Calming down the support incident

THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA" — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:52:10 GMT

So your thoughts about the call back support? - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA": http:

re: So your thoughts about the call back support?

Evan — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:31:31 GMT

(Oooo! Susan used the words "open source". Like moth to flame, I am here, loaded with snarky comments. *smile*)

Microsoft (and other closed source software support): If the "manufacturer" chooses to give you a less than satisfactory support offering (i.e. call back support, choosing not to fix a bug that is critical to your business, messing up your server computers remotely), you get to either (a) live with it, or (b) pick a new piece of software. (I suppose there is an option c too.) (c) Pay them more money and hope they get better.

Open source support: You can put out an RFP for what you're looking for, let the market bid on it, and pick the best provider based on whatever merit you choose, not on the basis of the source code locked up in a provider's vault.

Even better-- if a provider does do you wrong, you can pick up and go to their competitors. Even if you're not dissatisfied, the fact that you *can* go to their competitors should go a long way toward keeping your providers on their toes.

Seriously, though-- does anybody really use Microsoft Product Support Services, anyway? I can't imagine what a horrible hell the life of a PSS technician is-- getting calls from the kind of people who use PSS as their "first line of defense" (or even second or third line of defense). I could only walk an unwilling-to-learn-it-for-themselves party through setting DHCP options, evaluating group policy application, or understanding NTFS permissions so many times before I'd tear my plentiful hair out.

Further snarky comments: If a "partner" can't handle a Windows-based "server down emergency" entirely on their own w/o PSS, they probably shouldn't be selling / administering / touching server computers. Sure, sure-- there are the "gee, the product really just exploded phenomenally and I need help" situations, but how often do those happen? After doing bare-metal disaster recoveries of every "server" version of Windows through Windows Server 2003, disaster recoveries of every version of Exchange (ever), and resurrecting accidentally-deleted pieces of Active Directory several times, I have a hard time believing that there's much that can go wrong, short of hardware issues, that a competent admin shouldn't be able to fix on their own (or, at the very least, restore back to a prior known-working state).