max

We here at Developer Express are really proud of our Support Team and their overall performance.

From the beginning, our goal was to build the best support team, and a lot of work was done to achieve that. We built a strong team of professionals, and, in doing so, received a lot of customer praise for the job they do.

Starting from only-email support, we have constantly evolved our technical base and implemented Support Center, extended it with the KnowledgeBase, made our product documentation available online, published product demos, posted a lot of code samples via CodeCentral, worked on hundreds of video tutorials available on DevExpress Channel. We’ve also improved a number of internal practices and continue to work on everything that can help you, our customers, learn and use our products.

In essence, we grew, and we’ve grown quickly. But as with any rapid growth, there have been a couple of problems; not by design, just by happenstance.

Of course we’re working on these issues, but I have a worry that we might miss something. To fill the gap, to keep us on our toes, I would like to ask you, our loyal customers, to help us fix the issues you’ve encountered with support for our mutual win. Please give me your feedback by commenting either here or emailing me at max@devexpress.com. I’d love to get all comments on any problems you saw when working with our support service, whether it was an issue connected with technical matters, or with our support people, or with our support policies.

Thank you in advance!

We’ve recently published a new Support Center feature – the ability to start, read, and participate in a discussion on an issue right from the issue's view page. Simply click on the Discussion tab when you view an issue!

A thread will also be created on the forum corresponding to the product that the issue is about. The corresponding forum post will contain a link to the issue for easy reference.

This feature is in Beta, so any feedback you may provide is welcome!

In this post I’ll tell you how to get the most of the Support Center when you need to share your questions with your team members.

If you are a part of a development team that uses DevExpress products, you would certainly want to see any issues your coworkers may have had when working with our products. One way is to handle a database of Support Center issue IDs in some form internally to your organization. That would certainly work, but what happens if an issue were marked as Private since it contains information no one outside of your company should have access to?

Well, we've got an easy solution for you. Just check the “Issues Posted by Colleagues” section of your Support Center account:

The only problem you may find is that not all developers are properly registered with licenses via the “Manage & Assign Licenses” section of your master account. Should you have any difficulties in adjusting your developer licenses, don’t hesitate to contact us at registration@devexpress.com.

Thanks to Mary, our lead tech writer in the eXpressApp Framework Team, and Dennis, our genius young support engineer :-), we have recently published a cool resource for the eXpressApp Framework. It’s called simply: FAQ!

This is not yet a part of the regular eXpressApp Framework, but if you like this resource, we’re ready to include it.

If you think it makes sense to outline any specific topic in the FAQ or add a missing resource to any of the existing sections, you’re welcome to submit your ideas to the Support Center.

Over the years, we've introduced numerous online resources to help address the most common issues confronting our customers. Whether it's our Support Center (including our online Knowledge Base and Code Central), Online Documentation, and Peer-to-Peer Forums... we've done our best to document our products and publish relevant technical content so you can get up to speed with our tools in the shortest possible time.

If you've used these online resources in the past, you'll know that up to now, we did not have a centralized search mechanism. For instance, if you wanted to search our Support Center, you'd use the following:

...If you wanted to search our Peer-to-Peer Forums you'd use:

 ...And if you wanted to search our site/online documentation, you'd use:

Obviously, this approach is not the most efficient way in which to search for information. In fact, the process is so cumbersome that many users ignore it altogether.

Out with the Old and In with the New

As of today, we've launched a new Search Service, which is designed to query all of our web resources so you can obtain answers to your questions in seconds! This service uses significantly improved search logic to guarantee the most relevant results possible.

How to Improve Your Search Results (not that you don't already know this)

Use a wildcard like partoftheword* to obtain results including all words with the specified letters.

Use quotes like "find this" to get results including the specified phrase as is.

Please note that this is the first step in a number of planned major updates for our existing web services and as such, we're eager to hear from you. Feel free to forward your thoughts to us by email at support@devexpress.com or leave a comment here on this blog post. 

We’ve just published our new major release – DXperience v2007 vol 3. As always, we’ve introduced a bunch of new features based on the requests submitted as suggestion items to the Support Center.

However, a lot of suggestions are still not implemented, and we often receive questions on when corresponding features will be introduced.

If you think I’ll finally tell you here WHEN we’ll really implement them, you are wrong. I would love to do that, but it’s simply impossible, since a lot of factors have to be weighed when we make a decision about which features will go to the next major version and which won’t. What I’ll clarify is how treat the states of the suggestions, as well as other issue types shown by the Support Center 

,

and how you can affect the process of decision making.

Obviously the most common question we hear is what that mysterious “Accepted – TBD” state really means. Well, the Support Center already mentions that “"Accepted - Release TBD" indicates that the suggestion is under consideration and we will discuss its possible implementation in future”. Nice phrase, right?

So, what does it really mean...

It means that we understand the goal, and find that this feature may be useful for other customers. That it really makes sense to implement your suggestion at some point, we want it, and it’s possible from the technical point of view, even if the current product implementation may not allow us to implement it without rewriting it from the ground up.

You see, it’s relatively simple, but involves a lot of factors to build into the consideration, all with knock-on effects…

The next state a suggestion can get is Planned (or even Implemented). According to the Support Center hints they mean:

- "Planned" indicates that we accepted the suggestion for implementation in one of the next updates

- "Implemented" indicates that the suggestion has been implemented and will be included in a future public release

It’s important to understand that “Planned” is usually used when we finally decide that we’re ready to implement this suggestion, and want to include it in the next major version. Though it’s good news to get a notification about changing a request to this state, I would warn against relaying on it – the feature may not be included in the very next major version and it could be that we remove it if it delays the release. It’s actually a rare scenario, and we do our best to set this state only when we know that a feature will be included for sure, but anyway…

Obviously, the next common question is how I can speed up the process and get a shining notification saying “Implemented” ASAP.

To be frank, there is no good way for that. But we offer a “hidden” feature called issues tracking.

Besides the fact that it’s useful to get notifications about issue state changes, we take the total number of trackers into account when reviewing the current “Accepted – TBD” list. Possibly we’ll introduce other ways to affect this process, but I can’t speculate on that right now. What you may wish to do is to track the following suggestions corresponding to this subject:

CS55224 - Vote for suggestions

CS22007 - Points

DS41659 - Display the number of users tracking a suggestion

One more state used for Suggestion items I want to highlight is “Rejected”. Support Center tells us:

- "Rejected" indicates that we did not accept the suggestion and will not implement it

This isn’t an easy one, and we use it when we don’t want to mislead you and give a false hope that we’re continuing to consider its implementation. However, things are changing all the time and we may reconsider our decision at some point, especially taking into account a growing number of trackings for such suggestions.

The rest of state descriptions are mostly self-explanatory except for the following two:

- "Won't Fix" indicates that this is not an bug and we are not going to fix it

- "By Design" indicates that this feature was designed to work in this way.

These are definitely the two hardest ones to use, but Julian made a great job describing them in his Can't Fix? Won't Fix! blog post.

As an addendum, here is the list of remaining states:

"Can't Reproduce" indicates that we cannot reproduce the bug report based upon the information provided and additional details are required - applicable to Bug Report.

"Fixed" indicates that the bug report has been fixed and the fix will be included in the next public release - applicable to Bug Report.

"Answered" indicates that the question has been answered - applicable to Question.

"Insufficient Information" indicates that the information provided is not enough for us to give a complete solution and we need additional information - applicable to Question and Suggestion.

"Duplicate" indicates that this is a duplicated bug report and the Duplicated ID links to it - applicable to all issue types.

Well, my name is Max, and I’ve worked for Developer Express since the company was founded. Working as a key support person gives me some great experience and a total view of all the processes within the company. I thought it would be instructive to share some of my experiences with the community, to detail ideas which may help you get the most from of our services, understand more clearly how they work, and uncover “candies” hidden deep inside…

I also hope to get some good feedback from you through this blog, through which we can fill gaps in our services, and make them even better. In case you want to contact me directly, you can always reach me at max_at_devexpress_dot_com.