BorlandTalk.com Borland discussion newsgroups   Archives   FAQ   Search   Memberlist   Usergroups   Register   Profile   Log in to check your private messages   Log in  Your experiences with Borland Paid Support Goto page 1, 2  Next          BorlandTalk.com Forum Index -> C++ Builder (Non-Technical) View previous topic :: View next topic   Author Message Ronald McDonald Guest Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2003 11:57 am    Post subject: Your experiences with Borland Paid Support I'd like to know a little about your experiences with Borland Paid Support, regarding bugs in their own products. Has anybody here opened a case with Paid Support and what was your experience? What was the turn around time, and was the solution adequate for your needs? If later in the project, the solution provided by Borland turns out to be insufficient, did you need to pay again to get it sorted? Any anecdotes greatly appreciated. Back to top Kristofer Skaug Guest Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2003 12:38 pm    Post subject: Re: Your experiences with Borland Paid Support Ronald McDonald wrote: Quote: Any anecdotes greatly appreciated. I'm curious too. Also, can paid support actually result in patches being generated specifically for you? And if so, what is the relation to later product patches/updates that are made available to everyone? -- Kristofer Back to top Scott Metzger Guest Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2003 1:15 pm    Post subject: Re: Your experiences with Borland Paid Support I have used Borland paid support. I have only used the 10 cases per year level of support. These are my experiences: They work with you until the case is solved or an impass is reached. Once the case is solved they keep it open for a certain amount of time to make sure it has been completly solved. If it ends up being a bug in the product they will not charge a 'case'. Turnaround time is less than 24 hrs. Back to top Kristofer Skaug Guest Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2003 3:15 pm    Post subject: Re: Your experiences with Borland Paid Support Scott Metzger wrote: Quote: If it ends up being a bug in the product they will not charge a 'case'. Turnaround time is less than 24 hrs. Why would you call for support if there is no bug? What kind of issues did you have them solve for you? -- Kristofer Back to top Yu-Chen Hsueh Guest Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2003 3:35 pm    Post subject: Re: Your experiences with Borland Paid Support This is mostly true, but a minor addendum should be made. A bug with no workaround generally receives a refund. However, with a bug for which a workaround is provided, then it depends. -- YH -- "Scott Metzger" <NOSPAMScott.Metzger (AT) york (DOT) com> wrote Quote: I have used Borland paid support. I have only used the 10 cases per year level of support. These are my experiences: They work with you until the case is solved or an impass is reached. Once the case is solved they keep it open for a certain amount of time to make sure it has been completly solved. If it ends up being a bug in the product they will not charge a 'case'. Turnaround time is less than 24 hrs. -- Any e-mail sent to me from the newsgroups will be ignored. Please confine your posts to the newsgroups and DO NOT reply to this e-mail account. Back to top Yu-Chen Hsueh Guest Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2003 3:39 pm    Post subject: Re: Your experiences with Borland Paid Support Customers call Support for help using the product, i.e. coding questions and such. Sometimes these involve a bug and sometimes they don't. Regarding patches, it depends on the level of support, but in general, custom patches are not provided. Minor VCL source changes and similar workarounds are often provided, but anything more extensive usually is not. -- YH -- -- Any e-mail sent to me from the newsgroups will be ignored. Please confine your posts to the newsgroups and DO NOT reply to this e-mail account. Back to top Jeff Overcash (TeamB) Guest Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2003 5:05 pm    Post subject: Re: Your experiences with Borland Paid Support "Kristofer Skaug" <ya.ierfgnf (AT) thnxf (DOT) x> wrote: Quote: Scott Metzger wrote: If it ends up being a bug in the product they will not charge a 'case'. Turnaround time is less than 24 hrs. Why would you call for support if there is no bug? You may call thinking its a bug, but it turns out to be a misunderstanding on how to use the code (IOW a bug in your code). Some paid support issues are actually to have Borland help you with your code because you can't figure out how to do something (more common with the gold and platinum levels IIRC). Back to top mr_organic Guest Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2003 5:06 pm    Post subject: Re: Your experiences with Borland Paid Support "Dennis Jones" <djones (AT) nospam (DOT) com> wrote in news:3f98084d$1 (AT) newsgroups (DOT) borland.com: Quote: SNIP rant Anybody remember the days before (about) Borland C++ 3.x? Remember how technical support was FREE? Yes FREE! And how often did you have to call? Not very danged often. Why? (the following is conjecture/opinion) Because the compilers/IDEs were more stable. When Borland's products started to go downhill quality-wise (which was around that same time, in the early 1990's), they had to do something to keep the phones from ringing off the hook, and paid support was the way to do it. Yeah, that's it -- charge people for calling! I called techincal support *very rarely* before then, and it was almost always to report an IDE bug. By the time I needed to call them again (I forget when that was, but it was after BC++ 3.x), they were charging for support...and I've needed some level of tech support much more often ever since (and not always, although quite often, because of IDE bugs)! Coincidence? I don't think so, but I'm sure someone will make an argument against it. /rant - Dennis This is what comes of trying to run your support operations as a profit- center rather than as a cost-center. When you have to show a profit on support, all of a sudden *volume* starts to matter more than *quality*. It means you have to hire entry-level CS people and pay them peanuts to keep your costs down, in order not to tie up the high-dollar programmers. It means keeping the case-solution-time low so volume stays up, so lots of cases are marked as "closed" when they are simply unresolved or "no action taken" calls. mr_organic Back to top Kristofer Skaug Guest Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2003 6:11 pm    Post subject: Re: Your experiences with Borland Paid Support Jeff Overcash (TeamB) wrote: Quote: You may call thinking its a bug, but it turns out to be a misunderstanding on how to use the code (IOW a bug in your code). Some paid support issues are actually to have Borland help you with your code because you can't figure out how to do something (more common with the gold and platinum levels IIRC). I have yet to come across a BCB/Delphi question that I couldn't get answered for free in these newsgroups! Hmmmm.... -- Kristofer Back to top Jeff Overcash (TeamB) Guest Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2003 6:41 pm    Post subject: Re: Your experiences with Borland Paid Support "Kristofer Skaug" <ya.ierfgnf (AT) thnxf (DOT) x> wrote: Quote: Jeff Overcash (TeamB) wrote: You may call thinking its a bug, but it turns out to be a misunderstanding on how to use the code (IOW a bug in your code). Some paid support issues are actually to have Borland help you with your code because you can't figure out how to do something (more common with the gold and platinum levels IIRC). I have yet to come across a BCB/Delphi question that I couldn't get answered for free in these newsgroups! Hmmmm.... That may be true, but corporations would rather pay for support and get immediate responses instead of waiting an indeterminant amount of time, if ever, to have something answered on the peer groups like this one. I agree these groups are invaluable, particularly for smaller shops that want to save money on support calls. Back to top Hugo Duncan Guest Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2003 6:57 pm    Post subject: Re: Your experiences with Borland Paid Support On Thu, 23 Oct 2003 Scott Metzger wrote: Quote: These are my experiences: They work with you until the case is solved or an impass is reached. Once the case is solved they keep it open for a certain amount of time to make sure it has been completly solved. If it ends up being a bug in the product they will not charge a 'case'. Turnaround time is less than 24 hrs. We have used per case support. I can second Scott's experience, and add that recently borland support together with borland consulting here in canada, managed to get a bug of long standing fixed. This has made us very happy. A public thank you. Hugo Back to top Marcelo R. Lopez, Jr. Guest Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2003 7:29 pm    Post subject: Re: Your experiences with Borland Paid Support In the two occassions where a company I worked at had to use paid support, one was solved about two weeks later, by a patch to the linker. During the second incident ( also found to be a linker problem ), the incident was resolved as being "unresolvable", and was left as is. Word to the wise.....there IS a limit to how much debugging information ( even with the newer separated debug files ) you can generate. Hint: Extensive use of templates will KILL YOU. "Ronald McDonald" <ldinters (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote Quote: I'd like to know a little about your experiences with Borland Paid Support, regarding bugs in their own products. Has anybody here opened a case with Paid Support and what was your experience? What was the turn around time, and was the solution adequate for your needs? If later in the project, the solution provided by Borland turns out to be insufficient, did you need to pay again to get it sorted? Any anecdotes greatly appreciated. Back to top Scott Metzger Guest Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2003 7:32 pm    Post subject: Re: Your experiences with Borland Paid Support Kristofer Skaug wrote: Quote: Scott Metzger wrote: If it ends up being a bug in the product they will not charge a 'case'. Turnaround time is less than 24 hrs. Why would you call for support if there is no bug? What kind of issues did you have them solve for you? Er... because I couldn't figure out the problem and people in newsgroups couldn't figure out the problem and/or we needed a very fast resolution to the problem. Sure if you spend most of your time doing GUIs for database apps your not going to run into problems that people on the newsgroups can't solve. But once you venture into CORBA there are a lot fewer people in the newsgroups that can help you, especially if your using Delphi. There are some fringe technologies that are poorly documented, aren't covered in depth in any books, and don't have alot of experts on the newsgroups. If you are dealing with one of those technologies it _could_ be a wise choice to spend money on support. Things I have called for support on: I had a complex Paradox query that worked in Database Desktop but not in my App. Ended up being a bug in the BDE; but the guy gave me a workaround by using DeMorgan's on my SQL. Delphi 5, TClientDataset, we were adding records to a TClientDataSet by hand and some of them were not showing up. Ended up being a bug in the component. There were a couple that they legitimately helped me on but I can't remember them right now. I called mostly because my employer bought the 10 cases of support for the year, since I had them I used them. It was nice to be able to get a "Yes, this is a Borland bug. Stop banging your head on your keyboard, your doing nothing wrong." Back to top Kristofer Skaug Guest Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2003 8:21 pm    Post subject: Re: Your experiences with Borland Paid Support Jeff Overcash (TeamB) wrote: Quote: That may be true, but corporations would rather pay for support and get immediate responses instead of waiting an indeterminant amount of time, if ever, to have something answered on the peer groups like this one. Can't recall that I've ever had to wait more than 24 hours to get conclusive help on technical issues in these NG's... and I even suspect you get more expert and detailed (multiple sources) information here than from Borland itself. After all, as "peer groups", the NG's are frequented by people who use Borland tools for a living to develop real software, and have practical answers to real problems. -- Kristofer Back to top Kristofer Skaug Guest Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2003 8:22 pm    Post subject: Re: Your experiences with Borland Paid Support Scott Metzger wrote: Quote: There are some fringe technologies that are poorly documented, aren't covered in depth in any books, and don't have alot of experts on the newsgroups. If you are dealing with one of those technologies it _could_ be a wise choice to spend money on support. Ah, good point. 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