Maintenance

I used to work for a reseller. As far as I know, there is no way to get support directly through SolidWorks. I am surprised to hear that your VAR is so bad. The company I used to work for really took pride in making sure that they provided the best support they could. All of the tech guys were CSWPs. Even the other resellers that we competed with were pretty good. You can request to be reassigend to a new VAR. You have to write a letter to SolidWorks requesting the change. SolidWorks really discourages it and they will try to work with you to resolve the problems first, but it is possible.

Clearly not going to name names as that would be unfair. What we tend to find is the VAR is rarely (if ever) able to give us a quick response to any problem. The usual excuse is that the support staff are off-site or unavailable. When you are working in a commercial environment with pressures on finishing designs you can't wait for 2 to 3 days for someone to come back to you. A quick hop on the Google group or trying out a few things normally resolves the issue in less time - and for =A31300 a year less per seat.

Therefore I am pay> On Feb 21, 5:06 am, snipped-for-privacy@conway-cctv.co.uk wrote: >

I have rarely seen resellers that can give timely answers. For one thing, many think that giving a workaround constitutes a "solution". Resellers are not privy to the code behind SolidWorks. You cannot therefore expect them to actually fix anything that is broken. They are frequently not even privy or willing to use the resources users have at their disposal. Even more rarely will they take the time to fill in the blanks from what you tell them. When a reseller has to refer to SolidWorks for assistance, that is the kiss of death to getting a timely answer because SW will put it in their queue and then resolve it in some obscure way that has nothing to do with actually fixing your problem.

So my solution to all this is to simply not use the reseller except in dire emergencies and then with the caveat that if they don't have a fix for it in 8 hours it isn't going to be fixed. I run SW a year or more behind the current release when all the service packs that are going to be issued have been issued and all the major issues have been found.

Having these lowered expectations can really go a long way to helping both getting your job done and your sanity.

TOP

P.S. SW only has one factor in their favor for obtaining a renewal and that is the fact that you may have to buy more seats or work with someone who has. Other than that there is very likely no compelling reason to pay maintainence.

chris whos you reseller if your UK based i can probably tell you if they are good or not or just having a bad day ps send me a mail dont air the laundry on here

What's not fair about naming names? If these guys really are that bad, inform us all. Word might get back to the head of the company and things might change due to bad publicity. Or, someone at Solidworks may hear about it, but I really doubt they give a rat's a$$.

Therefore I am pay> On Feb 21, 5:06 am, snipped-for-privacy@conway-cctv.co.uk wrote: >

It's not "airing dirty laundry" if he has a legitimate complaint about poor service. Let us all know who the culprits are so we can take our pounds (dollars) elsewhere. Things will never change for the better if we don't "vote with the pocketbook".

I agree, in a way.

If a reseller sucks, name names.

OTOH, this is the internet; playground of shills and cranks. Unsubstantiated claims and accusations everywhere.

That said; VAR based support systems are antiquated. Factory support is the only way to level the playing field. The 'added' value in VAR should be over and above that.

Realistically, I don't call my reseller very often, as prior calls have nearly always resulted in no answer. Sometimes the tech. support people readily admitted to me that they were new to the job and "didn't know" anything about the particular issue I called about because they had only been on the job less than a month.

I personnally think SolidWorks needs to maintain a database available to all users that allows users to search just like in Google, so we can track down solutions which have already been found (or not) in earlier Tech.Support work.

Having the same question answered by each VAR all across the world multiple times with multiple calls to SWks, etc is a 20th Century solution.

Hey SolidWorks. SQL database, Google front end, blade servers, people permanently hired/promoted to maintain the problems and answers DB and the structure to make it an ongoing support solution.

Bo

In addition to the above, if we are not at the most up to date service pack for a given version, our VAR will not help. They simply tell us to go to the newer SP and maybe that will fix the problem. Since upgrading to a newer SP is a corporate decision (and they are rightly reluctant to do so without testing), the VAR is useless.

The situation with my var was pretty bad so I changed... perhaps this story will be helpful for some of you.

When I purchased SW the sales guy gave me some false information about the update pricing. When I went to update, of course they wouldn't honor the prices that I very clearly asked about at the time of purchase. I found out later that this perticular VAR goes through salesmen every 6 months or so and of course the origional guy was long gone. Actually, the support guys don't seem to stay around very long either. This is probably a good question to ask the sales guy and the technical support guys when first looking for a VAR, "how long have you worked for XYZ?" If they say more then 2 years or more there are probably good reasons for this.

I ended up presented my compalint a couple levels of management to SW and they basically did nothing. If the truth would be known SW could have just made it right and we would have all been better off because they spend a lot of time on this issue. My personal opinion is that the SW Technical group really does try to do a good job but the SW Marketing group STINKS. They have some of the stupdest policies.

Towards the end of trying to work with the VAR, I wrote another long explanation and the response that I got from the VAR was that I had gotten a free year of support, basically implying that I was stealing support and they basically implied that I didn't deserve the origional quoted pricing anyway. Before SW, I had/have Inventor and I just didn't want to purchase another CAD package with the same problems.... Hey, at least they should be different problems for the money spent... :-) So, for about 9 months I asked the sales guy lots of questions. Mostly when I had a problem with Inventor, I wanted to see if SW had the same issues. I considered these questions to be pre- sales questions but apparently the VAR considerd these questions Free Technical Support, (for a year at that). But there wern't that many calls, and I was working with a salesman.

Another thing that I noticed about the VAR was that they always had a lot of people shifting around. In the beginning of my time they had a fellow that provided some of the best technical support that I have EVER received. However, there was some type of problem with his avability, (of course this guys avability to the users was fantastic) but they fired him and replaced him with a couple of guys that wern't worth the effort to dial the phone.

Ultimately, SW's solution was for me to going through the process of changing VAR's and so far have been very happy with the new VAR: Hawkridge Systems, (if you are curious). They have worked with me a little on the price and while the tech support has not been perfect, most of the time it has been timely and effective.

Hope this helps so of you.

Edt

For all that people like to knock Microsoft, their on-line knowledge base is pretty good, and is readily searchable using google, if you're too lazy to go directly to their site.

I don't see why SWX couldn't do the same.

John H

John, I think it would benefit SolidWorks, the VARs, & primarily the end users, if all problem solving issues were on line.

Is that not why we use computers?

Bo

My 2 cents:

My reseller is pretty excellent, they have their own 'issue' id system which they use to follow-up via email, phone call etc. But I make use of them in a particular way - mainly getting spr's assigned to bugs. Their tech-support people are adequate knowledge wise, but I consider my maintenance money is simply to keep up to date with the software, the 'tech support' is like bling. The money is for the updates.

uh, SolidWorks did make a searchable knowledge base, and put it online.

The customer portal has been available for months.