After I posted my last piece on Snow Leopard, I received a couple of emails from friends at school asking me why the Bates College "Help Desk" folks had advised them against upgrading. At first, I was baffled.

I've had Snow Leopard installed since last night, and I tested every application I use on a regular basis — R, Mathematica, Word, Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, Coda, et al. — to make make sure I can go back to school without a hitch next week. Unfortunately, I completely forgot one very important application: Cisco's pathetic excuse for a piece of software, the Clean Access Agent.

Said software, which I've blogged about on a number of other occasions, facilitates access to the Bates campus network. It's a terrible implementation of a very good idea: ensuring users have the right credentials and security features installed before allowing them onto the network.

So, naturally, it turns out the Cisco Clean Access Agent does not work on Snow Leopard. To put it mildly, I find this inexcusable. Registered developers, like Cisco's engineers, have had access to pre-release versions of Snow Leopard since June 2008. That's over a year. That one of the world's largest technology companies couldn't manage to bring their software up-to-date in the space of 14 months is outrageous.

The folks at the OmniGroup, who develop such wonderful applications as OmniFocus and OmniGraffle, had fully Snow Leopard compatible versions of each and every one of their applications the day before Snow Leopard shipped. This in spite of the fact that each one of the OmniGroup's applications is probably an order, or several orders, of magnitude more complex than Cisco's dinky little Clean Access Agent, and the OmniGroup is a tiny company with far fewer than 1000 employees.

All this incident has done is reinforce my perception that the Cisco Network Access Control product is really, really awful. Get on it Cisco!