Re: ORACLE TECH SUPPORT. NONEXISTENT

Jack Love (jlove_at_ivrit.ra.itd.umich.edu) wrote:
> I suspect that many of us who have had good experiences with Oracle
> support won't bother to reply, so I will. In general, I find Oracle
> support to be quite good. I would say that I get through to the
> appropriate person and receive good advice better than 90% of the time.
> On some occasions, the problem will necessitate a patch and in the Bad
> Old Days we would have to wait for overnight delivery. Recently,
> however, they've been able to ftp or e-mail the scripts.

Well I'll clarify this a bit for my case. In general, support for existing tools, such as Oracle 6 and Forms 3 type of problems is generally good. If there is a problem they can easily debug it and send out a fix via next day air.

Now on the other hand, with their new products like Oracle 7 and Forms 4.0, there's where we get into the big problems. Oracle 7 shouldn't be too bad since it has really been out for some time (1+ year), but the migration from customers always lags behind for obvious reasons, and the point about the sheer number of problems is very valid.

Forms 4.0 on the other hand has been out maybe 6 months on average, and the support for it is fairly bad. Obviously it is because of extreme lack of training of the support personnel. I would guess that the ones who know anything are leaving because they get all the problems falling on their shoulders from the other non-experienced tech support members.

Until Oracle figures out how to get the experience and manpower necessary in their support department, all of us are in for a very long haul, and paying for it dearly in $$$ and time. (that's one of the downfalls of a contract which is paid up front!)

Helpful Advice: If you really are having problems with down databases and such, make sure to tell Oracle so the priority can be raised. Those issues will be taken care of promptly.

Unless you are willing to wait up to 3 months for a callback on your tar, you may have to ask for a duty manager to get the priority raised on your tars before they are truly worked on in a decent time period, by knowledgeable tech support. Do keep track of how long it takes them to respond to your tars and give the info to your sales rep.

Supposedly Oracle is going to be doing a lot to re-do their tech support because of constant complaints. I haven't really seen anything yet, but changes will range from them sending tech support info on CD-ROM so you can try to look it up without tying up their phones and time (like PowerBuilder does) to having the ability to dial-in to their tech-support system to look into the status of your tar. Well...we can all keep dreaming.

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