It's Nice To Work with Professionals
Category None
For part of this week, I spent time with a client who had a brand new Domino installation. There were some rough spots in the architecture, and no one in the IT department has been trained on Lotus Domino (yet), so lots of little issues have been creeping up. I did the initial design for the infrastructure, the installation, the migration and the configuration of the messaging system. Like most jobs, parts of it were sourced to other contractors (some good, while others required considerable re-working of their attempts).
The customer wanted to continue using their Treo's to connect to the e-mail, but they were not sure what wireless Domino-based package would be a good fit. After an analysis, we agreed on mNotes by CommonTime, and I stepped aside. Now, at this part of the story, I could reel out paragraphs of how many different people were called in to integrate mNotes and all the mishaps, but that's not very interesting to read. So, I want to jump ahead to the conclusion.
I stepped back in to assist in untangling the confusion (sheesh, the installation was still running with the evaluation license and they had purchased a full license). After spending a good while sifting out what was a problem and what was not, we came down to misconfiguration problems. Now it's late Friday afternoon, and Commontime is in the UK. They do have an office in New Jersey, but its phone connection seems to roll to overseas, and no one was answering (it was 8:30 PM in England).
We posted an e-mail on the support site, wrote out the problems (and the tenor of our frustrated users), provided contact information and went back to work. What I expected, was to hit a dead-end (I'm not a Commontime expert and by now everything looked as clean as I could get it). I knew the problem was a configuration error, but I couldn't identify it.
The phone rang in the server room.
It was Kevin from Commontime.
He had actually been reading through the e-mail support queue and called in from the UK. We discussed what we had done, and he confirmed that everything was correct, and then made a very subtle suggestion. "Why don't you enter the time as a military value instead of using AM and PM." Of course, that is the sort of information that doesn't exist in manuals, and is not intuitive (even the field help used "AM" in its description). Yes, it worked, and everyone was happy (just in time for an executive meeting with the director of operations).
So, Kevin, this is a thank you for paying attention to the support complaints on a late Friday night, and then calling us up, working through the problem and then solving it. That's professionalism.
For part of this week, I spent time with a client who had a brand new Domino installation. There were some rough spots in the architecture, and no one in the IT department has been trained on Lotus Domino (yet), so lots of little issues have been creeping up. I did the initial design for the infrastructure, the installation, the migration and the configuration of the messaging system. Like most jobs, parts of it were sourced to other contractors (some good, while others required considerable re-working of their attempts).
The customer wanted to continue using their Treo's to connect to the e-mail, but they were not sure what wireless Domino-based package would be a good fit. After an analysis, we agreed on mNotes by CommonTime, and I stepped aside. Now, at this part of the story, I could reel out paragraphs of how many different people were called in to integrate mNotes and all the mishaps, but that's not very interesting to read. So, I want to jump ahead to the conclusion.
I stepped back in to assist in untangling the confusion (sheesh, the installation was still running with the evaluation license and they had purchased a full license). After spending a good while sifting out what was a problem and what was not, we came down to misconfiguration problems. Now it's late Friday afternoon, and Commontime is in the UK. They do have an office in New Jersey, but its phone connection seems to roll to overseas, and no one was answering (it was 8:30 PM in England).
We posted an e-mail on the support site, wrote out the problems (and the tenor of our frustrated users), provided contact information and went back to work. What I expected, was to hit a dead-end (I'm not a Commontime expert and by now everything looked as clean as I could get it). I knew the problem was a configuration error, but I couldn't identify it.
The phone rang in the server room.
It was Kevin from Commontime.
He had actually been reading through the e-mail support queue and called in from the UK. We discussed what we had done, and he confirmed that everything was correct, and then made a very subtle suggestion. "Why don't you enter the time as a military value instead of using AM and PM." Of course, that is the sort of information that doesn't exist in manuals, and is not intuitive (even the field help used "AM" in its description). Yes, it worked, and everyone was happy (just in time for an executive meeting with the director of operations).
So, Kevin, this is a thank you for paying attention to the support complaints on a late Friday night, and then calling us up, working through the problem and then solving it. That's professionalism.
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Comments
Blackberry certainly takes out all the oxygen in the room, but I don't think I could have been more impressed by CommonTime if they had flow out in person. They moved way up on my list of recommended vendors.
Jack
Posted by Jack Dausman At 12:31:23 AM On 06/18/2005 | - Website - |
Posted by casey At 04:41:37 AM On 06/17/2005 | - Website - |