Now, working in both a development and support function, I can appreciate that everyone is busy and that trying to debug faults in my application isn't the job of support. However, I do get a little tired of the support process going like this:
But it's the next request that often follows - "Please supply example project" that is sometimes irksome. It's going to take me several hours to try and and build a sample standalone project and at the end of that, it's not guaranteed I'll be able to reproduce the fault. It could be that it only happens in a very specific situation that a sample project can never reproduce. I once had to resort to sending you a complete VM so you could see the fault as when stripped down to basics, it didn't happen. It turned out in that case to be a localisation bug.
In situations like this, it would be preferable to discuss the problem conceptually with the developer. Wearing my development hat, the support people here often go "Can you think of any reason why XYZ should happen?". As I know the code and they don't, it's often very easy for me to glance down the code and go "Ahh, yes - that could happen if XYZ".
So the plea is to not always bounce the support call straight back at me. I'm not in the habit of making up issues just for the hell of it :-)
Cheers, Rob,
PS. The DELETE key doesn't work in this editor. Backspace is fine.
Hi Rob,
This is by no means typical and should not be expected. I have sent you seperate emails to discuss this if you wish to talk about this or anything else.
Again - you can always reach me at DSManager@infragistics.com.
Sincerely,
Stephani
>I have duplicated your issue and will submit it for bug report review..
Time for a party!! Except a) this issue was raised on 4th April - yes, that's THREE months ago and b) I'm only at the stage I expected to be three months ago.
Cheers, Rob.
I have also requested support on several occasions and to date, have not had a resolution or workaround. I am too busy meeting my deadlines to waste my time with a support group that doesn't give me answers. I no longer use your controls because of that.
At this office we don't have time to wait for a fix and we are not allowed to send out our code (to anyone), we need resolutions quickly as we do work on serious deadlines. Every project we undertake has a deadline and we had hoped your tools would assist in meeting those deadlines. That has not proven to be the case. As, I'm sure you know, in our industry timely and knowledgeable support, we can't justify using your tools or services.
I am the one that recommended Infragistics controls for our company and I am now recommending we not renew or agreement with Infragistics. It's faster, for us, to write my own controls than wait for a resolution from Infragistics, which often doesn't come.
Jim
>As a priority support customer I would expect to speak to somebody very knowledgeable about the product and the different ways to use it.
Indeed. I'm not on priority support and given the response earlier, I'm not going to rush either. But this sounds like a sensible additional benefit for paying more money for support. The sad thing we're all appear to be saying here is that if one was asked that standard web survey question "Do you feel the person you spoke to understood your problem", the answer would be no.
BTW - why can't you edit posts on here? One of the big advantages of forums over email/mailing lists is you can edit it when you spot a typo or mistake.