Tuesday, June 12, 2007

TFS ripoff or back up your money (updated)

Today I come across pretty interesting post on MSDN forums. To give your some background: recently (about a month ago) some company started to market suite of products that supposedly perform migration from SVN to TFS, backup of TFS projects, work items etc.

The inability to backup separate projects has long plagued TFS community; the company was mentioned in several blogs and in several MSDN postings. I was saying to myself "Kudos to those guys for doing that enormous work and implementing functionality even MS itself was unable to implement". Until today somebody (apparently the buyer of the said software) posted the following:

"... is a fraud company. I had purchased one of their products. The buggers provided me a *** software, which was good for nothing. I have even heard from a mate of mine in France that they charged the product amount and never gave the product.

Today - Even their website does not work."


Well, that surely sets off some alarms. So I indulged a bit in some hobbyist investigation and here goes the list of interesting facts:


  1. The company site is offline as of now; the domain was registered on April 19th, 2007, shortly before the first mention of the products offered appeared.

  2. Neither pricing information nor trial downloads of the products were available at the site (the site is only available now through Google cache).

  3. All posts pointing to the company site on MSDN forums were posted by the same user "gauravmangla". Looking at activity of the user one may see that user was registered on May, 2nd 2007 and all his postings are linking to the mentioned company site. No other posts by the same user are found.

  4. The only feedback posts on MSDN forums is by some user named "john.matthews01", registered on May, 26th 2007 and whose three posts are concerned solely with praise to the company software. No other posts by the same user are found.

  5. No customer feedback from real customers is found using Google (I mean feedback from real-life person non-affilated with the company); only mention of the software in TFS related blogs.


Before I compiled that short list, I was inclined to think that the company in question is new micro-ISV company (of the kind regularily discussed at JoelOnSoftware forums), perhaps with very decent offering that help lost of people in TFS crowd; but now I am of opinion that some fraud scenario might have been at work. My conclusions from that story - before buying something

  • Download trial version; if no trial is available then reconsider

  • Request client reference/search for users feedback; if none found then reconsider

  • If the company is new and the price of the software is significant for you, reconsider

  • Use credit card to pay for the software to make sure you get your money back in case of fraud



Update: I stand corrected as the owner of the company in question posted an explanation of the situation; the site is inavailable due to some internal problems ("... a disgruntled employee left our company and he was responsible for our web site. He changed all the passwords and removed all the web site code"); no products was shipped so far due to export limitations so the rumours of products beind paid for and not shipped appear to be just rumours without any solid foundation.
I do hope the company will be able to resolve the internal situation and resume business as usual.

7 comments:

Sanjay Garg said...

Eugene: I am the owner of Kyrosoft and we are a new startup working on hard problems. Recently, a disgruntled employee left our company and he was responsible for our web site. He changed all the passwords and removed all the web site code. We got the passwords reset by the hoister and we are in the process of getting the web site up. I HAVE NOT sold our product to any one yet as we are in the process of acquiring an export license. It looks like some one is spreading untrue rumors about our company and whoever claims to have purchase our products should provides a proof of Kyrosoft processing the payment. Please bear with us as we get our web site running. I am willing to give demo of our products to any one at any time.

I wish that you had courtesy to send a note to me at the address listed on our website before posting your blog. Please try to put your self in my shoes and imagine the damage this has done to my company's reputation. If you still have any question’s or concerns, Please contact me at info@kyrosoft.com

Anonymous said...

Even the explanation from the CEO sounds a little fishy. Your advice about dowloading trials, getting client data, and using a credit card to help prevent fraud is VERY good advice for anyone.

Anonymous said...

The explanation from the owner definitely does sound fishy...I remember visiting their website about a month back and their products were listed as if they are in the business and now they are claiming that they are in the process of acquiring export license. WoW!!! Makes we wonder how can someone offer products, when they are not even authorized to do so.

Anonymous said...

Sanjay, Lessons to be learned:
* Follow appropriate security measures when employees leave or are fired.
* Don't give potential customers reason to distrust (as of 23-Jun-06 kyrosoft website is contradictory: "Trial version is available" and "Trial version will be available soon"
* Don't start marketing products until something is available.
* Don't start marketing products globally until you're legally allowed to sell them globally.

You're providing much information that feels substantiative to comments like "this company is a fraud".

Anonymous said...

I was recently in the market for a tool to migrate my source and history from SVN to TFS, and these posts left me uneasy with Krysoft. However, their trial version worked well, so we went ahead and purchased the full version. I'd like to report that it works fine, they're a real company, and did not rip me off.

I have roughly 4000 source files with about 2500 check-ins, and the history from these is important to me, so I was needing one of the few available tools to migrate the data. Krysoft's SVN-2-TFS tool handled this job quite capably.

It has the marks of a new product, such as having minimal options or control of what it does, but it does the job that I most needed -- moving all the source and source history from SVN to TFS. They also provided excellent support, quickly fixing the issues that arose.

I'm not associated with Krysoft in any way, other than being a satisfied customer.

NathanD

eugenez said...

Nathan,

Thank you very much for the update.
I am glad to hear that things are working out. But after the story I would be still recommending for evetyone to test the software themselves before purchasing it.

Cheers, Eugene

Anonymous said...

Also, a company called OnePulse has released a TFS 2008 Data Management product that does Backup, Restore, Migrations and other data management from the server down to the item-level. Feel free to search either Live or Google for 'Onepulse TFS'

I hope this helps,