I managed to get to from Groove’s help menu and submitted my query from an online form.<\/p>\n

After 24 hours with no reply, I sent an email to support@groove.net.<\/p>\n

After 24 further hours with no reply, I sent an email to sales@groove.net. <\/p>\n

On each of the emails I stressed that I had yet to even receive an acknowledgement of my contact with them.<\/p>\n

It has now been a week and I have still yet to hear from them. Not a sausage.<\/p>\n

Here is a quote from their support page:<\/p>\n

\nOutstanding customer care is yet another way that we seek to gain your trust in us as a company that can meet your needs. Our support team excels at resolving your issues quickly. Every inquiry is tracked and managed so we can resolve your issues effectively.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I see no evidence of any of the above assertions.<\/p>\n

Groove has been a great tool for me, but I’m now looking for alternatives. I can’t consider it a critical tool in my business with service like this. Could you?<\/p>\n

What’s up, Ray<\/a>? I’ve never had any reason to be disappointed till now.<\/p>\n

Update<\/b>
\n90 minutes after my blog entry, a support message arrived (does someone have an rss search feed that takes higher priority than their email?) detailing how I can uninstall version 3.0, reinstall 2.5 and then restore from an archive. <\/p>\n

Being that my last Groove backup is part of a drive image backup, this would entail at minimum a day’s work that could have been avoided had I been presented with a dialog box that clearly said “You are about to upgrade to version 3.0 – Are You Sure?” <\/p>\n

I really had consciously decided not to upgrade to version 3.0 until I was ready to and would have declined the offer had it been clear to me.<\/p>\n

Clearly, the simplest way out would be for me to pay the $25 or $50 to upgrade (oops – just looked it up. It’ll be $150 to upgrade to the professional edition. not sure what the filesharing edition does but I’d likely lose functionality from 2.5 Standard). I might well have done that a month from now, but I can’t imagine myself doing so with my back against the wall. I suppose that’s stubborn of me but I think I have a point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you have ever used Groove, you will know that it regularly pops up a notification that there is some new version of a widget or installation helper. You click ok and it grabs it and installs it into your Groove client. I got one of those notifications last Monday (a week ago today). As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}