Honestly, I keep trying to buy a Crystal Ball and I’ve asked all our preferred suppliers, but no one seems to have one. Printers, mice, monitors, disk drives, and SATA II RAID controllers are no problem. But no one sells a Crystal Ball.
One would make my life easier. I could then answer those support responses we get. You know, the one liners like:
“Script doesn’t work”.
If we had a crystall ball I might have an inkling as to which script doesn’t work, what the user tried, how far he got, what the expected outcome was, what the actual outcome was etc?
In the absence of fictional wizardry devices there is of course the Macro Scheduler Debugger. That has all the clues. While I certainly don’t expect every user to be expert at using the debugger it is encouraging when an attempt is made to use it. This kind of support query is far more useful:
“The script isn’t working as I would expect. The output file is not being generated. I’ve stepped through with the debugger to the point where the file is supposed to be generated but in every instance the script branches to the end at line 47 because the the value of gContinue is always False and I’m not sure why.”
Great, I have something to go on. The answer is probably there in the script or the watch list but at least I know where to focus my efforts and we can do away with a game of email tennis.
Something even closer to a crystal ball is a service called BeamYourScreen which allows us to view someone else’s desktop. We can help you debug your script using this amazing technology, but I much prefer it if the other person has had a go at it first. If you get someone else to do something for you all the time you’re never going to learn how to do it yourself, so I believe a little prompting in the right direction is beneficial.
Of course, our priority support customers have access to up to 2 hours a month of BeamYourScreen support or training, and we can also offer hourly one-one BeamYourScreen consultations or training separately.
But, as yet, no Crystal Ball or clairvoyant support staff. So if you wouldn’t mind giving us a few more clues when you email support that would be much appreciated. 🙂
These links might be helpful:
Use the Debugger
How to get Support – Help us Help You
