It's not SmarterTools fault either... This is why v17 came out and removed appear.in. They fixed it and brought the service in internally. They were bought by another company, they are no longer dealing with the original supplier, the original supplier is now another company. We bought many thousands of dollars worth of Gene6 licenses, one day, they stopped responding to the forum, they stopped responding to tickets, disappeared off the face of the earth. We invested tons of time and effort into integrating their product into our control panel. There was no refunds, no checks written for our wasted efforts on integration to our CP. Had to move to another FTP server, Cerberus spend more time and money integrating it instead. HINT HINT SmarterTools, SmarterFTP would be f**** fantastic :). Do you get mad with Samsung, when they stop supporting a certain phone because it is 3 years old or something, or when Apple says they are done supporting the iPhone 4. No, you move to the next version if you want OS upgrades, further improvements and bug fixes.
Yeah, SM 16 had a TON of issues, we know, trust me, we basically beta tested it for over a year, but that was our choice to upgrade. SM 17 also has its share of issues. What application, program, service etc. doesnt. That is why we have updates and new versions/builds. I can tell you this though, SM is working their ass off on SM 17. We have even dedicated our massive mail server to their cause and allowing them to run profiles and tests etc. to make the product better for us and everyone else.
From experience and testing, I can tell you that the new version, 17, the TeamWorkspace feature works brilliantly. Sitting here bitching and whining on the forum because you refuse to upgrade isnt doing anyone any good. If you want to stick to v16, fine, disable the feature on the domain's settings and call it a day until you feel SM 17 is stable for you. Do what we did, test the conversion on another machine, if you have a small enough server, you can probably copy all the data to another machine and test with real data, grp files etc. If you find an issue, log a ticket, they've been plowing through them for us. The new support model, you can submit tickets worry free without having to shell out $75 each time and hoping its a bug.
tl;dr, quit complaining and stay where you are at, upgrade and enjoy the new workspace feature or move on.