Salesmen & Details

I investigate & recommend most of the components of our network; hardware & software. Documentation, demos & reviews only tell part of the story. No matter how hard I try, I rely heavily on the salesman. Someone once said, "The devil is in the details." (Ambrose Bierce?) Whoever it was, they were so right. A good example happened to me out last year as I changed Help Desk work order & inventory systems.

I worked at & managed a help desk at my previous job. I've configured several different systems, so I knew what we needed. We had been using Track-it Standard edition & had upgraded from version 3, when I started with the company, to version 6 at that time. It was a pretty good bang for the buck, but too limited for what we wanted now. We had to patch all of our remote PCs & get current inventories, something that Track-it just couldn't do in our environment. About 75% of the PC's we support are in small offices scattered around the US. They're not members of our domain, can come & go as owners change & are used by people who are not picked for their computer skills.

After a lot of research & pricing, I decided on Everdream, an ASP that would do an inventory, patching, help desk work orders & even allow us to push down custom software to our remote PC's. Best of all, they did all this for the low price of $3 per PC per month.

Everdream turned out to indeed be a dream to setup. We had to install an agent on all the PC's & make sure each PC was named uniquely & according to our specifications, but that was expected. It was a lot of work, but the help desk folks got it done. The system wasn't perfect, but was OK. Work orders were a bit of a pain to enter, so we didn't get as many in as I would have liked, but the inventory & basic OS patching were pretty good. Reports were OK. I have to admit that we didn't do as much with the system as we could have, but it was a busy year & it seemed to serve us pretty well - at first.

In March, I needed to make sure all the PC's had the latest version of Java on them for the new SSL VPN to work properly. I tried to roll it out through Everdream, sure that I could, because I'd asked the salesman about this specifically. It was one of the selling points. I couldn't get it to work. Tech support said it would need to be a custom package & it would cost me $2000! No way! So we rolled it out the old fashioned way, by telling the users to install it themselves. How hard is it to go to Java.com & click download, after all? Tougher than you'd think for some of our folks, but everyone managed it.

I started a months long project of getting Everdream to live up to their promise to allow me to roll out customized programs & patches to my sites. Finally, in September, they showed me, but at the same time they informed me that their price per PC would go up to $11 - $12 per PC per month the following year AND the work order module would not be included. We negotiated that back down to $4.50 per PC with the work orders.

The huge price increase coupled with Microsoft finally getting their Windows update working well made me reevaluate Everdream. They made some nice promises, but I wasn’t happy with them. I don't like promises that take 6 months - half the contracted year - to come true. I don't have that kind of time to waste & don't need more stress fighting them for it.

We decided to go back to Track-it, upgrading to 7.0 enterprise this year. Their tech support is quick to answer & pretty good, but even their salesman has made promises they can't keep. He told me that I could turn the Solution Library on or off for my users. Turns out, without 'Service Plus' it is always on. Since we use the Solutions to store stuff for the Help Desk technicians, I really don't want the users seeing it. It turned out the fix (not supported by tech support, who did NOT tell me where to look!) was to edit 4 of the .asp files for the user web client & remove the references to 'Solutions'. My techs can still get to the Solutions through the technician client, though.

So that's the moral of today's gripe. Salesmen make promises their product can't keep & they shouldn't. I know they aren't techs, but tell me honestly what your product can do or make damn sure your tech support is good enough to make it work anyway, even if they're not supposed to.