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Zimbra Admins - Support question

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2013 11:29 am
by 835DennisT
I've been trying to eval Zimbra Appliance. I was impressed when I was offered support during the trial period to resolve a problem I was experiencing.
It's been almost 2 weeks since I opened a case and I still haven't been able to get a tech to connect and see why the test Zimbra appliance isn't working. The support problem appears to be a time of day issue. The tech assigned to the case is on IST & I'm on PST. I'm on site Mon-Thur. With my limited availability and the tech being nearly 12 hours out of "sync" nothing is happening.
With non critical systems I don't mind, but with email I cannot move to a system that can be down for weeks.
Is this typical for Zimbra support? Do they have support that has a schedule more in line with customer needs? What has been your experience?

Zimbra Admins - Support question

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2013 11:19 am
by Travis Kensil
Dennis,
I never had any production stopping issues thus far needing support (on Zimbra 1 year so far), most of my support encounters are for functionality issues or bug requests, etc.
Are you properly categorizing the request, Zimbra really sticks to their SLAs related to the priority of things. If memory serves me right though, I think the evaluation support is not given a high priority in terms of response. With paid support you do have 1 hour SLA for critical 1 issues as well as immediate phone support with a support pin.
Zimbra does tend to have a variety of engineers in different time zones, usually if I have a noticeable delay I call the support line and have my ticket escalated to a better time zone engineer. A lot of them are California based which is 3 hours difference for us, haven't found it to be too big a deal.
Overall Zimbra Support is good, from a technical perspective they are very good and know the product well, I have noticed at times their response/SLAs are lost if they get too busy or back-logged. Generally though the product is solid enough that we haven't really needed support, couple that with running on RedHat Linux and Zimbra has been a very solid product for us.

Zimbra Admins - Support question

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2013 12:02 pm
by 835DennisT
Thanks Travis. That helps a lot. You're right about the request category. Since I'm a eval (potential) customer I get tier 4 support which is the lowest priority.
Looks like I'll open a thread to see if I can get help from the members here.