Re: Sterling Commerce and AT&T

[Dave Taylor]

Title: Sterling Commerce and AT&T

Hi Shannon,   We were an agent for AT&T until earlier this year and signed up one of our customers to use their VAN service a couple of years ago.  We integrated our EDI translator with their AccessPlus communications software running on NT.   Their system has been reasonably stable this year.  Our one customer is still using their service.   We had two bad experiences with their technical support:   1.  They entered the wrong information in  setting up an interconnect and then corrected it twice before getting it right.  I can accept the initial error, but not the multiple corrections to get it right.   2.  Our customer failed to receive a 997 for an invoice they transmitted and AT&T's tech support could only tell us when it went out and to whom it was sent.  Several hours and many phone calls later (including phone calls to our customer's customer and to the receiving VAN who alerted us to the situation) we were informed that the AT&T mail bag contained an error that their engineers were working on but their tech support staff was not aware of, and the entire mail bag had been rejected by the receiving VAN.  The AT&T support staff told me that they didn't have that information on their system status screen.  Their support staff does not have access to critical system status information.   With these experiences, we were reluctant to recommend AT&T to other customers.  Since our sales of the AT&T VAN service were significantly below our sales quota, they closed our agent's account without notice, even though our one-year quota period had not been completed.  This precluded us from supporting our one customer.  Then, some months later, after our one-year annivarsary, they cancelled our agent's agreement for failing to meet the sales quota.   Unless they have changed their policy, you will have to use their AccessPlus software and you will only be able to get it from an authorized AT&T agent, who may not be able to continue to support you unless that agent continues to meet their current and future sales quotas.   We now represent Worldcom's EDINET because another customer of ours had been using EDINET before we installed our translator for them and had been very happy with EDINET.   Our experience with the folks at EDINET has been excellent.  They are highly competent, have access to the status of everything going on in the system and are always most helpful.   If you'd like any information about EDINET, please call me at any time.   Dave Taylor Sysmark Information Systems, Inc. 800-SYSMARK (800-797-6275     ----- Original Message ----- From: Shannon Vaughan To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 30, 2000 10:18 AM Subject: Sterling Commerce and AT&T Hi all, I am looking for feedback from anyone who is using (or has used) Sterling Commerce and/or AT&T as their VAN. How reliable are they? How quickly/accurately do they respond to customer questions? How well do they compare against each other? etc. Whether you have praise for them or horror stories about them,  I'd like to hear your two cents worth. thanks in advance, Shannon Vaughan Programmer/EDI Analyst M.G.A. Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The views, opinions, and judgments expressed in this message are solely those of the author.  The message contents have not been reviewed or approved by Movie Gallery."