As a user of Symantec Encryption Desktop (SED), I have been able to simplify and secure my workflows and sensitive information better than with any other program. However, despite the valuable stability and compatability upgrades that have been applied to the SED software, there is still much to be desired from it.
It's fine if you're a somewhat average user who typically makes light to moderate use of the SED software, the program was designed to do exactly what it advertises. Although, it was only designed to execute one task at a time. I find this an unnecessary impairment as the program could easily handle running multiple operations within the same active base process. For example, take a look at the "PGP Viewer" that allows you to view encrypted email messages in the .eml format; sure you can open one file at a time, but you can also open a large cluster of messages all at once by dragging them over the "Drag Email or Files Here" space, which sets the precedent for the idea of running multiple processes in the same window, in a matter of speaking.
Let's say you want to run a "Shred Free Space" task on one of your drives. Sure, you select the parameters and the drive to shred, start the process, and everything works fine. But wait, there's more! Myabe you were going to Encrypt or Decrypt a drive and it needs to be done right away, but you can't abandon the drive shred process for security reasons... So you click on the SED window behind the shred space process to let the shred continue, while you try to use the encryption part of the program itself-- but it doesn't work. The shred process won't go to the background, and doen't have the option to make it it's own separate window or process. This is because the shred space utility and SED itself are all one program. This is only a minor flaw, but it is nonetheless a flaw.
At the very least, the shred space utility needs to be fully integrated into the SED base program so that it has its own task setup and progress bar integrated into the SED GUI, instead of having a pop-out task window that is tied to the SED base window. Try to imagine the shred utility looking and working more like the Virtual Disk creation tab; the process setup and progress bar are all there in one place, and I can still switch to another feature of SED while the virtual drive creation process is running. This is a very simple problem that a lot of advanced users such as myself would like to see fixed. (By the way, the virtual disk creation utility has an even worse problem, which I'll describe at the end of this idea.)
Next, we have my favorite design flaw-- one that I'm sure many people are aware of and would like to have fixed or imporved...
Most of us who use the SED software likely use the PGP Disk encryption feature frequently for newly encrypting drives and decrypting ones that are to be repurposed. But there's one nagging problem that I can't, for the life of me, even begin to understand; you can only encrypt or decrypt one drive at a time! Historically, this has been the case with almost all file encryption software, but there have been a few progams over the years that can encrypt and/or decrypt multiple drives simultaneously. Most of the programs I've heard of that can do this are either extremely proprietary, long gone, or obsolete. Sure a workload like this would be somewhat of a drain on system resources, but for those of us who have those resources, (most people who professionally need and use SED probably have powerful enough hardware) having the ability to run mutiple simultaneuos encryption and/or decryption processes in the same window, in the same program, and on the same system would be an extreme versatility amplification and make cryptographic drive operations a lot more efficient. This is why I call this "my favorite design flaw," because it's another reasonably simple improvement that should have been made a long time ago.
I'm sure there have been more than a few people who needed to encrypt or decrypt 2 or 3 drives at once, or maybe even encrypt one drive and decrypt another all at the same time, which is exactly why it would be a great idea to improve PGP disk encryption to be capable of handling multiple drive operations in the same place, as described above.
Finally, I'd like to uncover a little known problem with the Virtual Disk creation feature. Actually, I just found out about this one, so all I have is a short summary; when creating 2 or more Vritual Disks simultaneously, 1 breaks and the other disappears (typically after space allocation), then you have to restart the entire program and you might get the remaining virtual disk file to work if you're lucky (or depending on how you set the process up-- it's different sometimes).