Hi, to start: I'm the responsible person for the Installation Support. I'm subscribed to this list with my private e-mail address since I typically participate here out of private interest and a suse/novell e-mail address would not reflect that. For this particular answer, however, I am answering as a SUSE/Novell empoyee, not as a private member of this list (using my private e-mail address since I'm not subscribed here with my work e-mail address). On Monday 09 January 2006 20:37, Clint Tinsley wrote:
has anyone been successful getting installation support from Novell (cannot be done from the SuSE site according to the support page). I have been able to register but when I try to use their eService to send a request for email support a new page asks me for a CID, something I don't have as I'm after free installation support. Has anybody been able to get installation support from Novell for 10.0, and if so how is it done. Thanks
Novell SuSE Support appears to be a bad joke on those who bought the product.
I registered but was unable to get the CID.
I called their support number, only one person works there from what I can tell.
That depends on what time you call. Overall we have 12 people in the team that delivers installation support for SUSE Linux 9.3/10.0 (the "consumer product"). This is to cover all support requests worldwide and in 5 languages. Regarding your comment about the service hours of the phone based installation support: of course customers would appreciate longer opening hours of this service. But please keep in mind that this is also question of costs (and as a paying customer of the boxed product these are in effect *your* costs). We need to cover 5 Languages and several time zones. Not an easy task as it is. Extending the opening hours of the phone based hotlines would mean we would have to increase the team size. Also, I think it is fair to mention that phoning us is only one option to open a support request. http://support.novell.com/eService is available 24x7 ...
She promised to fix my registration a month ago and so far, nothing. No support. Oh, they, if, only provide installation support. Hours are noon to 5 PM or something like that, rediculous.
Be nice if someone from Novell would step up the plate here and let everyone know what is going on.
What is going on is that we currently have quite some confusion as to how to interact with our support. This confusion is mainly caused by having two support system infrastructures running in parallel (and worse: visible to the customer): ° The old SUSE Portal and ticket system: this is used only for versions up to 9.3 ° The new (not really new, but new to the users of SUSE Linux) Novell Portal and ticket system In order to migrate all customers from the SUSE system to the Novell system we had to add some complexity to the interface. This will be removed as soon as the system integration process is in place. As for the Contact ID (specific to customers of 10.0 and later versions - does not apply to customers of 9.3!): you only need this if you want to contact the installation support by phone. You *should* receive this Contact ID automatically after you have successfully registered your product. Once the registrtaion is done, you could also open a support request through http://support.novell.com/eService (and you won't need the Contact ID for that since you already authenticate yourself using the Novell account). We do get quite a number of complaints from customers who have not received such an e-mail with their Contact ID. In some cases we have been able to identify the reason as a) misspelling of the e-mail address upon registration b) a SPAM filter on the customer side (or rather it's e-mail provider) that didn't let the notification e-mail with the Contact ID pass to the inbox of the customer. There might be other reasons for why such e-mails would not arrive with some customers, but we haven't been able (yet) to identify those. Most relevant information (e.g. links for registration) can be found on http://www.novell.com/usersupport For those of you who have registered your copy of 10.0 but did not receive an e-mail with the Contact ID, please send me an e-mail to hartmut.meyer@novell.com Please include your registration code (you'll find that on the back of the CD/DVD cover). It's a white sticker with a combination of numbers and letters. Some complaints are about the user interface of http://support.novell.com/eService. Soon there will be a flash animation available on that site that demonstrates how to use this tool. I'm further aware that we are working to streamline the workflow of this tool to make it less complex for those users that have just one product registered (likeley the majority of our consumer product users). Greetings from Stuhr hartmut -- Hartmut Meyer, NTS EMEA Partner Relationship Manager SUSE LINUX GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, D-90409 Nuernberg T: +49 421 3064385 - M: +49 179 2279480 F: +49 421 3064387 - hartmut.meyer@novell.com ---------------------------------------------------- http://www.novell.com/open