Just to get my 10 cents in on this one. I'm not a RAC or RPC, however, my knowledge of the ARS allows me to operate and develop an extensive custom ARS enviroment with very little technical support. I've been working with ARS for about 7 years in an isolated network environment as the Senior Developer. Imagine the response from the Remedy Tech. when I tell them that a WebEx is not possible and "No, I can't send you my workflow". The general response is, it's impossible for us to help you or something along those lines. There times when I get one of the support staff listed previously who have an almost intutive knowledge of what the problem is and where to look, but most importantly realize that I have done an exensive level of troubleshooting prior to calling. Mostly, I solve my own problems unless they are bugs, not well documented, or something very bizarre is happening. I view the current BMC support site as marginally more useless than the previous Remedy SupportWeb. In the past I have been sent knowledge base article numbers that I was not able to access through the supportweb and the techs were completely suprised that they were looking at a more extended version of the KB than I had access to. There are very few times that I actually found a resolution to an issue by searching the old KB and doubt that the new version has any better information in it. At some point a customer needs to be identified as an "Advanced User/Developer" (RCP/RAC, or otherwise) and afforded more access into the KB and support site. I'm not saying that anyone should have direct access to L2 support, but the pathway there should be accelerated if the L1 support issue map doesn't pan out. I don't feel that an experianced developer should have to sit and retry everything that L1 support walks them through (we've probably already done that prior to calling). Let L1 step through a list of Yes/No questions, Bypass the Yes answers qualify/quantify the No answers and push to L2 if no resolution is found. BMC needs to wake up and realize that if they start losing the more experianced and knowledgeable support staff that no amount of money spent elswhere will be able to replace them. They should also take a lesson from Dell who very quickly pulled all of thier corporate support back to the U.S. after thier major customers started complaining. Running a support shop by outsourcing or with limited resources may be cheaper but what is the customer satisfaction cost? Dave Fincher
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