Bentley systems - Here's how to help your customers recover from a ProjectWise outage.

This was a frustrating day for us (Monday, March 8th) dealing first with the global IMS outage, followed by the sudden onset of the issue with connect clients @ 11.0.2.16 and 18 unable to connect, neither of which were causing an issue for us yesterday.

I think Bentley needs to step up its level of service and commitment to its customer's success.  The solution offered was... figure out our downloads page and then get your clients to 11.0.1.109.  

In a secure enviornment like ours, staff without admin rights cannot uninstall software, nor can they install updates, so sudden widespread issues like this cause serious problems.

Its been a long day cleaning up from this and I feel Bentley has let us down as a customer which ultimately can affect our ability to meet the needs of our clients. Today we were again left on our own to figure out and fix problems with Bentley software, namely how to effectively roll back a large number of users at the 2.16 and 2.18 versions and then install the 1.109 version. 

I can imagine an entire global community of ProjectWise admins working under pressure to build the same rollback package we did because Bentley did not provide any guidance on how to do so.  Detailed guidance on best practices for rolling back offending versions, and getting the latest would help the global community of ProjectWise users more easily recover from an issue like this, and would demonstrate Bentley's commitment to being a partner with its customers.

Bentley systems, in the future, when your products have a known bug, the expectation from the community is that you will at a minimum share a link to some code snippets with best practices for how to automate the uninstall of the offending versions, and as efficiently as possible install a functional version.

This is ultimately not an issue with an Microsoft update, it is an issue with Bentley software and how Bentley systems provides support for its customers to ensure shared success.  Today I think Bentley systems failed.  My hope is that the next time a situation like this occurs, Bentley will provide detailed guidance on how we can best recover together - not leave the community to figure it out on its own.  Such improvement in the future will help us all be successful.