On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 2:48 PM, Andrew Shafer <[email protected]> wrote: > I've been on both sides of this equation many times and my experience has > always been that every intermediary in the communication loses/distorts > information, so if I really want something to be fixed the best strategy > always seemed to be provide the best possible report with clear steps to > reproduce the issue.
I think what you're saying happens quite a bit. It depends a lot on the quality of the support and the patience and thoroughness of the person who is reporting the problem. If I'm paying for support for a product, I want to have my cake and eat it too. That is, I don't want to be the one tracking down bugs, and I also want the supporting party to track down the bugs and get them fixed as soon as possible. > What are your expectations for support? Have you ever had support from > Oracle(replace with enterprise software company of your choice)? Did that > put an upper bound on the amount of time your staff had to spend working on > anything? My expectations for support are that when I encounter problems, I will have someone I can go to for expert advice. 9 times out of 10, there's an expert way around or out of the problem. Very rarely is there an actual bug that needs to be fixed with a code change. In any case, when I call, I want a solution or a work around immediately. That may not always happen, but from that point on, the ball's in the vendor's court, and I've always got other things that I can be doing. Support is really like an insurance policy though. You have a product, and there are core requirements it needs to achieve. Once you've plunked down the money to acquire it and the grace period is over if it stops working it needs to start working again. That support contract is how you ensure that if it stops, it won't stay stopped. I've never had support from Oracle. Biggest organization I've ever purchased support from is CommVault. I've had support from my organization's enterprise-IT department (of which I am not a part). We've got a realtime OS developed by a one person firm, and he has a support contract which we renew yearly, even though there's probably been just one bug we've found in the last 5 years. We've got hardware support on most of the things we buy. We'll take support for things that are vital to our ability to operate, because ... they're vital. I think the best analogy is to replace "support contract" with "insurance policy". > I want to explore this topic so Reductive Labs can provide the most valuable > support possible by understanding everyone's expectations and motivations. I think its a great topic, and I'm trying to respond as honestly as possible. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Users" 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/puppet-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
