Tech support has made us neither happy nor sad. The challenge with tech support is that it seems like every time we report something, they come up with a bunch of questions such as, What Datacap version are you using? What kind of application are you using? Is it customized? And so on. They have all of that information. That’s one issue.

Another issue is that they downgrade our priority. We say it's a priority 2 and then they downgrade it. They ask, how is it affecting you? For us, we feel the heat. We know why it is a priority 2, but they downgrade.

Then, most of the time the first answer that we receive turns out to not be possible. In many cases, we have to give them references of other customer's PMRs. We tell them something like, No, you did this for XYZ. Why are you saying to us, No, you can't do this enhancement? Then they come back a couple of days later and say, OK, yeah that's possible; we'll do it for you too. This is a real issue.

Also, there are enhancements and they say, this is an enhancement and it will be released in some future release. I understand their challenges; they can't tell us when it will be released, but we are waiting and waiting and waiting.

They are simple enhancements in terms of products. For example, the product offers certain features which we don't want to use. Our business process doesn't warrant them. We want to disable those, but there is no out-of-the-box way of disabling those through configuration or another way. We asked IBM and then they said, okay we'll do that enhancement but we are just waiting for it. Until then, we will ask the users, we will train the users, do not touch that part of the screen. That's a challenge. Every now and then, we see some adventurous user clicking some buttons and entering that part of it and filling some batches.

We do use the PMR mechanism to resolve all our issues. That's helping. Sometimes, there are some delays but I think overall, it's a good process.

Technical support is pretty good. It's a crap shoot. It depends on the engineer that you get. Some of them are really good and go above and beyond. For some of them, it's actually more like training; they're helping you with implementation. The other ones delineate the work. One of the frustrations that everybody has is, if they want to delay you, they just keep asking for additional logs: "Can you give me your logs? I want logs from this, this, this. Turn on tracing. Do this." They kind of nickel-and-dime you to death. It really does depend on the engineer that you get in support.

It’s something I want to see improved. I would like to see the engineers that do go above and beyond rewarded for that. I think, back in the FileNet days, all the surveys just went back to a big pool; individual engineers weren't rated on their individual performance. I'm not sure if that's the case anymore. This was 10 years ago. I hope that is the case, so when I fill out those surveys, I hope that goes back to reflect on the engineers themselves.

IBM has an office in Saudi Arabia, and their support is very good.

The initial time to answer is quick. But sometimes it can be challenging, even though we've already done some leg work on the issue. Once we provide that information, we sometimes get to the actual root cause and resolution. More often than that, we end up requiring some escalation to get the item resolved. Sometimes, it's the complexity of our own environment. Only sometimes is it challenging, requiring escalation through our channels.

I have used technical support a little bit. It's been going well.

We purchased IBM Forms in September 2016 and paid a significant amount of money for some custom widget work to IBM to integrate IBM Forms with the Case Manager platform. In mid-December 2016, IBM announced they were discontinuing IBM Forms. In spite of assurances that "they would make us whole", this has yet to become a reality. Moving to IBM Forms Experience Builder is going to result in a lot of throw away work and wasted money. This is significant point of contention.

I have used technical support many times. They're very good; very, very good.

We usually go through our representatives and they, in turn, will use tier 2 and tier 3 technical support to help us. We get excellent service from them.

We have used technical support a few times. It’s very good; excellent on their tech support.

IBM technical support along with engineering teams have always come to assistance to fix bugs,performance tuning and address enhancement requests .Direct involvement of IBM and a good VAR partner is key to a successful implementation.NEVER attempt implementation of IBM products in-house without an experienced VAR/Integration partner.

The technical support engineers are helpful in terms of identifying the problems and involving engineering teams as needed which will be very often in a new implementation.

Technical support is very good. It's not a widely used project, the CMOD on Z, so whenever we call, we usually get the same guy.

We have used technical support just with PMRs and so on. Then we have our sales engineers that have been assigned to us that really have been wonderful and integrate with us well. Things are going very, very well. We have been pleased and it's been a wonderful partnership.

I have not used technical support for this solution.

Not to my knowledge. Probably my technical people are using them.