MailScanner support

[Mariano Absatz]

El 25 Feb 2003 a las 10:15, Julian Field escribió:

> At 04:56 25/02/2003, you wrote:
> >Julian: Your stance is perfectly justified. But for you, users would have
> >paid some Bill, Tom, Dick and Harry! Why not you instead for such selfless
> >service.
> 
> Thankyou all for such kind comments!
> 
> The next obvious question is this: what kinds of support service are you
> most likely to use?
> 
> The options so far are these (in no particular order):
> 
> 1. Membership of private, closed, high-priority mailing list
This one would be good, maybe the outcome of this list could be later sent to 
the main (free) list...

I'd be willing to buy access to it (supposing its not too expensive... down 
here dollars -and euros and pounds- are more than three times as expensive as 
they were a couple of years ago... income, however, is fixed in pesos)
:-(

> 2. Traditional annual support contract
This option should be available (though I'm probably not a candidate 
customer) for the traditional corporations where you have to budget in 
advance.

> 3. Regular installation of new releases and updated anti-virus engines
I wouldn't use it, but maybe this could be a best-seller... anyway, I don't 
know if many mailing-list participants would opt for it, but you should offer 
it in the website... many people that could be interested in the product may 
very well be frightened by the sheer trafic and sometimes highly technical 
content of the mailing list and may think "this is just not for me", whereas 
having this option prominently available and comparing it to the price of 
commercial products could indeed opt for it.

> 4. Advice on configuration and installation, paid for as needed
I might opt for this kind of service from time to time... I think it should 
be priced on a per request basis with a dificulty (level of weirdness) score, 
maybe.

> 5. Remote testing and inspection to ensure your setup looks sane and should
> work
I don't know... maybe on a one-shot basis?

> 6. Out of hours support of all the types above (perhaps out-of-hours
> installation of new releases?)
It's hard to define "out-of-hours"... You are probably quite close to GMT, 
I'm 3 hours west of it, people on the US west coast are 5 or more hours 
left... people on the Asia-Pacific zone are almost half a day ahead...

> 7. Support paid for per-incident, possibly paying for a block of time in
> advance. How you use the time is up to you.
This one is also a good choice for me (non exclusive) and I think it'd be 
good for any small or medium size organization with low levels of bureaucracy 
which would be more pleased with this option than with #2.

> 
> And any other options I haven't thought of?
Options 2 and 7 can have different levels: 7x24 phone access with possible 
remote access to customer's servers, mail access with some guaranteed 
response time (maybe also different levels here), etc.

On-site I guess will be really impossible, especially on a global scale... 
I'd like to know how long can some of the guys living in UK take to get down 
here to Argentina (or to Australia or Japan, for that matter).

> --
> Julian Field
> www.MailScanner.info
> MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support


--
Mariano Absatz
El Baby
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Real programmers use: cat > a.out