Hi Andrius, I've tried to answers your questions below but at a high level the thing to understand is that (as I've stated before) there is no formal support SLA for non-premier customers. This group and stackoverflow are places that you can ask questions where the community can answer and periodically the App Engine team will respond as well. There are well over 150k developers on App Engine, the majority of them are paying nothing or very little, it isn't feasible to try to support all of those developers. Given the choice between have all users paying and getting a high level of service and many users not paying but some questions go unanswered, we opted for the latter. We also created premier accounts for developers who need to get answers and are willing to pay what it would cost us to have people ready, willing, and able to answer their questions quickly. There are suggestions as to additional programs we could provide (such as paying per answer) that we might explore in the future but do not exist today. This means that if you ask a question in this group it may go unanswered, questions asked belligerently or with very little information to help someone understand the issue are often the ones that are not answered.
Additional information below: On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 12:49 PM, Andrius A <[email protected]> wrote: > Greg, > > before giving any visions, can you please answer the following questions: > > 1) Honestly, how confident your team is with current GAE release? 100%? > I am confident that it will work for the vast majority of our users without major issues. I am not confident that the release is bug-free as anyone who as ever released software will tell you, no release is bug-free. > 2) Do you/your team think/know that there is issue with providing support > to dev community? > I believe there are people in the community who would like to get a higher level of support, but this will always be the case, no matter how high a level of support is given. In an ideal world we would be able to answer all questions for all developer all the time, but it would be prohibitively expensive as a lot of the people asking questions do not pay anything for the service. > 3) From scale 1 (less important) to 10 (most important) how important for > your company is to support us as dev community? > I believe it is incredibly important to support the developers who use App Engine. By the tone of your question it seems like you feel that supporting the dev community means answering any question that arises in Groups. In fact there are a wide variety of ways to support those developers ranging from various communication methods to ensuring App Engine is running appropriately and continues to run appropriately. > 4) Do you have full time dedicated people working to support us, reading > these mail groups? If so, how many people? > We do have full time dedicated people working support for Premier Accounts. There are a number of people on the App Engine team (including me) that spend a portion of their time supporting developers (again with that caveat that this includes things outside of reading emails in the group). > 5) Do you have any plans to increase/dedicate more people to support the > community? > We are are always evaluating the best way to support the product but we don't disclose externally how many people work on any one particular item partially because the numbers change periodically. > 6) Did you try to determine how many disappointed developers do you have > with the service you provide? If so, did you try to find out the reasons? > We are always trying to stay aware of the current level of satisfaction of our users and the reasons why. As you can see from the other responses to this thread, while you obviously feel disappointed there are many who do not. > 7) Do you measurethe production issues left unanswered (per week, month)? > We do track the number of issues we have with production but not the number of production issues in the issue tracker as many are not actual production issues. We do use it as a way to get indication that many users might are seeing any issue but there are a number of issues that are user error. The signal to noise ratio is relatively low so we don't track it directly. > 8) Do you have any procedures you tell to your developers how to assist > us? If so, can we know the key ones? > I'm not sure I understand the question. We do not instruct the software engineers that they have to answer issues but there are a lot of people on the App Engine team that are not software engineers. > 9) Do you have someone senior monitoring our emails and your support > members answers to mail groups/forums? > Yes. Me. Greg D'Alesandre Senior Product Manager, Google App Engine > > > These answers could show what is the current situation, so we can then > make the further suggestions. > > Thanks, > Andrius > > > On 21 November 2011 18:28, Gregory D'alesandre <[email protected]> wrote: > >> This group and stackoverflow are essentially the solution you are >> referring to. There are a number of people in the group that respond to >> the majority of questions and when something seems like it is a true issue >> someone from the App Engine team starts looking into it. The main >> difference between this forum and premier support is that there is no >> guaranteed response time. That's the basic idea of course but it sounds >> like you don't feel like it is working. How would you envision it working >> differently/better than this group does? >> >> Thanks, >> >> Greg >> >> >> On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 10:03 AM, zdravko <[email protected]>wrote: >> >>> Greg, can you also work with your bean counting team to determine the >>> added value of GAE user groups acting as their own first support line >>> and then passing onto GAE team just the real issues that to some >>> extent GAE should pay to be informed about in the most concise >>> possible way. Ask them what they think should be charged to support >>> such small groups of say up to 100 small users ? >>> >>> On Nov 21, 12:57 pm, "Gregory D'alesandre" <[email protected]> wrote: >>> > In order to get a premier account you'll need to go through a corporate >>> > credit check (due to being billed offline rather than having a credit >>> card >>> > verified) which means you need to be an incorporated entity. This is >>> > likely the biggest issue you'll run into as I'm not sure how many >>> people >>> > are willing to form a new company (including absorbing the liability >>> behind >>> > it). Having people outside an existing company asking questions >>> through a >>> > single support account would be consider an abuse. If you are truly >>> > interested in exploring this (as in you are ready to incorporate) let >>> me >>> > know and I can work with the legal team to determine if we see any >>> issue >>> > with it. >>> > >>> > Greg >>> > >>> > >>> > >>> > >>> > >>> > >>> > >>> > On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 9:27 AM, Andrius A <[email protected]> >>> wrote: >>> > > hosting applications under premier account for are big community >>> would not >>> > > work, as it would be difficult to calculate the usage separtly, but >>> I am >>> > > thinking more about getting various issues resolved and questions >>> answered. >>> > > we could have a small organization and use premier account for >>> education >>> > > and testing our apps and limit it to 20-30 members? so we could all >>> have a >>> > > copy of our application running and use it for support? >>> > >>> > > On 21 November 2011 17:16, Barry Hunter <[email protected]> >>> wrote: >>> > >>> > >> I dont see how its going to work. Everyones apps would need to be >>> > >> under the same 'Google Apps Account' >>> > >>> > >> There can only be two 'contacts'. So few people would have to be the >>> > >> point of contact for all requests - another bottleneck/SPOF into the >>> > >> 'system' >>> > >>> > >> All billing for all the apps would go to one person (by invoice). >>> Who >>> > >> would then have to collect payment from all the partipating >>> > >> developers. >>> > >>> > >> Pretty sure somewhere that there is a limit ot the number of >>> requests >>> > >> per month. A shared system will quickly burn though its 'quota' >>> > >>> > >> ... and Google would notice pretty quickly, and almost certainly >>> look >>> > >> unfavorably on the 'abuse' of the system. >>> > >>> > >> On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 5:04 PM, Andrius A <[email protected]> >>> wrote: >>> > >> > As you know we all have problems with GAE, lots of issues and >>> unanswered >>> > >> > questions and Premier Account costs a lot for a single developers >>> or >>> > >> > startups. >>> > >> > What about if we create a independent GAE Developers Organization >>> and >>> > >> open a >>> > >> > single Premier Account? In such a way we could split the cost and >>> have >>> > >> our >>> > >> > issues/questions prioritized and use collective power to push >>> things >>> > >> > forward. >>> > >> > Let me know who is up for it?! >>> > >> > Regards, >>> > >> > Andrius >>> > >>> > >> > -- >>> > >> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >>> > >> Groups >>> > >> > "Google App Engine" group. >>> > >> > To post to this group, send email to >>> [email protected]. >>> > >> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >>> > >> > [email protected]. >>> > >> > For more options, visit this group at >>> > >> >http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. >>> > >>> > >> -- >>> > >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >>> Groups >>> > >> "Google App Engine" group. >>> > >> To post to this group, send email to >>> [email protected]. >>> > >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >>> > >> [email protected]. >>> > >> For more options, visit this group at >>> > >>http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. >>> > >>> > > -- >>> > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >>> Groups >>> > > "Google App Engine" group. >>> > > To post to this group, send email to >>> [email protected]. >>> > > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >>> > > [email protected]. >>> > > For more options, visit this group at >>> > >http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. >>> >>> -- >>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >>> Groups "Google App Engine" group. >>> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >>> [email protected]. >>> For more options, visit this group at >>> http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. >>> >>> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Google App Engine" group. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> [email protected]. >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. >> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Google App Engine" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. 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