Discussion - Preparing Customers for Dot Net V2.0 based products

This is an unusual issue but what little business I get is ‘grass roots’ in a way. It’s rarely with corporations. During negotiations, everything goes well in the proposal phase, and once I’ve attained the business, I say clearly what the deliverable is to be and that the implementation will be done in Visual Studio 2005 which requires the Dot Net V2005 framework. I explain that the deliverable will be in the form of a “One-Click solution” or will be the output of a deployment project which will be a setup.exe and an msi file. The next step is where things go greatly awry:

I then explain that these standard installations will check the target system for the presence of the Dot Net V2.0 framework and if it is not present the setup process will install the framework directly from Microsoft via the net.

The latter statement often frightens customers to death even when I explain that this is done once for a given system and that gradually all newer software will require this framework. I have lost so much business from this because people don’t understand this. This is both a technical/business issue that is an issue in deployment and getting these solutions out there. I realize that a.) this problem should diminish over time although I see no sign of it right now and that customers already have older frameworks on their systems and don’t even know it. But I do see that at this time, this is a huge impediment to doing business with this fine product. I cushion this information as softly as possible yet for many it’s quite traumatic. It also scares some corporations (size unknown) who are Microsoft savy but apparently haven’t done much thinking about the introduction of V2.0 Framework based solutions.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how this might be better managed

Renee