Recently, my company has been in the process of doing PC upgrades for all of our users.  Initially, we sought to use the built in migration tool provided with WindowsXP but were rather unimpressed with it and machines that were migrated become quickly unstable, either due to a flaw in the wizard or in a corrupt source machine that was imported to the new PC. 

After reading an article from "Computer Shopper" dated August 2002, we decided to look into a product called PC Relocator made by Eisenworld Software.  We contacted this company and inquired about their products.  It came to our attention that they made a stand alone version and an enterprise version and we asked which they felt would be best for our small environment.  Upon hearing their answers, we were told to go ahead and try their enterprise version for free for 30 days. 

This is where there was a catch. 

I personally tried to make this product work and placed several calls to this company's tech support on their "fully functional" evaluation.  I was given conflicting answers on many occasions and came to fix some of the problems myself.  I ran a somewhat successful migration, but it was lacking in what we wanted in that it could only search for file types, and did not allow for additional input of what to migrate.  We were slightly displeased at this, and called to tell the company that we ran their demo, but were not interested in their product. 

At no point in this did they tell us what we came to find out. 

One of our developers, and company VP's was the recipient of this PC.  He had done a lot of work in the three weeks since this migration, which Eisenworld insists was successful, regardless of the fact that we pointed out it did not meet our needs and we had to spend additional time migrating over more files and software which it did not do as it was advertised. 

We now are being prompted on this PC every so often to either undo or purchase their product.  This is something I would be MORE than happy to do, had I known about it from day 1, but to do this now is not only unfair but unprofessional. 

When I brought this to Eisenworld's attention, they scoffed and said we would not get something for nothing.  I have no problem with them making money, I have a problem with them making money in an extortionary fashion.  What would have been wrong with their representative letting us know that if we did not choose to purchase and activate it, that we had to uninstall and undo their utility's migration or face it doing it on it's own in 30 days? 

It seems very arrogant to force a company to buy their enterprise level software for a test of one PC to see if their software meets their needs.  I likened that to a free sample at the store, and then being forced to pay or cough it up intact.  They were neither reasonable nor professional in their dealings with me and I feel your readers should be aware of what type of business tactic this company likes to use. 

Thank you,

 

Mark Vovchuk

Datatech Software Corp