Be careful with beta software

A few days ago, I got another lesson in the Law of Unintended Consequences. I tried out a free service called Soocial, aimed at the "connected consumer" who wants to share a single electronic address book among all their computers and portable devices.

Great idea, if it had worked right. Unfortunately, Soocial's software didn't properly handle my Microsoft Outlook contacts list, in which I have my contacts neatly organized into several subfolders: personal, companies, organizations, medical, etc. What Soocial did was copy the contacts from ALL my subfolders to a single online folder—not a very useful tool. But it gets worse: when Soocial subsequently "synchronized" between Outlook and online, it inserted all the hundreds of extra contacts from all the subfolders into my personal folder in Outlook, and then proceeded to DELETE them from the original subfolders! Ouch!

(Fortunately, I regularly backup my Outlook storage file. Most Outlook users do not, since Microsoft inexplicably puts this file in an obscure, hidden folder rather than in "My Documents" where you'd normally expect to find such things residing for easy backup.)

Soocial currently uses a beta version of its software, which signifies that the program is still being developed and debugged, and might be expected to exhibit strange behavior. I should have heeded the warnings that are invariably embedded in the "fine print" when one downloads beta software, and first experimented with it using data I could afford to lose.

Beta software doesn't carry any guarantee of performance—in fact, it's almost always free—and support is usually limited to user forums where other "Beta testers" help each other with problems. The manufacturer supposedly watches these forums for consistent "issues" that signal problems they need to fix before the final version. That sort of feedback is the reason that software companies make beta software available to the public, a growing trend.

Beta software includes the newest version of Google's Chrome browser and Microsoft's Security Essentials anti-malware program (though the public beta is now closed to new testers). Microsoft made the Windows 7 "release candidate" available as a public Beta months before the final version was ready for manufacturing. (It's due Oct 22nd.)

Our advice: Beta software can be a nice, cost-free way to try out a product before it's released. But don't rely on beta software to do everything it claims to do right, or even at all. It may not even uninstall cleanly, so beware. Expect problems, and don't use beta software to work on important files you can't afford to lose. —Dean Gallea