At work I rebooted my desktop to be delightfully told the following by Windows on startup:
“Installing managed application: Symantec Endpoint Protection”
Or words to that effect. So far, this is doing well with regard to this post’s theme of telling the user what is actually happening.
However, the UI is pretty bad here in that the message is static. There is no indication that anything is actually happening behind the scenes. At this point, the user is not able to actually do anything other than wave the mouse pointer around.
This is not usually a problem when the actions behind the scenes complete quickly. In this case, I was staring at the same screen ten minutes later, with my eyes flicking to the hard drive activity light.
I rebooted as I was not convinced anything was happening and this time just logged straight in. It did not try installing again.
I spoke to the guys behind the scenes and was told I should have waited for fifteen minutes instead.
Some very much common sense guidelines in this area that really should be followed:
- When something big is happening behind the scenes that takes control away from the user, provide a progress indicator! This is pretty standard for normal installations. The same should happen as the “Managed install” level. I wonder if this is fixed in Windows 7?
- Okay, the first one is not fixable in this situation. So, sysadmins who are looking after these things: Tell your users about the install! A simple email about what is going on, saying to wait for fifteen minutes, and everything is okay would suffice. Always avoid just rolling out arbitrary changes which impact everyone without proper notification.