OAUG Customer Support Council Chair, Raymond R.
Payne, wrote the following article that is noteworthy to all Oracle customers.
Are you a member of OAUG? This is a tremendous organization and user group that I've been involved with for several years. Thank you Ray Payne for a great article.
Read on......
Who says an old dog can�t learn new tricks? For those of you who could not
join us at COLLABORATE 07, you truly missed a great conference and plenty of
opportunities to learn � even for old dogs like myself! The Customer Support
Council (CSC), along with a ton of help from Oracle, held a support panel
session that was extremely informative. I gave a presentation on recent
accomplishments of the council and Oracle working together, not the least of
which was the recent announcement from Oracle of the waiver of fees
for the first year of extended support for the 9i database product (PDF
file). Medi Goker from Oracle gave a fantastic presentation on how Oracle
Support measures its own success and responsiveness internally, and I do believe
that was a first of its kind presentation outside of the CSC. There was a quite
lively question and answer session, moderated by Oracle�s Judith Platz, with
plenty of support from a multitude of Oracle Support personnel in the
audience.
Then it came. I did not see it coming. The series of questions. �Who in the
audience has not made use of Configuration Support Manager (CSM)?� I raised my
hand. Then another, �Who in the audience has not used the SR profiles?� Once
again I raised my hand. Since I was down in the front row of seats in the room,
what I did not see behind me was that I was just about the only one in the room
raising my hand. A couple of the Oracle folks in attendance came up to me
afterwards and noted that I had been raising my hand and that they needed to get
me up to speed on some of their support tools. Wow, that was pretty
embarrassing! I confided that my company had not been exactly at the bleeding
edge, but that we were trying to correct that.
�The Power of Support� to the rescue! Within minutes, Judith Platz had
arranged for someone from her team to come to my facility in person and teach us
about some of the new support tools. Chris Warticki came out and stepped us
through an overview of Configuration Support Manager (CSM), and my co-workers
and I were very impressed. Within a couple of days, we began using projects and
profiles, and using the features of CSM to help us with our service requests.
Chris also explained to us that there were many more tools available to help us,
and that he would be happy to come back and do a deep dive session into any one
or all of them for us. And all of this, just in time, as we are preparing to
embark on a Release 12 upgrade journey!
You may be sitting there thinking to yourself that �yes, Ray got that because
he is chair of the CSC �� and it turns out that you would be wrong about that.
Oracle offers this service for free to any of its support customers! It can be
accomplished via Webcasts or live visits depending on the need. All you need to
do is contact support-training_us@oracle.com
and discuss with them your support training needs. And
best of all, this is all offered for free. Yes, I said free! As long as your
support contract is current.
To me, this is just the tip of the iceberg of �The Power of Support.� Keep
watching and reading as we develop on this theme. And yes, even if you are an
old dog like me, you can learn new tricks!
Regards,
Raymond R. �Ray� Payne
2007 Chair, OAUG Customer Support
Council
