Software is never released as a finished product. This is a fact of life in the IT world, and the longer you work in this industry, the more of an appreciation you’ll have for the fact that things are released in an unfinished state. In my previous post, “When is the Right Time?” I highlighted the need to take a cautious approach to introducing new software into your environment. I had an even greater appreciation for this idea after this last week.
Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2013 about a month and a half ago. Our team gave it some time to marinate, and we waited to see if any issues would pop up. Seeing as nothing major had happened over the course of that month, we worked on installing the Service Pack in our Test environment over the last two weeks. The day we finished the installation I found a post on the Reddit SharePoint sub-reddit that was describing issues associated with the service pack. Sure enough the link came up with the message below.
Even when you’re careful and you do your due diligence, there is still the potential for issues to pop up with software upgrades and patch deployments. This is not a typical situation, but we were lucky, in that we only had deployed it in our test environment to this point. Microsoft will likely come out with an additional patch to fix this issue, but the fact of the matter is that these types of things will definitely make you tense up a little when realizing there is potential that you will need to rebuild an environment.
Sometimes there is nothing you can do to prevent these types of issues, and the only thing you can do is react to the issues as they come in. This is somewhat of a micro chasm of IT support as a whole. Even when you do everything right, there are still things that will go wrong. All you can do is take your time, do your research and verify that all of the information you are working with indicates that you are making the correct decision.
If you have any comments, please use the link at the top of this post, and be sure to follow me on twitter @burked585.
Re-Imagine IT 