aecioneto wrote:
I post such inquiry to the list because some prospects of mine very often tend to compare
feature-by-feature (nonse, IMHO) and - thanks to MS culture - have doubts about a
solution with no helpdesk phone at the "other side of the box".
Forgive this little rant, but support for SA is far superior to the
support most companies offer. For instance, I've got NetIQ's Webtrends
Log Analyzer installed. I didn't buy a support contract because the
cost was about $1000 a year and at the time NetIQ had a web based
knowledge base that seemed useful enough. Recently I've had a minor
but annoying problem with Webtrends and I've discovered that NetIQ no
longer makes their web knowledge base available to non-support contract
holders. So now I have the option of either living with this one
irritating issue or paying an outrageous sum of money for a contract.
If that's not bad enough, I find most support from proprietary software
vendors to be the pits. We have Mcafee's Enterprise Anti-Virus suite
with a support contract. However, I hate calling them because I tend
to have to wait 30+ minutes on hold just to speak to a first level
support person who knows less about the product than I do who forces me
to walk through all the steps I've already done before giving up and
putting me on hold for another 30+ minutes while they try to track down
a second level support person.
On the other hand, I had a question about SpamAssassin the other day
that I couldn't figure out so I posted to this list. Within two hours
one of the developers had responded. You just can't buy that kind of
support.
