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Re: AN IMPORTANT MESSEGE FROM SYMBOLICS SOFTWARE SUPPORT



    Date: Fri, 27 Oct 89 10:32 EDT
    From: pan@Athena.Pangaro.Dialnet.Symbolics.Com (Paul Pangaro)

	Date: Fri, 27 Oct 89 09:51 EDT
	From:     JR@YUKON.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (Johanna Rothman)

	I have no comments about promises and timing that Symbolics has made.  I
	do want to respond to one misunderstanding about our software support effort.
    [...]
	[much more deleted]

	    In lieu of that, I would hope that at least symbolics would accept email
	    bug reports from  subscribers.  The  report should  be acknowledged;  not
	    just its receipt, but a comment on status, known workarounds, etc.
    [...]
	I've had an incident open for about 6 weeks that the developers were
	completely stymied on for a long time.  If you were the customer I was
	dealing with, would you want to see a response saying "We're still
	stuck, don't know when I'll have something for you, but we're still
	working on it"?  I suspect that might be irritating to a large number of
	users.

    For myself the irritation comes from not knowing what is happening, and
    the quesy feeling that the issue has been lost into the black hole of
    bug reports.

Even more irritating is when the following happens:

1) I send the bug-report.
2) I get the automatic response.
3) I wait 2 or 3 days.
4) Since I haven't heard anything I send a "bug-probe". (e.g. Hello? Anyone working on this?)
5) No response.

	Do you have recommendations for a procedure when software support takes
	more than a week or two to close a reported incident?

    If someone is actually still working on it, the overhead of a reminder
    message to the customer should be trivial. I suggest the customer be
    told the status of the situation. I wouldn't make this an automatically
    generated message, though, because that doesn't satisfy the quesy
    feeling....

    Best,
    PANgaro

Perhaps when software support knows from word "go" that it will probably
take more than 2 days they ought to send something back to that effect.