Conceptual Clarity

“YES!  FINALLY! FIXED!!!!”  

That’s what I sounded like when I finally managed to fix my sound issue on my Bootcamp partition with VMWare Fusion.

Sometime during one of my updates to VMWare or Windows XP somehow my sound stopped working when I accessed my Bootcamp partition via VMWare.  Ever since I’ve been battling with Bootcamp and VMWare to get the sound working again and finally I’ve done it.  

While I found numerous suggested solutions on forums and web sites none of them worked for me, so I thought I should document the solution that worked for me here…

The Problem

When using my Bootcamp partition via VMWare Fusion 2.0.2 there was no sound.  Despite the (software) sound card being connected and the sound icon in the bottom right of VMWare’s window lighting up (showing that it was receiving XP’s sounds) there was no sound no matter what I tried.

The Solution

The solution that I believe worked for me in the end was two part:

• Rollback a sound driver update; and
• Delete and reinstall the Bootcamp partition from the VMWare 

Rolling Back the Sound Driver Update

Firstly I rolled back a soundcard driver update that occurred via Windows Update.  The instructions on how to do this can be found on the VMWare Community web site in the article called “Audio Driver Bug in VMWare Fusion 2.0”

Delete and Reinstall the Bootcamp Partition in VMWare

After rolling back the driver, I then removed the Bootcamp partition from my list of VMs and then reinstalled it.  This appeared to force VMWare to reinstall all the drivers it needed into the VM.

The default settings of VMWare Fusion do not allow you to remove a Bootcamp partition from the list of available VMs.  In order to make the Bootcamp item delete-able you will need to exit Fusion and then run this command in the Terminal:

sudo mv "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator" "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator.bak"

(Thanks to the post from WoodyZ in the VMWare forums for this – http://communities.vmware.com/thread/200649) 

When you start Fusion up again the Bootcamp item can now be deleted via the right-click/context menu.

Once I had deleted the Bootcamp item I restarted VMWare Fusion once more for good measure and then re-installed the Bootcamp VM via the normal VMWare interface for this.  

And now the sound works!!!!

Finally…Thank You

Thanks to all those on the VMWare forums whose responses helped me track down a solution to this most annoying problem, I wouldn’t have gotten it working without you!

Last week I was called a “bit of a black hole for feedback – in the nicest possible way”  by our acerbically humoured CTO Adrian Sutton.  I’ve been working with Adrian for many years now, and I find his perspectives forthright and valuable and often they lead to some manner of introspection – hence this blog post.

Before I embark on a journey of introspection though I think some exposition is warranted.  The “black hole” remark came up as Adrian and I were exchanging emails about how best to improve our ability to track the veritable mountain of feedback that we receive from staff, clients, prospective clients, business partners and many others.  This has become an increasingly important issue as the company has expanded and we seek to move from product design with heuristics to formal systems and processes in order to better cope with our growth.

Ephox is now a global enterprise software company, with several major OEM partnerships, a large number of clients in the Fortune 1000 and offices on three continents.  At the same time as this expansion has been happening we’re having an increasing number of conversations with our clients.  Adrian, Michael Fromin (my US-based counterpart) and myself talk with clients at every opportunity to discover how Ephox can provide them with better solutions to their content creation problems.  Hence the mountain of feedback.

And this feedback is important!  As a product company Ephox lives and dies by its ability to deliver solutions that the market wants – request and feature management is a key part of this.  In the very beginning we determined what functionality to implement by looking at similar applications to EditLive! in the desktop space.  We outgrew this eventually EditLive! matured and the requirements of a specialty web-based editor diverged from that of the desktop one around EditLive! version 4.0.  By that time our second feature management system was in place.  It was called “the product manager with a spreadsheet”.  This system worked surprisingly well, even if I do say so myself, and gave us the basis of what we use today.  Today the system has evolved and both components have received some decent upgrades and is now called “the Director of Products with JIRA”.  [For the record I am simplifying here, there are more people and systems involved in this…but that just doesn’t make for a good story, and it is still a good analogy.]

Overall, I think that Ephox does a great job of tracking user feedback.  We get a great deal of feedback from all of the sources I’ve mentioned previously and all feature requests are tracked in detail, prioritized and reviewed during every release planning phase.  Yes this is time consuming but it is absolutely worth it, and to be honest I for one take great satisfaction in knowing we’re delivering functionality that our customers want and need.

Unfortunately though, in certain cases this system is not coping.  For what it’s worth JIRA does a fantastic job of tracking discrete issues.  While it’s “clicky” user interface may drive me nuts some days (I hope someone from Atlassian’s reading this) for the most part it does its job very well.  To Adrian’s point though I think it’s the other part of the system that’s currently not as effective as it used to be.  

The problem lies with the high level feedback.  Those things that aren’t exactly features or specific requests but things more along the lines of someone saying, “you know, I think EditLive! could do more for authoring for mobile browsers.”  Right now, those ideas are on paper, mind maps and spreadsheets.  They are then centralized and processed in my head…which is unfortunately not a globally available system with 99% uptime.

So, I think it’s time for Director of Products 2.0.  So over the next few weeks I’m going to try and upgrade our feature management to be something more like “Product Management Team with JIRA and some web 2.0 collaborative applications.”  I’ll keep you posted.

Over the next few months I have a rather hectic travel schedule ahead of me.  While I can’t say that I’m looking forward to spending hour upon hour in airports I can say that I’m looking forward to meeting a whole bunch of people who are using EditLive! today.  In fact, the whole purpose of my travels in the next month or so will be to hear from you.  

I’ve still got some spare time on my schedule, so if you’re an EditLive! user in one of the following cities and would like to share the challenges you’re facing with your content systems then let me know, I’d love to hear from you.

• April 6th to 8th – Washington DC
• April 9th and 10th – Boston, MA
• April 13th to 15th – San Francisco, CA
• April 16th – Los Angles, CA (tentative)
• April 20th and 21st – Melbourne, Australia
• May 7th – Sydney, Australia