If you have a moment or two, I’m interested in a little bit of feedback. In short, why did you visit this forum today.
Going back a number of years, IBM/Lotus support used to be chargeable. You either needed a contract or you could pay a not insignificant charge for support towards resolution of a single incident.
Now any customer that pays for software maintenance is entitled to free support and can log a PMR directly with the IBM support team and have it worked by a trained analyst.
No end of problems still come to the forums and I am wondering why this is so. Maybe you don’t have maintenance? Maybe you think you’ll get a faster response in the forums? Something else? I’ll be happy to read any response you’d like to provide.
In my case, I’ve had numerous problems with Notes 8.x clients and found support from IBM to be a little slow to respond. I’ve been following the forums in the hope that I will find other customers with the same issue and make better progress towards a solution than I am making in the official support channels.
I also find the forums a good place to research other known issues that I may not have experienced until now but need to be aware of during a new product rollout in my organisation.
Opening a PMR and managing interaction with Lotus is an involved and often quite time-consuming process. I reserve that process for things that are truly worth the effort, rather than involve support for something that’s easily correctable by changing a .ini setting, or something that another developer knows how to address with relative ease.
It’s a good first line of attack. Often a given issue isn’t really an issue at all, in terms of a bug or a problem with the system, but it’s something I don’t know how to do or can’t noodle out based on “help”. Those sorts of things are more logistical than support, and it makes no sense to open a PMR for them. By posting here I get a feel for whether a given thing is a real problem or (typically) just my own ignorance.
Like Erik said, it’s impossible to get any sort of useful data about existing PMRs and suchlike. Others who know this or that is a PMR or that IBM is already aware of it can so indicate, and I can search the Forum for that information before wasting the time and effort to create a PMR for a known and under investigation issue. Why IBM doesn’t let developers scan PMRs to save them time and money has always been a total mystery to me, and the Forum is a sort of a workaround.
I can help others. Others help me here, and it’s only right and proper that I should return the favor when time and ability allow it. PMRs are locked away forever and never help anyone but me when it comes to issue resolution.
As for today, it’s Item 2. I’m looking for a solution to a logistical issue that isn’t a problem with Domino or anything Lotus/IBM. It’s me trying to get an XPage to function in a particular manner and I don’t know how to do that, and what I’m working on is light years outside what one would expect “help” to provide, even if “help” were complete. Actually I think this constitutes 90% of my usage of the Forum, and I do Item 4 while I’m searching.
Opening a PMR now requires a waiting period. I recall when calling in a PMR one would be transferred to a live soul within minutes.
I can search for solutions to the problem I am having. Am I trult the first to encounter my situation? In most cases not, but I do think I have had a few unique scenarios within my environment.
If I see someone asking a question I can answer I would try to take the time to help them out too. Community involvement. Everyone is new at something as some point.
I respect the folks at Lotus Support but feel that many of them have been at a helpdesk too long - their focus is on closing the call rather than addressing causes (and hopefully preventing re-occurence). When I have a problem with some functionality their goal seems to be primarily to prove that I must have done something wrong - and that the product is working just fine in their test environment. Which is fine - but I want to know how my environment is not working correctly - I already know its not working teach me somethign I dont know.
I’m not involved with talking to IBM at all, so I have no experience of their support or maintenance with regards to help.
I generally visit the 6/7 and 8.5 forums each day for a number of reasons :
If I have a problem with something I’m developing this is my first port of call because normally someone has experienced the same issue. If I can’t find my answer I will post a question.
You can learn an awful lot and get some good ideas from posts you read.
Having been helped a number of times through the forum I like to “give back” and if I can help out someone with an answer I’ll post a response. Most of the time I will just browse the latest few pages of the forums to see if anyone has a problem I’m familiar with… what goes around, comes around!
Unless the online system is broken, I always use ESR where possible and request email updates. There’s always inevitably some phone calls but email works well most of the time.
I think the key thing is regular updates. Even if the news is that there is no news, it at least tells the customer that they haven’t been forgotten.
I visited looking to see if anyone had more information about an error I’m getting. There are SPR’s about it but they’re not helpful and IBM hasn’t updated them in a while.
Generally I only visit the forum when I’m looking for someone else with a similar problem. I don’t have a maintenance contract so I’m limited to online options and my network of professional contacts to resolve problems.
I have my iGoogle page set to show RSS feeds for several forums. I use the feeds to keep my eye on what is going on, to get a sense of what others are seeing, to possibly catch some tips, and to see the posts IBM makes about issues…however I generally get support through the direct PMR approach (out of habit & the fact it gets formally managed that way).
A couple key problems with the forums:
I cannot subscribe to get notifications to updates to threads I’ve created/responded to. Ugh!
Responses within a thread require you to type a new subject line–more often than not, the new subject isn’t anything like the original one. When viewing them via RSS, this breaks any tie to the original message (you have to open up the web view to see where the message fits in the thread). E.g., I may be interested in the thread “8.5 Client Bug”…but I would easily miss a key response with a subject like “Yep, I have that”.
I have a support contract, but still use the forum a lot. My reasons:
I want people who have the same problem to easily find my discussion/solution.
This is by far my biggest reason for posting. IBM customers have no way of searching PMRs. And searching SPRs, while possible, is cumbersome.
It’d be nice if there was some sort of integrated supplement in the general Admin/Designer Help that actually listed the various known bugs/shortcomings related to certian functions and actions. But until then this forum’s the next best thing.
More exposure of bugs I need/want fixed.
Yeah, this is admittedly somewhat self-serving. But if I find a bug that IBM doesn’t believe has enough “weight” to fix with my company alone, the fact that it’s out in the open forum means other customers may see it, realize they are affected and possibly add their weight to it.
At the very least it offers a possibility that somebody will offer an alternative or workaround months or even years after the PMR has been closed. With IBM, once an SPR is filed and the PMR closed, it goes off to the mystery dreamland. You never get notified if it’s fixed later, or closed, etc. You pretty much have to log your own SPR numbers and routinely check the Fix List Database to see if they happen to have fixed your bug.
With the forum, nothing is ever “closed” until it’s solved.
It’s faster for me to post on the forums than it is to open an incident.
I usually get a faster response.
Response times are usually faster from somebody in the forum (even if it’s an IBMer responding in the forum) than vs. going through IBM support. I do think IBM support is pretty darn responsive, though, and overall am very happy with them as far as analysis capability goes.
I always take some time during a day to read new posts. There’s almost always something I didn’t know about being discussed (especially with xPages now).
I can also help people potentially - I’ve had a lot of help here in the past so providing even a few answers is worthwhile. Besides, I think the community needs this forum and adding some value to it will hopefully help in keeping it going.
If I have a problem I always come here first, and post a request if I can’t find the answer. Someone else may have seen it and I’ll get the answer a lot quicker if they have usually. In terms of forum value if someone can post an answer to the question then it may help someone else as well in the future
I actually find the service request system from IBM quite efficient sometimes, but not always. For example at the moment I have 2 requests with them, one they got back to me by phone within an hour, the other I’m still waiting for a response 2 days later.