I wish I could say I'm shocked, but the truth is I'm shocked they didn't move to kill it much sooner than this. PTC's apparent philosophy is to make the transfer of information more difficult than it needs to be.
When I contact PTC Tech Support they will contact me within 24 hours (generally). Then I have to explain what the problem is again (the one I just typed out in minute detail). Then they need to see it through a WebEx session. I think my average solution time is around 4 days from tech support.
When I contact the exploder, the contact and solution time is significantly quicker. Sometimes minutes and sometimes as logn as hours. In the rare cases where the exploder doesn't have an answer or comment, then I know it's something major. Contact and solution time is so much quicker that it beggars the mind they think closing this down is a good thing.
I should say it's significantly quicker if I don't already have the solution simply from emails I've saved that I felt may come in handy some day. This, of course, speaks to seeing people talking about something and realizing, 'Hey, I never thought about that. What a great idea!' Something we're apparently going to be stripped of.
For a long time I've thought that PTC intentionally provides less than amazing support specifically because someone internal has it in their mind that forcing customers to rely on their tech support helps justify the maintenance costs. I find it difficult to come up with an innocent explanation for documentation that says, in effect "run this query from windchill shell" and then doesn't expand on what it is you're doing, what the follow up prompts are really asking for or how to trouble shoot it yourself. Or documentation that says "before doing this action you must first do X", and then providing scant resources for actually doing "X". The worst part of this is when you're on the phone with tech support and they say "please hold on for just one minute" while you know they're digging into documentation that shows how to solve the problem step-by-step-by-step. Documentation that can't be found by the users because ... why? Because keeping it obscure or obtuse makes customers rely on tech support, justifying maintenance costs.
This less than amazing support they [intentionally?] provide is where the exploder steps up to the plate and delivers. Sometimes a base hit, sometimes a double, and sometimes a home run.
Based on this new announcement I'm sticking with 'PTC's goal is to actively hinder the user community for their software.'
In Reply to David Haigh:
The shocking news from day one of PTC Live is that PTC want's to "absorb" the mail exploder into their on-line communities forum.http://communities.ptc.com you'll see the announcement of this at the top of the page.
I went up to Ron and Dan durning the break and said what are you doing to my mail exploder. The answer was there was pressure to only have one source of communication instead of some stuff on the forum and some via the mail exploder. They are having discussions next week on how to transfer the data from ptcuser to the ptc site.
I asked if I was still going to get emails and the answer was no.
I'm sorry but this is killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
Make no mistake, if you don't raise your voice on this issue the mail exploder will disappear.
Dave Haigh
