An Outlook Signature Deployment and How it Changed My Way of Thinking

Over the course of the past few years our company has wanted to get everyone on a standardized signature to include company information, links and a professional picture of the employee to help give us a personal feel to clients. The idea was great, however deploying signatures to 40 or so employees seemed daunting at the time I had come on board, as well as making the signature its self which was based loosely on the original we had.

I have learned a lot in those past few years about the company, people, technology, and design hoping to make the process easier as some point.

It never happened however. Instead I struggled with the project, with issues surrounding the signature design and even worse compatibility among other programs.

The project changed, died off, came back and changed again. I was fed up, I was tired and most of all I was uninterested. I couldn't make parts of it work well. Images were blown up, Gmail just saw code and I was exhausted with the project altogether.

At the end of 2013 my supervisor had brought the project back up and decided on deploying it before our annual company meeting. I groaned but went along. He suggested we use a third party this time due to my busy schedule, hoping to make things smoother and finish quicker. I'll be the first to admit that utilizing an outside vendor to do "my" job seemed against my own nature, and I am 100% sure I resisted more than I should have. It took a bit for me to warm up to the idea but got them going on it anyway.

The vendor came in, and I showed him what we had and our issues with my ideas and let him get to work. He came back with a signature that looked similar but different and I was actually very pleased on how it turned out. I got my supervisor involved and he stated that he liked it more as well. After some refinements the vendor left to work on it more at a later time and to make it auto populate from excel based data so I could create them easily. Testing of the signature came and went and this time, no garbled code in Gmail, and nothing weird in different versions of Outlook. It became a big win to get even this far and my interested increased ever so slightly back into the project.

I ended up deploying the signatures myself (though it may have worked with a vendor) citing my users busy schedules and the cost of the vendor on site. We've achieved 100% deployment for the users who were with us and had professional photos taken, and all the while I was able to turn my attention to other projects while still having more than plenty to do. In the end my offload of this project to a vendor saved me a lot of time, and got the "leech" of a project out of my head while still being able to show progress week by week on it. Looking back it seemed silly to sit on my mess and not clean it up while all the while I could have utilized someone else to clean up the mess and come back with a steak dinner so to speak. Sitting on messes doesn't help anyone in the long run, the meal never gets made and you smell like rotten eggs. Sometimes, you just need to delegate.

Unable to install Symantec 12.1.4xxx on Windows 8.1 VM

I had a bit of trouble today trying to install Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1.4xxx on a Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit virtual machine. The installer would fail and give cryptic advice through the windows event viewer console which was almost worthless. I followed the random number given to me (1603) to a few articles on Symantec's website but all referenced an issue that was supposed to have been fixed in 12.1.3xxx.

Sad to say I must have found a loophole.

I did check into a few things but was not able to find a work around. (Disabled Windows Defender, looked for a bad KB update)

I opened a case with Symantec and will report back my findings.

EDIT 2/4/14:

We were able to resolve this after running the clean wipe utility from Symantec. After that the installation completed successfully!