Sun's support is the best one from all vendors I have had a pleasure to interact with. However when it comes to OSC it's one of the worst. First you can't even log-in on regular basis your session just time outs. Then if you are lucky and you log-in it's so sloooooooow most of the time, you experience regular time-outs and you've got to wait dozen of seconds to refresh a page. Then even if it works it's functionality is limited - why can't I attach any file to the case? I do I have to send it later vie email directly to assigned engineer who will attached to a case or I have to use separate ftp site and put file names in a case. Of course that ftp site is also slooooooow - uploading bigger crashdump takes many hours, sometimes even more. Then description field is limited to 28KB - so if you want to put some more command output or log files you have to do above (send an email later or upload to ftp site and provide file names) or split it and put as another 28KB as an update to a case. Once you put everything in your case and you mark that you want to be notified of all changes in a case - why should you get 3 emails each time? Then there are other less frustrating problems (comparing to above) with OSC. I'm talking about some problems lately - I'm talking about my experience for a last couple of years (or more more).
Remember - it's a service for a paid customers! It doesn't matter if you have basic plan or platinum subscription - you get the same OSC. Some changes were promised last summer - nothing happened.
To me and to many others OSC is a really discouraging experience.
I know that everyone has got used to it, but we're in a 2008 and we're talking about the company who is proud to be innovative and ahead of competition - and they have a right to be proud because they really are innovative and ahead of competition in many cases. It's time Sun put some more thought to OSC now and bring it to 21st century.
You'll be pleased to know the OSC is biting the dust in the not too distant future. You may have heard about Sun's move to a new "Integrated Business Information Solution suite" from Oracle. This will include a whole new "OSC" (or whatever it'll be called) with much better functionality, including the ability to manage and check your own contract information.
ReplyDeleteAs lildude stated there are improvements on the way. In fact improvements is probably the wrong word as it's a significant replacement called SunSpectrum Member Support Centre.
ReplyDeleteYou can see what it will be like by visiting the info wiki.
http://wikis.sun.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=5309082
Please take a look. As with any big change there's bound to be some early teething problems but it certainly is going to be a large improvement on the current OSC.
By a quick look it should be more feature wise and beter organized. I wonder that proper infrastructure will also be provided so it's fast and not slow.
ReplyDeleteThanks for info.
AFAIK it's being built on new infrastructure so it has the potential to be fast (or at least faster), however when deploying something new to the world it's hard to fully emulate the performance characteristics so there may be some bottlenecks yet to be discovered that impact performance in the early days.
ReplyDeleteIt would be great if you would blog your experience with the SSMSC when it goes live. Nothing like customer feedback to focus the efforts. Of course, don't be too hard on us in the first few days ;-) while the early bugs are sorted out.
Cheers, Rob.