In most enterprise IT teams, the word "vendor" is spoken with a slight disgust (with a hint of disappointment) every time there is an issue that isn't about as straightforward as a brick falling off a bridge.
Also, as a general rule of thumb, the deeper you go into understanding your system, and as you learn your way through minor problems and annoyances in your to-be-implemented solution, the more complicated it is to actually resolve a problem with the vendor. You have to fight through layers and layers of break-fix technical support in order to get through to someone who actually understands the functioning of each component of their own software on an in-depth level.
You're lucky if the problem is something they've seen before, if it's in their knowledge-base, or if you can find it on Google. However, if you search your error message on Google (assuming there even is such a luxury point of reference as an error message), and the only thing you find is your own forum post on the vendor's website, then you're in trouble. Same applies to the "Your search did not match any documents" comment, that should be properly translated as "You're screwed. Good luck."
The worst case scenario is when you know more about the product than the vendor tech - through experience, for example. Maybe your hobby is to read log files from servers at night and decipher every single line until you understand exactly how they function - the "Enable Verbose Log" check box would be the holy grail in that case.
In this blog, aside from rambling about various day-to-day IT topics, I will also post my personal notes on vendor support, the highlights and downsides of my day/week/month/year, etc.
Every software is bound to crash, no matter how well it was written, which is why "IT Crashes" is the perfect name for this blog.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment