Dana Epp has a blog that I like to follow, today she had a post on PSS frustration.
PSS is Premier Support Services also sometimes known as Premium Support Services. This isn’t free support. You pay dearly for it. Her issue is that she had a problem and worked with PSS for 4 days prior to them coming back and saying we can’t help you because it involves an open source component.
This does not surpise me. Let me rephrase. Unfortunately, this does not suprise me. I have dealt with Premier at an Enterprise level for some time. Don’t get me wrong there are some outstanding resources on the Premier teams, but mostly, it is a pain in the butt. My main experience is even with the elite of PSS, the alliance folks, these are folks “dedicated” to specific types of accounts or customers where you tend to get to know the people by name and they have folks on site with you, they know you, they supposedly know your environment.
What Dana describes is something I have encountered many times but not every time. A willingness to help right up until they don’t have a clue and then there is work to find a reason NOT to help. Had they had a solution in the one of the internal Databases describing how to solve Dana’s problem, she would have gotten an answer. Had someone had an idea, she would have gotten an answer. Since answer to both of those questions was no, Dana got an answer of I can’ t help you because “xxxx” where xxxx is some reason that sounds somewhat plausible why they can’t help.
I tend to reject out of kind when they do it and keep fighting it. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. Either way I get a better feeling for PSS and the specific person I am dealing with. Even now I am dealing with someone in support (EMS actually) over a bug that is absolutely a bug and being told it is by design and getting all sorts of excuses and reasons why it is fine when the whole time I simply hear, “We have purposely written a component that is not guaranteed to give you correct information even though the entire purpose of the component is to give you that information”. When I hear by design I think, so you are saying you intended for it to give me possible garbage and gave me no way to know for sure? I have hit the limit on what I can do for support though, they have decided to call it “by design” though it isn’t documented anywhere and is counter intuitive and dangerous so I probably won’t get much further on it. Basically I have been told, we can’t help you because “that is how it is supposed to work”. Of course, I spent several weeks with support on this before hearing, oh yeah, that is how it is supposed to work. You would think they would have known right up front.
My recourse and what the PSS person keeps saying is file a DCR. A DCR is a Design Change Request and if it comes through a corporate account it tends to mean that you will be paying for the review and work put into the change. That is crap. If your product can’t be guaranteed to give out accurate info or at the very least you can’t tell me how accurate it might be like (the info is 15 minutes out of date or 2 hours out of date) how is that my problem other than I have to currently use it.
Of course my issue is with Exchange, I almost never have the issues with other groups inside of MS that I have with Exchange. I wish Open-Xchange wasn’t GNU or else I would be putting some serious time into looking at it and seeing what could be done with it.
Again, there are some amazing people inside of PSS doing some amazing things. But the fact that they are in PSS does nothing to cause or promote that, they are amazing on their own and go above and beyond because that is the way they are. Mostly I find PSS frustrating when the answer isn’t already known by them just like Dana ran into.
joe
