Novell迷

As a result of your feedback and further analysis on our part, I’d like to let you know that we have decided NOT to move forward with the knowledgebase portion of the plan. To be clear, ALL knowledgebase content, including Technical Information Documents, for all Novell products will continue to be freely available to all Novell customers and partners—regardless of maintenance or subscription status.

Your comments reminded us that our knowledgebase is a critical self-support mechanism for Novell products and that Novell support forums are greatly enriched by the direct and valuable contributions of a community, including many of you. Accordingly, continuing access to these resources on an unrestricted basis is the right choice. 本文引用自http://novell.me

 Colleen, 内容来自Novell迷网站

First let me say I do appreciate the response and ending the speculation
as to if upper management had a clue as to the revolt that is happening
here. That's the nice part of my message. Grab a chair, this make take
a few minutes. 本文引用自http://novell.me

Unfortunately Novell still doesn't get it. Anything you do that makes
it HARDER to support your product is going to drive people away. There
is no justifiable reason for doing so. Novell thinks it's met us half
way. You dug yourself into a 20 foot hole and climbed up 10 feet.
You're still in a hole. By you, I mean Novell, not you personally.

I'm going to try this again on behalf of all the other customers. 本文来自Novell迷网站 http://novell.me

If you release a product that's defective, and you subsequently fix that
product in a patch, the customer, who PAID you money for that product,
is entitled to receive any patch which your company produced that makes
the product function as it sold.

Novell迷网站內容，版权所有

What part of that isn't clear? Please have the person at your company
who doesn't seem to get this reply here and I'll be happy to keep
explaining this until they understand. http://novell.me

You can't sell me a car where the passenger window doesn't roll down
when it's cold and the humidity is high, and then release a part to fix
that and then tell me I have to pay for it because I don't have a
premium maintenance package. I bought a car that I was told had working
windows. The fact that you didn't test it with that
temperature/humidity level and catch the problem during manufacturing
doesn't give you the right to say oh well, that'll be another $400. http://novell.me

It's one thing if a decision is made not to fix the issue because a new
product is out and the existing product is several years old. We may
not like that but that's the reality of moving forward in software. As
a product gets older, development shifts from maintenance of the old
product to development of the new. However, to fix an issue and say no
you can't have that fix unless you give us more money is outright
dishonest and unethical. If that's the way Novell wishes to do business,
I don't know why anyone would purchase anything from them again.

Novell: The company that stands by the quality of it's products.. but
only if you keep paying them over and over for the same product that you
already paid for.

I paid maintenance on my stuff, and right now I have Netware
6.5/Groupwise 7/ZDM 7 deployed. I'm entitled to OES2 Linux/ZCM 10. I
missed GW8 by a little bit there. 本文引用自Novell迷网站

There is no way in hell I will consider deploying ZCM or OES2 Linux if
the current support structure changes. Your new products are supposed
to make my job easier and more efficient. Neither of those products
does that. What they do guarantee me is a ton of headaches and angry
user calls and months of frustration while I try and get back to the
base functionality and quality of service that I had with the existing
Netware/ZDM platform while at the same time having to explain myself to
management as to why I decided to deploy a product that had a
significant negative impact on my companies operations. Tell me how
that's good for my career? http://Novell.Me

Lets talk about the "value" of the maintenance if I renew again today.
I get Groupwise 8. Which I'd be so happy to deploy if I didn't have any
users that used Webaccess, but sadly, I have a lot of them that use it.
It seems from what I'm reading in the various support forums, that
Webaccess is a wee bit a problem if you expect to keep it running.
Perhaps I'll write a small script and use cron to run it every night and
stop and start the process, or Novell could just fix it so it works
properly. Under your rules, if I owned GW8 but no longer had
maintenance, I would not be entitled to that fix if and when you get to
it. I'd have to live with my hacked up workaround for your defect.

So let me explain to you how you induce customers to pay maintenance,
because this is escaping the upper brass.

Novell迷，迷Novell

1) You give the customer 2 upgrade options. http://Novell.Me

A) A new version comes out and you pay an upgrade cost to receive
it. You don't make them purchase it again as if you never had a
relationship with them before. You did that to me with Open Workgroup
Suite and I don't appreciate it.

B) You purchase maintenance. The customer commits to staying with
Novell with the gesture of renewing maintenance and in exchange for
that, Novell effectively gives a much better price on your renewals plus
point 2 below. Customer commits to Novell, Novell commits to customer.
Win-Win for both.

http://Novell.Me

2) Premium tech support. You almost had it here, you really did. The
brass ring was right there. You gave customers an unlimited number of
support incidents. That to me was fantastic. Let me tell you how many
incidents I've opened with Novell in 15 years. 1. Yes 1. It was a
migration of users from one post office to another and one user got
stuck mid migration and refused to complete. I followed the documented
procedures correctly. I did what I was supposed to do make the product
work in the way it was supposed to. It failed. Naturally, the mailbox
in question was a senior VP. I had to open an incident. I was actually
quite upset about that as I was proud of never having to call you up to
that point. I eventually got it worked out with the tech and we got the
user unstuck. So Novell came through and fixed an issue that it's

http://Novell.Me

本文转载自http://novell.me

So why is unlimited incidents fantastic for me when I don't use them?
OES2/Linux and ZCM. I would have a significantly higher level of
confidence and optimism about migrating to both of those products if I
knew I was going to be backed up by quality knowledgeable support
people. To be honest, I am. It's all of the wonderful people that
"work" in the forums. They keep your company afloat. Your support
infrastructure would collapse under it's own weight if every person that
posted in the forums had to contact Novell directly instead and open up
and incident. Unfortunately they have lives and they sleep and they are
bouncing through hundreds or more posts per week, not to mention many of
them are on different continents from where I am which means our times
don't coincide for availability to reply. Problem resolution can take 内容来自http://novell.me
time and with an new environment, I'm not at a level of comfort where I
would want to work without a speedier safety net. I'm not so much
concerned about my lack of knowledge, as I learn quick and I'll do a lot
of testing. It's the lack of product quality that concerns me. Sysops
can't fix broken code. 内容来自http://novell.me

Which brings me to the almost had it point. I've not heard great things
about the support I get with the safety net that you want me to pay
maintenance for. Do you know how many of the free incidents I used when
I had maintenance? Zero. The sysops handled any misc questions I may
have had. What I am hearing is that if I do open an incident I can look
forward to people that I probably know more than, information that may
be incorrect or downright wrong, and the problems taking longer to
resolve than if I had posted them in the forums. Perhaps I've been fed
completely incorrect information on all of this, but I doubt it. 内容来自Novell迷网站

Now I know what you're thinking ... Patrick, Patrick, Patrick... sweet
silly Patrick... If you renewed maintenance now, you'd have just that, a
support net, and it's actually fabulous, everything you heard is totally
wrong! You'd be able to use that product you already paid for once and
if you had problems, well you could call us, and we'd get them resolved.
You'd be right in that thinking as I have been fighting to get that
maintenance renewed figuring that between my own experience, the forums,
and whatever your support provides, I'd be able to handle just about all
of the problems that come my way to my satisfaction. Unfortunately our
budget is not unlimited and we have some significant expenditures on
other highly critical things that absolutely have to get done first, and
changing my already working network to something else from Novell that

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Right now I'm the unclean/unwashed Novell customer. I don't have
maintenance and my job of keeping my company's network infrastructure
running is about to get more difficult. Your company is the one that's
going to make it more difficult. We've been with you since Netware 3.12
and watched you grow and evolve, fall behind tragically and get squeezed
out in the marketplace. We've watched you release outright crappy
products (Netware 4.0, ZCM 10 as it shipped) We've cheered for you,
we've given you tough love. We've seen those crappy products turn into
decent products that we knew they could. We've gone to many
BrainShare's and give our feedback as to what we as customers need, and
we hoped one day people would be saying, you want to put Microsoft in
our data center? Are you nuts? Novell迷网站內容，版权所有

Now you're telling me that in order to get the patches that might at
some point in the future make products that I paid you for work the way
they should have the day they were shipped I have to pay you again?

No.
 

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