Re: InformixLink
For those of you who have asked for InformixLink to be hooked up to the internet: I attended the Customer Services Birds of a Feather session at the Informix Worldwide Users Conference. Several people made the request that InformixLink be hooked up to the Internet. The head of customer services said (after repeated requests) he will consider this. Two other topics of general interest to this group were mentioned at this session. Bug fixes and telephone support. I'll discuss these a little below... but first, any of you who can attend the equivalent of this session next year - attend! This is a good chance to show that we as a user community really do care about this stuff. The attendance this year at this session was pretty small. On my personal favorite subject of bug fixes... It was pointed out that bugs have an extrordinarily long lag time before getting fixed. Last summer Informix began a new methodology of handling bugs. They claim that under their new plan, the customers with the most money won't be the first to have their bugs fixed. They feel fairly comfortable where they are with their ISQL/DBACCESS products and realize they need to devote a lot of resources to catching up on the backlog of 4GL bugs. They currently plan to release two version of Informix per year with bug fixes - one every six months. Once they have fewer bugs on the queue, the idea is that newly reported bugs should be fixed in the next bug fix release, and where the bug is reported too late to get into that release, it should be in the following release. While I personally think six months is a long time, I believe this will be an improvement over the current system. We will see how well it is implemented. As for phone support... They are working on trying to raise the level of phone support expertise by training these people more. For those of you who dial in with emergency situations, we were told that if you wait till the end of the phone support voice mail options, there is a place in there where you can press a button for emergency support. This should prevent the normal waits and get you to a more experienced person when you are down and need to get back up ASAP. Their goal for phone support is to eliminate the long waits and have no customer waiting any longer than two minutes. The issue of being able to talk with someone in understandable english was also brough up and Informix says there should be less of this problem in the future. If there is anything important I missed or misstated, I know at least one other person from this group participated, so please feel free to correct me or add to this. Also, if you have any questions about whether your own problem with Informix customer support was addressed, please feel free to mail me. I will try to respond (but we have been having problems sending outgoing mail to certain locations for the last several months). - Cathy -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cathy Kipp * These are my opin- * ckipp@vth1.vth.colostate.edu Colorado State University * ions and may not * Veterinary Teaching Hospital * represent anything * Phone: (303) 491-1294 Fort Collins, CO 80525 * at all relevant. * Fax: (303) 491-1205