I am coming into this discussion a bit late so forgive me if this has
been covered already.
I can see Michael's point and I can also see Tracy's point.
From Michael's point it does not help to dig your feet in and demand
that a vendor not use tools (like Visio) that many other clients find
acceptable.
On the other hand, Tracy seems to me to have gone much more out of his
way to work with the vendor than the typical customer would have done. I
suspect if I were in Tracy's shoes I would feel very much the same way
as he does.
However, having been in a similar position I would make the observation
that the vendor dropped the ball by assuming that everyone uses the same
software tools. Quite often I have had to use M$ Office programs to
impart information and I long ago learned that there are 'readers' for
the various applications in MS Office (the same holds true for Visio)
which can be downloaded for free off of the M$ web site. The 'readers'
will not allow you to modify the files but you can read and print them
without owning any MS Office Suites.
I routinely include the appropriate 'reader' along with the file to make
sure that my client can read the file. I accept that the client isn't
always right but he is always the client and making him right, or
enabling him to work with me without communications snafus, is part of
my job.
This practice of including the 'reader' grew out of dealing with sales
reps who did not want to be bothered with learning how to make printing
work on their laptop as they traveled from client to client where they
could not be sure what printer would be available. I set up their
laptops to print by default to a PDF-making printer driver and taught
them how to save the PDF to their hard drive and to email a copy of the
PDF to their client. The sales reps had an electronic copy of what they
had given to the customer which could not be easily manipulated by the
customer and the customer could download the appropriate reader for
their OS. If it was a particularly inept client we would include the URL
for Adobe's reader so they could get the reader for themselves.
I discovered the readers for MS Office when some Divisions of my company
were using different versions of MS Office but not bothering to make
sure that the files they were sending out were backwards compatible . It
is amazing how executives at Corporate HQ think everyone is running the
latest and greatest software/hardware just because they are...
Rick
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tracy R Reed wrote:
Michael Werneke wrote:
That was the first mistake. Just because you don't have Visio does
not exempt you from making an attempt at getting the information
I think we'll probably have to agree to disagree here but I feel that
our numerous conversations about how this is supposed to work
established the design very clearly. When we were never expecting to
receive any sort of network diagram. I have never received one when
getting a cablemodem or DSL or T-1 installed before. Next time I think
perhaps we will just get T-1's from one place to another and handle
the bonding and IP side of things ourselves.
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