Zimbra customer support portal comment

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DennisT
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Zimbra customer support portal comment

Post by DennisT »

I'm finding the support portal lacking. I open a case and it takes quite a while for it to appear on the portal. However when I go to the case management (home) it shows no open cases, even though the header reads "My Open Support Cases". I then click on "View Support Cases" and still no open cases are shown. I then click on "View all support cases" and finally I can see my open cases - though it doesn't actually show all cases, it just shows the open ones.

Even though I have had several emails from support and replies to them on one of these open cases none of the emails are shown in the case. It really becomes a chore when email is not working perfectly (imagine the irony).

If I open a support case and Rick King responds I know I'll get excellent support (shout out for Rick!). His support is world class. The customer support portal however is no where near that level. It is awkward, clunky, and incomplete. The only saving grace it appears to have is it doesn't crash or hang.

Oh, and when I'm starting a thread here why do I see a "tinypic" "This image is no longer available" at the bottom of the page?
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L. Mark Stone
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Re: Zimbra customer support portal comment

Post by L. Mark Stone »

DennisT wrote:I'm finding the support portal lacking. I open a case and it takes quite a while for it to appear on the portal. However when I go to the case management (home) it shows no open cases, even though the header reads "My Open Support Cases". I then click on "View Support Cases" and still no open cases are shown. I then click on "View all support cases" and finally I can see my open cases - though it doesn't actually show all cases, it just shows the open ones.

Even though I have had several emails from support and replies to them on one of these open cases none of the emails are shown in the case. It really becomes a chore when email is not working perfectly (imagine the irony).

If I open a support case and Rick King responds I know I'll get excellent support (shout out for Rick!). His support is world class. The customer support portal however is no where near that level. It is awkward, clunky, and incomplete. The only saving grace it appears to have is it doesn't crash or hang.

Oh, and when I'm starting a thread here why do I see a "tinypic" "This image is no longer available" at the bottom of the page?

Hi Dennis,

The Support Portal issues are indeed a bit of a pain; it's a Salesforce thing as I understand it, and I agree it would be nice if the Support Portal got some development love. For case management, while I use the Portal to open cases, once a case is open I process the case entirely via email, and really don't need to use the Portal to track existing cases. So these issues don't impact my workflows much. I am able to access older, closed cases no problem, which is another use case I have for accessing the Support Portal.

Rick King's nickname is "The King" -- and as you point out, for very good reason! Rick has published a huge number of very detailed wikis for better managing/improving Zimbra. While not all of his suggestions are supported by Zimbra, they are incredibly helpful and will deepen your knowledge of Zimbra: https://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/King0770-Notes

The tinypic thing is due to tinypic having gone out of business in 2019. I agree it would be nice if Zimbra removed all references to TinyPic here in the forum software.

Hope that helps,
Mark
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JDunphy
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Re: Zimbra customer support portal comment

Post by JDunphy »

First thank you and I completely agree Dennis.

Your portal works better than mine. I can't even see my open bugs. I can only search by bug id's that I know via bug lookup. If I attempt to go into case mgmt, it logs me out. Do that enough times and you learn that you can only open tickets but not view them. I follow Mark's advice and use email to do follow up's on open tickets. They really don't want to know of any bugs I think at times given this reality. It use to work years ago but something broke and after reporting it enough times, you just think this is how it was ment to work unless you are a network partner.

Because it's so extremely difficult to know what bugs are out there, many of us are wasting our time reporting similar bugs or ones that have previous bug tracking numbers, I resorted to using the forums with Bug in the subject and then putting what you tried and any workarounds might be to help and alert others. I tend to do this first thing now and then reference this back to Zimbra support when I open a ticket and then update the Forum post with the Bug tracking id for others to report. Note: it is rare for them to read the forum link however; and recently they offered me a workaround to an existing bug when I clearly gave them one in the forum post for zmresolverctl. ;-) They quickly close that ticket down and ask for feedback on how it went. It's a crazy system. Anyone else have a better idea? I am game.

I know of no other way and Zimbra is wasting a lot of our collective man hours which is amplified by every administrator including the users they manage here when a serious bug crops up. In our business, even a min of downtime is amplified by the number of users we manage so I find it frustrating that they don't have a similar mindset given the business they are in.

Jim
DennisT
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Re: Zimbra customer support portal comment

Post by DennisT »

Today I went to the portal to respond to a case I opened recently. Even though I received a email response, my case doesn't show. I'm finding it difficult to understand why this portal is so poorly run.
Zimbra support - The product you sell is a email server. Strange as it may be, we use that product for our email. What do you think will happen if our server has problems (IE Cannot send/receive email)? We will open a case on the support portal. What good do you think it does to communicate exclusively via email when the customer's email isn't functional? This isn't rocket science. Fix your support portal software and educate your support group on how to use it and ensure they use it properly.
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Re: Zimbra customer support portal comment

Post by barrydegraaff »

Took a while, but the Tinypic extension is now disabled on the forums.
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DennisT
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Re: Zimbra customer support portal comment

Post by DennisT »

I have an open case for professional services I opened on 5/20. No response other than an acknowledgement. A inquiry on the case for a status on 6/22 resulted in no response. The case is for a OS migration. Since then I've spent 3 Sundays trying to do a migration myself and have been blocked each time. To say I'm extremely frustrated would be an understatement. Our new GM wants to move to GSuite and as of right now I can see no reason not to and a good reason to migrate - getting this OS upgrade off my back.

My cases on the portal were messed up again and I had to open my third (or was it fourth) case on getting it fixed.

I'm paying for support but I don't feel I'm getting much for my money. I used to rate Zimbra 10/10 on support. Now it would be between a 1 and 2.
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