HPIA - when is it going to be fixed?

[Integraxp]

HPIA is a nice attempt at a tool to handle patching, unfortuntely someone in HP seems to have decided that it shold be handled by the summer student programmer with no experience of actually patching hundreds of systems.

- Amazingly despite using the /silent switch, it will check to see if theres a more recent version available and display a modal dialog! In what way is a modal dialog 'silent'?

- Its a bizarre mix of GUI app and command line tool in a single exe - who thought that was a good idea? This makes it almost guaranteeds to fail as it opens windows for no good reason.

- The HP web is, as usual, totally unhelpful and there isn't any way to just download the latest version. Each time they publish a new version, the download link changes. How do you know theres a new version? The supposedly silent tool hangs with a modal window open telling you theres a new version. Brilliant programming. This is useless when you've launched the tool as a background command and there is no user to intervene.

- On at least 50% of machines the scan option produces an xml file which contains a text indicating that an exception has occured while scanning. It doesn't contain the actual exception, just that one occured. Beyond usless is the best description. How does this stuff even pass code control? Would it have taken so much effort to have written out the underlying exception text, or even code?

- Scans, when executed with /silent, sometimes produce a file called report.xml, which was good. Recently this seems to produce three files, which are named after the hardware model. What is the point in naming the output after the hardware model. It only means that we have to look up the model to work out what the output is going to be called. Why would you do this? Who thought this was a good idea? What was wrong with report.xml, report.json, report.html? Its at least predictiable. If you really wanted to name it something else, maybe nodename.xml?

- Dependency on .net runtime recently added. Why complicate a simple tool by making it dependent on a library which is almost certainly not installed on desktops and is almost certainly not necessary? Ah, yes to add some GUI fluff that nobody needs.

Does HP hate its customers? Why does the Dell tool work so much better?