You must not have ever worked with Microsoft premium or paid support; IMHO, for server products, they have no competition. In my personal experience, they will not let you hang up the phone until they are satisfied that the problem has been solved (one call lasted from 1 AM to 4 AM - they remained on the toll-free line during all of the re-starts of DNS and AD), and then they follow up for several days afterwards to make sure that you completed all necessary actions to prevent reoccurrence of the problem, and they help you document the solution. I have only had to use it twice, but it was exceptional. Not to be confused with "free" support for consumer products, which NO ONE does well. I must miss out on a lot of the frustration others have experienced by not having/paying for BMC phone support. When I submit a new issue on the web it is usually accompanied by a long explanation of what I have seen and tried, and loads of log files and other data. These tickets don't spend much time with overseas frontline techs - they are quickly baffled/overwhelmed and escalate the ticket to someone who might know something. Once you reach the second level of BMC support, especially with some of the more experienced people, response tends to be much better and quite often they begin a steady interchange with the backline engineers on your behalf. If the problem is serious, they start calling me (I can't call them) and scheduling webexes with the engineers watching to see the problem in action. On the other hand, on those occasions when I just casually (or impatiently) toss a newly observed application error into the submission form without logs or other detail, I know that I can expect to pay for it later answering successive, inane questions from frontline techs who are just following their troubleshooting scripts. The process takes longer since I did not perform due diligence troubleshooting up front, and report all of my results in the initial ticket submission.
Christopher Strauss, Ph.D. Remedy Database Administrator University of North Texas Computing Center http://remedy.unt.edu/helpdesk/ _____ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Pierson, Shawn Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2007 3:21 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: BMC Rant ** I agree completely with what you've written, and I've had to deal with pretty much everything you wrote here within the past few months. I've got a high priority ticket open right now that I haven't heard from BMC support in a few days now, despite updating the ticket asking for a call. On the other hand, other companies are much worse. Microsoft's support is a joke, and Adobe is abysmal. I was working on an Adobe product that was having issues and their average response time for a server down is about a month, based on my experiences. They also randomly close out their tickets and ask you to open a new one if you still have the problem. On my recent server down with Adobe, I had to complain to my sales rep, who then pawned it off on someone else, and eventually it was dropped again until I told my sales rep that we were starting to evaluate what other software we could use since support for their products were non-existent. That worked, my issue got escalated up to the VP over Adobe's support staff. The issue was eventually resolved. So while I do feel that on average customer support is getting worse and worse, I really wish that a company whose flagship product is used for helpdesks around the world wouldn't follow that trend. _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org ARSlist:"Where the Answers Are"
