Norton Flagging Our Windows Installers

We create installers for our windows products because that makes life easier for our customers.

Over the years, we have found that Norton Anti-Virus has become more and more aggressive in its suspicion of installers which do not come from large companies.

Specifically, Norton is prone to throw a "WS.Reputation.1" error, which basically means "Norton does not specially know about this installer, so Norton cannot say that it is OK." See this Norton link for details: http://community.norton.com/forums/clarification-wsreputation1-detection

We try to maintain a variety of "common" Windows installations in-house. On some of our validation machines we run Norton AV ourselves, so our in-house testers have reported this issue as well. But our in-house testers only had to respond to a dialogue box from Norton AV in order to allow our installers to finish. Customer Service declared this to be irritating, but not a deal-breaker.

Then one of our customers claimed that Norton simply deleted the file and would not allow them to run the installer at all. Since they are a programming shop, they did not really need the installer, so we sent them the component files and they installed them by hand. So in that case the situation was merely annoying, but we realize that other shops might not be so comfortable installing software by themselves.

This issue is not unique to us: here is another frustrated small vendor's rant about this: https://www.codeandweb.com/blog/2012/06/23/how-symantec-ruins-independent-developers

While we are generally big fans of firewall and anti-virus software, and understand why our customers might be unhappy to have our installer quarantined by Norton, we are not happy that Norton is willing to be so aggressive with so little data. And it is not clear what we can do differently: the DRG market is a niche market and we will never have the volume numbers required to get Norton's attention.

So for now we feel that the best we can do is to happily provide the component files and installation instructions as an alternative if you cannot run our installer on your system. Just send us email at our tech support email box.

PS We use Nullsoft to build our installers. For more information on them, visit their wiki here: http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page

Question About DRG27

QUESTION

Hey there I currently have your v27 software and we recently put this into production for the current year.

My question is if it's backward compatible ?  I need to go back 3  years in my dataset and assign a drg value.  Can I use your software version to do this ? will it look at the service dates and assign a previous version ?  Or, must I buy a previous version or versions and apply based on the year ?

Thanks for your help.

ANSWER

(Before we start, I should point out the current version is F29, not F27; you can see the complete list of versions here:

http://www.drggroupers.com/grouper.html

For the purposes of this answer, I will assume that you knew this already and that you wanted F27.)

In order to assign DRGs for a given version, you need two things:

1. Logic, which we encode in software
2. Code attributes, which we encode in masks files

The software is always for a given version; in your case, that is F27. The software is backwardly compatible, provided that you have the masks files for previous vesrions.

So if  you have software for F27 and want to assign DRGs for F24, then all you would need to do is to buy the masks file ($100 from our on-line store at the above link) for F24. In fact, you can buy masks files for any version before F28 and then be able to assign DRGs for that version.

File Upload

Customers often need to send us files as part of our DRG Assignment Service (DAS) and customers sometimes need to send us files as part of getting technical support.

To handle either case, we have added a File Upload page, powered by TransferBigFiles.com. This upload page is available from the navigation bar at the top of any of our web pages from our main site:

http://www.drggroupers.com

You can also reach it directly at

http://www.drggroupers.com/upload.html

Please let us know what you think.

Phone Support

We have overhauled our internal phone system, in order to separate ourselves a bit from our parent company, M+H Consulting.

Since we have people in Oregon, Massachusetts and Connecticut, we know that our internal communication has sometimes been lacking.

You will still call 203-481-4885, but the extensions have changed:

• Extension 104: Sales Support
• Extension 105: Tech Support

With our new phone system, messages actively follow us around, so we hope to cut down on response time.