Ride the Lightning

“MY BAD” – ACCESSDATA GIVES ME A CALL

May 16, 2008

The blogosphere is an amazing place. Very shortly after I published my negative review of FTK 2, I received a phone call from Brian Karney, the COO of AccessData. To give credit where credit is certainly due, Brian offered a string of apologies, essentially saying “my bad” on behalf of his company. He could have been confrontational and argumentative, but he was genuinely acknowledging a series of errors (so many that I am still dumbfounded) and trying to convey the company’s sense that it needed to do a lot of damage control. Which it does.

For the moment, I am simply saluting the candor of the call and offering additional information from Brian’s follow up note to me, which said in part, “I agree we could have done a much better job of explaining and preparing our loyal customers for FTK 2 and the future of FTK 1.  As you can imagine we are doing what we can to clear the air on that matter now. We are confident that we are headed in the right direction addressing many of the core issues with FTK 2 and committed to not stopping until we do.” 

Brian also sent me a list of the items that are being addressed in the upcoming FTK v2.04 and FTK v1.80 release. 

Coming soon Version 2.0.4:
• 64-bit support
• Vista support
• Enhanced pre-processing performance
• Additional UI enhancements
o Much faster Quickpicks
o Much faster display of lists         
               
Coming soon — Version 1.8:
• RSR functionality (automated generation of registry reports)
• Microsoft Office 2007 support (recognition, indexing and display)
• New containers in the Email tab (webmail and other email)
• Bookmarking e-mail attachments with parent e-mail support
• Recursive file export (from the file, back to the root of the drive)

Though I am still slightly confused about Versions 1 and 2 of FTK, our friend Craig Ball tells me that he has spoken to AccessData’s CEO, Tim Leehealey. Apparently, Mr. Leehealey acknowledged that the company had goofed in even naming the product FTK 2.0. He told Craig that, despite his company’s marketing, they are two entirely different products geared to different customers. 2.0 is designed only for massively parallel, collaborative workgroups with legions of powerful machines (large corporations and the federal government, for instance). I’m not sure how we were supposed to divine this from the marketing, but the clarification is useful. If AccessData can get this word out (and perhaps rename FTK 2), it will better serve its customers.

Finally, I tip my hat to Brian and Tim for listening, talking to Craig and I courteously and going back to the drawing board to figure out how to make things right for their customers. As the Japanese (especially MY Japanese guy) are fond of saying, “Don’t point fingers – fix the problem.” Here’s hoping they do.

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