I do not understand the need to soo radically change the way Backup Exec operates with the 2012 version. Please give me a checkbox that says "use legacy interface" cause someone forgot to swollow their wheaties when this 2012 product was approved.
Our experience with 2012 has been difficult. It began with the migration not working at all so we just scrapped everything and started fresh. To make things totally worse, the software does not enable hardware compression on our LTO tape drive and we have tried literrally everything we can to get it to work to no avail. With the new interface you can't even click on a job to get it's status, it shows what it's doing alright but it's usually incorrect and stuck. If you open a particular tape, you can't see what jobs are on it. Selecting restore brings up something we've never seen before. This new system is literraly impossible to relate with what we have been used to..
We've used your product since before Symantec even owned it. 2012 is soo incredibly complicated there is no way I can reliably teach our assistants how to decipher whats going on. The reports generated in e-mail are soo complicated it serves no purpose but to confuse the operator. At one client there are over 100 systems on various jobs. Each system now sends an e-mail and there appears to be no way to combine system jobs into a single job with one mail including all systems. 100 e-mails just won't work. With this new interface and the incredibly difficult and complicated nature of the product now, it is prone to disaster.
Backup exec 2012 to us is just too broken, complicated and dangerous so we have scrapped it. We will not be moving forward again with any future Backup Exec product if the interface continues to deteriorate from it's simplicity it has always had up until version 2010. I am personally hesitent to even try 2012 with a service pack as the product has simply moved to a state of functional ignorance.
I don't know if I speak for the community at large but to me it's plain and simple Symantec. Simple is safe. Complicated is dangerous. Give me back 2010, add support for new OS's etc but DO NOT CHANGE THE WAY IT WORKS.