Actinic cover

[christina]

I've been really frustrated with support lately - not necessarily on the technical aspects of the service but the people I speak to seem to have little experience of practical application of the site includignj intergrating with actinic hosting & payments.

I currently host with actinic & this week have been trying to get a new site up on the server. After several telephone calls (sitting in a queue or even just an engaged tone) & emails (receipt of which is never acknowledged) over 3 days the problem was sorted - becuase apparently the actinic hosts can take 48 hours to set up a new site - so when the 48hrs was up the site uploaded. Shame I wasn't told this on my first phonecall - would have saved me 1-2 hours of valuable 9-5 hours - grr!

Actinic hosting & payments has very little in the way of instructions for inital set-up, so I wonder if this is contributing to the strain on support?

[dscontroller]

If they're hand delivering them, us in the north will be waiting a long time.

So, if you live in the north and your surname begins with S, it could be a couple of years before I hear anything. Oh no, they'll be writing for me to take out cover soon!

[Mark H]

Forgive me if I'm wasting time here (haven't had chance to read "the letter" yet) - is this just a question of "we've split the cover into two parts - basic cover gets you free upgrades, premium actually gets you help".

I don't have a problem with this as we have only ever had cover for the upgrades. Perhaps this is just a better way of doing it, but not particularly transparent.

[RuralWeb]

I've not had a letter yet but it sounds like they have listened to the posts from last year when most of us said support was too cheap.

[Darren B]

Forgive me if I'm wasting time here (haven't had chance to read "the letter" yet) - is this just a question of "we've split the cover into two parts - basic cover gets you free upgrades, premium actually gets you help".

I don't have a problem with this as we have only ever had cover for the upgrades. Perhaps this is just a better way of doing it, but not particularly transparent.

No support is the same, how ever there is the advantage of premium support, its an additional insurance if you like. I dont have my letter to hand so cant give the finer points. But i think it mentioned a different phone number and support with more experience. So support on different levels. Seems to be common these days, level 1 field all support issues, level 2 pick up the not easily resolved one e.t.c so you bypass the level 1 support.

I maybe wrong but thats the way i understood it

[TraceyHand]

I wonder, it sounds like the same kind of offering as the Developer Subscription offers?
Could this be why some people haven't had a letter about it? Those who already have a Developer Subscription? (that said, I've not had one for BB, which 'has standard' cover, although I do have a Dev Sub also)

[Duncan Rounding]

I think the towers want to phase this in to make sure thay can deliver. It wouldn't help to have everybody on premium support otherwise they would then be back to square one.

[george]

How ironic would it be to pay more for support to find out how to repair or get workarounds for bugs in the software?

With the introduction of this Premium service it yet again shows how Actinic is yet again moving away from its roots and are now more interested in its bigger customers.

With every cost now being carefully monitored by small businesses I'd imagine many wont renew anyway. I asked on here a few months ago what would we have to look forward to in v10 and was told that it was confidential and only known to the select few and not to be discussed and go look at the wish list.

Actually, I'm still angry about that... can you tell?

Do we have a planned release quarter for v10? Is it safe to ask that? Or are there maybe another two releases of v9 to go yet? An update on what is planned for the next few months wouldnt go amiss, I've always said that. Kind of keeping customers in the loop thats all.

[Duncan Rounding]

I think the issue here is that some people view support as a free upgrade path whilst others view support as technical assistance.

I think Actinic are trying to address this dstinction.

[george]

How many people would buy the upgrade then? I think a lot of users seem to accept the initial problems with a release because its `free`? If they had to pay, say, £250 per upgrade there'd be even more burst blood vessels when things don't work.

[chris ashdown]

I think you are right on this one George, I would want V*.0.0 to be near 100% if we went that route, at present we wrongly expect problems untill version 0.0.2 comes out, but we consider upgrades free and Support as part of our normal business insurance

[leehack]

The problem is that if noone buys the software, then it won't be corrected by .0.2, it will most likely be 6 months and 2 versions down the line from where most people jump in. One presumes that they think their latest release is good to go, it falls apart once used by the masses and then they scurry around for 6 months trying to fix it. This seems to be what has happened for the past 2 releases IMO.

People delaying the purchase of the software will not add to the quality of its release, it is full and correct testing that does that, which doesn't happen so well until it is out in the public domain. Chicken and egg?

[TraceyHand]

Chicken and egg?

chips with mine, please Lee

[jont]

I think the issue here is that some people view support as a free upgrade path

This is really a long term punt as 2+ years of cover laying wait for a new version for which you do not know what it will contain (all secret hush - hush) can be an expensive route.

[george]

Whats your views on this thread, well, at least on Cover and the costs Jonty?

We've got everything from it being not very good to not being expensive enough.