On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 02:07:04AM +0300, Timo Sirainen wrote:

You should probably reply privately to me so this list won't get spammed.

I'm replying on list because I personally won't be wanting commercial support but I do work in IT (I have since 1970 or thereabouts) and have both provided and used commercial support many times over the years.

So, assume that Dovecot v1.0 will really be stable, will have real documentation, and the support isn't going to be completely in hands of just one or two guys.

I think there would basically be two types of support available:

1. Basic support

Guaranteed replies to questions within some time interval.

• what response times? a few days?

I'd want *much* better than 'a few days', for E-Mail support I'd expect an immediate (probably automatic) acknowledgement and a response from a human being within 24 hours. From the user's point of view anything more than a few hours is a bit of a disaster. The response *may* be the "we're working on it" but in many cases I'd expect it to be a (fairly simple) answer or some questions to find out more and/or some tests.

• phone support needed?

Much less necessary in my opinion, if the E-Mail or Web response is quick enough I prefer it to 'phone support.

• what would you be willing to pay for it?

Yes, if E-Mail/dovecot was a critical service.

2. Mission critical support

For those who *really* can't afford any unexpected downtime, and so would be willing to pay more for quick response times. Problems divided to different categories (eg. normal, high, critical) with different response times.

• what response times? a few days for normal, about one day for high, less for critical?

Again in my opinion very few people would be happy with any sort of computer support where the response time is 'a few days'. Unless your support system is severly overloaded you should always have the capacity to respond almost immediately. If the support queue is stacked up such that response takes 'a few days' it means that it's going to stack up more and response is going to get steadily worse!

You need a way to manage the 90% of support questions which are going to take very little time (and thus it's quickest simply to respond to 'now') while having a way to manage the longer term ones so that they don't delay the bulk of questions but on the other hand don't get forgotten.

The 'Mission critical support' would (could?) only guarantee that the customer would get a (near enough) immediate response, it can't guarantee a resolution of the problem. A problem that takes two days to sort out takes two days to sort out, if you've got too many of them then support lead times get larger and larger and no amount of prioritising the support system is going to get them fixed quicker.

All you can do for 'Mission critical support' is guarantee to respond quickly and you mustn't in the process of doing that stop responding to other support requests.

• sanctions?

I don't personally think that's a good idea, provide good responsive support and your customers will be happy.

• customized modifications, kept up-to-date for new Dovecot versions?

I'd fight shy of this, configuration management and such could become a nightmare.

• what would you be willing to pay for it?

There are probably two categories of user:-

Personal (and maybe SoHo) users who will probably be talking in
the two or three dollars/euros/pounds per month sort of amount as
a maximum.  Maybe an annual fee of ten or twenty would be better.

Commercial users to whom a few hundred a year will not be
excessive.

I'm not sure if there should be "outsourced email server maintenance" option too.

What do you mean by this exactly?

        Or maybe some really low cost support for a limited number 

of questions. Any other ideas, suggestions or tips? Did I miss something important?

You probably need to think quite hard about what the front page of your web site looks like and how the support works from there, it's the first place customers will look.

And finally, would you like to have a job related to Dovecot? :)

Not just yet! Though if/when I retire from a 9 to 5 programming job doing support by E-Mail would be quite an attractive proposition.

-- Chris Green (chris@areti.co.uk)

"Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."