doelz@urz.unibas.ch (Reinhard Doelz) (03/15/90)
1.) concerning the commercial aspects of INTERNET usage: I hope that support is a little bit more than sales and advertising. As far as I know the rules, research must be involved in the subject of transmitted messages, or at least support research activities. Even though I see your point saying that you are a commercial company, I think that an email hotline would be directly supporting researchers thus permitting you to use the INTERNET. 2.) What about setting up an 'iris-maintenance' email adress which could be accessed as database? Provided that the people asking for support agree, their problems could be made available (anonymously if needed) including the answer given by the support. Quite often I meet problems which are answered with replies like like 'will be in the next release' or so. The release notes of the OS need to be accumulated somewhere at SGI. As soon as an entry is completed, it were easy for SGI to inform customers by spreading the news. Normally, the problems are not that site-specific and a database of questions and answers were quite helpful to me. OK, you're using an HP box. But a simple thing were to have a log number attach to each incoming problem by the mailer program and send out the answers to a bouncing list referring to that number. Reinhard
ams@ACM.PRINCETON.EDU (03/15/90)
I really don't see what the problem is. A number of commercial companies right now have e-mail hotline support, and even encourage its use for low priority problems (especially those that are of the "look at this 200 line segment of code, why is ... not placed in a full word at ..."). For all the fluff about what constitutes "proper" use of the internet, I really don't think anyone will care if SGI adds a support@sgi.com so long as they don't collect a special fee for using it. NCD & MIPs routinely answer questions in this way right now. It is my impression that questions emailed to either will be answered regardless of maintenance agreement status, however, there is no guaranteed turn around time. As far as what SGI should do, my hotline response time is consistantly good (and I am on the east coast). However, a lot of times I think I would prefer to place an 800 line call but get the response via email and say a follow up call the next day. --ams _________________________________________________________________________ Andrew Simms, System Manager Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics Princeton University 218 Fine Hall, Washington Road ams@acm.princeton.edu Princeton, NJ 08544 609/258-5324 609/258-1054 (fax)