Last year, the Enterprise Vault support team devised a process that would eliminate "dead time" when a customer logged a case and an engineer picked it up. The idea was for this to be automatically sent out, via an email, when a support case had been registered in our case system. The idea behind this initial email response is to gather some pertinent information.
Here is a copy of what you will see :-
This section is included for you to add additional information that may be missed when logging the call. It is worthwhile filling this in and sending it back ASAP as it will help the engineer when picking up your call, and also (hopefully) stop you having to repeat yourself. When you log a case via GCSS, you are speaking to a case logger, not a technical person and sometimes the case abstracts are nowhere near what the problem is, thus causing confusion!
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TYPICAL INFORMATION NEEDED FOR TROUBLESHOOTING
If the case that you have logged is to report a problem or fault with your Enterprise Vault installation, please answer the questions below and then also provide initial technical information using the applicable document in the Self Help Resources section of this mail, otherwise simply answer these questions:
1. Please explain the problem in your own words.
2. How many users are affected?
3. Is the environment that the problem is occurring in new?
4. When did the problem start?
5. Were any changes made to the environment leading up to this problem?
Please include any other information you feel is relevant for this incident.
Thank you.
Symantec Technical Services
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The next section has been written with references to some "Self Help" Technotes, whereby we have tried to think of some of the more common issues our customers come across when logging cases. Again, it is worthwhile going through these Technotes and following the troubleshooting steps, as the main objective is for us to have as much information sent to us, and available in the case, so the engineer can pick the case up and work it immediately. Most of the steps end in requesting the Deployment Scanner .CAB file. This file is a mixture of information and logs which again will help us to assist you quicker.
SELF HELP RESOURCES
To capture the technical information needed to troubleshoot your issue, please follow the link that corresponds with the Enterprise Vault product that you are experiencing a problem with and enclose the resulting data in your reply to this email (if the data <10mb), or simply use FTP to transfer the data using the instructions below. Please advise us that you have used FTP to transfer data in your reply.
* FTP Instructions:
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/302592.htm)
* Enterprise Vault for Microsoft Exchange
ftp://exftpp.symantec.com/pub/support/products/Exchange_Mailbox_Archiving_Unit/300881.pdf
If your product is not yet listed, please gather Deployment Scanner output from the Enterprise Vault server that is applicable to the issue:
* Collecting support information using the Deployment Scanner
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/300867.htm
It may seem like a lot of effort to initially get this data, but it rarely takes that much time, and will mean that the case abstract is correct, and the engineer should be able to identify exactly what is going on, without you having to wait for us to contact you, and then request all the information. As Enterprise Vault matures as a product we will be looking into enhancing what we can do from an automated side, with regard to the client and server installations. As yet, these are ideas being looked at, but hopefully we should see some improvement in this area in the future.