Digital Meanderings
Meanderings of a coder

Note:

A tale of love lost and poor customer service.

The Backstory

I originally purchased Iambic’s Agendus in November 2004. Between then and now I purchased quite a few upgrades and their 3D Icon collection.

Up until recently I have been very happy with the application. I love the layout, I love being able to associate icons with tasks and appointments. I love Agendus! At least I used to love Agendus.

The Current Situation

I’ve recently run into a problem syncing with Outlook. Every time I associate an icon with a meeting Agendus it changes the meeting organizer to me! This problem is reproducible and very troublesome.

In my current job, meetings are scheduled and updated by a variety of people. So, when I sync my Treo 650, and the meeting has been updated, I don’t get the update. The update comes through Outlook and I accept it, but Outlook can’t find the meeting anymore. Therefore I have two choices - update the meeting manually or don’t worry about the meeting updated. Both are unreasonable in my opinion.

An Attempt at Resolution *

On 7/31/2007 I submitted ticket YNR-385653. The staff replied on 8/8/2007 asking for clarification on my issue, I replied to his request one day later. At the time of this article I have yet to receive a reply. In my opinion this is unacceptable for a few reasons.

1. I encounter this problem every time I add an icon. If Iambic can’t reproduce they should contact me.
2. If they are researching the issue, I should be alerted. There is no excuse for this utter lack of communication.
3. If they are able to reproduce it and are going to include a fix in a future release, I should be made aware of it.

Trying to Understand

I am a software developer. I provide customer support and I carry an on-call phone. I understand how it takes time to resolve an issue - research, coding, testing, etc. Developers are over-worked and support teams are often under-staffed. But in my experience there is never a good reason to leave a customer in the dark. It is unacceptable to leave a customer in the dark, especially for as long as I have been.

Important Reminders

For me, this underscores how important it is to keep my customers in the loop. The software I work on affects a person’s ability to do their job and it is my job to fix it. When a problem happens they understandably get worried and frustrated.

For the corporations out there, I hope they realize how important it is to keep communication between themselves and their customers.

In the case of Iambic, I think they tried but they unfortunately failed. The only means of communication I can find is their trouble ticket application. But what if, as in my case, I haven’t heard anything? Do I send another message through ticket application and have my request go to the bottom of the queue?

What I’m getting at is this - Iambic, please provide another means of communication. Have your support staff reminded of aging issues. If the support staff is too small, at least send some kind of automated notification. The best situation would be to provide a telephone number or an email address that goes to an actual person.

* My Email Communication with Iambic

7/31/07 - The First Email - Sent by Me

I’ve run into a problem when I sync Meetings between Agendus and Outlook. When the meeting is initially sync’d the “Meeting Organizer” is set appropriately to the person who sent out the meeting invitation. As soon as I change the icon associated with the meeting, the “Meeting Organizer” is set to me. Is there any way to resolve this?

8/5/07 - The Second Email - Sent by Me

It has been a few days and I have yet to hear anything from Iambic. I have even received a “Customer Satisfaction” survey but still no response. Is anyone looking into this?

8/8/07 - The Third Email - Sent by Iambic

I need to tell you a little bit about how our ticket support software works. When you create a ticket, it goes to the list. We work from the bottom in order to answer the oldest first. When you repost into the same ticket, it move to the top of the list again. I realize that you had no way of knowing this, so please just consider it information for the future.

Please explain - do you mean the Contact for the meeting? By what means are you sending out the invitations? Are you using the Attendees module over SMS? Or an Exchange Server? I don’t see a similar report in our bug tracking suite, but if you’ll give me the details, I’ll try to replicate and report it as a bug if we need to.

8/9/07 - The Fourth (and most recent) Email - Sent by Me

The company I work for uses Exchange Server 2003 and Outlook 2003 is
installed on the desktop. My operating system is Windows XP, SP2.

When a meeting request arrives from a co-worker and I sync Outlook with my
Verizon-branded Treo 650, the meeting in Agendus looks as expected. I like
to change the Category and the icon of the meetings I’m attending. I change
the Category in Outlook before I sync, I change the icon using Agendus and
then I sync again. After the second sync, I am set to the “Meeting
Organizer.”

Below are the steps I can use to reproduce the problem 100% of the time.

1. Receive and accept a meeting request. (Takes place in Outlook)
2. Update the “Category” of the meeting request and save it. (Takes place in
Outlook)
3. Sync. (Using Palm Desktop and the Outlook conduit)
4. For testing purposes, I sync again.
5. I look at the meeting in Outlook and the “Organizer” is the same person
that sent the meeting request.
6. I update that same meeting in Agendus to include an icon.
7. Sync.
8. I look at the meeting in Outlook and the “Organizer” is set to me.

If you need anymore details, please let me know.

By the way, the Agendus Issue System should alert a user if their update is
going to cause the issue to drop to the bottom of the queue. This is a major
iritation, and although it may be in the FAQ, this is an important thing to
make the users aware of.

I’ve been using Agendus for quite awhile now, and I’ve purchased many, many
upgrades. This situation is causing me to re-evaluate my relationship with
Iambic. I realize that nothing in this, or the previous, paragraph is your
fault, I just wanted to make mention of it.

Thank you for your time and your attention in this matter.

Updates!

Well it looks like Iambic has people monitoring Digg, Reddit, etc. Last night when I checked my email I received a note from the COO/CIO at Iambic. His message his posted below.

9/1/07 - Email from Adriano Chiaretta COO/CIO

Hello Zack,

I just wanted to personally follow-up to your blog’s post about your
recent misadventures when trying to get in touch with our Tech Support.

Please accept my apologies for what happened — we do our very best to
promptly and effectively reply to anyone contacting us, but at times
things just don’t go the way they are supposed to.

You can expect a follow-up on your problem from our Tech Support by the
end of Tuesday (since Monday is Holiday in US), at the very latest.

Best Regards,

- Adriano

———————————————
Adriano Chiaretta
–
COO
iambic, Inc.
1270 Oakmead PKWY STE 214
Sunnyvale, CA 94085
http://www.iambic.com
Redefining Productivity

9/2/07 - My response

Adriano -

Thank you for your email. I’m sorry that I had to resort to writing a blog entry regarding this matter but I had no other choice.

I’d also like to thank you for securing a follow-up for me. I look forward to their email.

Thanks again.

- Zack

9/4/07 - A Response From Iambic Technical Support

Hello Zack,
My name is Michael, and I am the iambic Support Team Supervisor.

Sincere regards,
Michael
QA/Support Team
www.iambic.com

9/4/07 - My Response

Michael -

- Zack

After a week long hiatus from the Internet, read: I went on a real vacation, I am now back. Today, for the first time, I checked my blog and its stats. What’s this? A ton of hits on June 15th? Where did they come from? Why Mobuzz TV.

While I’m happy for the traffic, I’m sorry to see Karina leave. It seems that a post I wrote awhile back on my favorite podcasts made it onto the episode’s web page.

Karina, you will be sorely missed. Your banter and wonderful personality is one of the reasons why I love Mobuzz. Good luck in all your future endeavors.

It seems that Leafyhost is still proving to be a bad hosting choice. I just received and email from Jon H, a current Leafyhost subscriber. It turns out that they are still up to their old tricks. Below you will find the contents of his email. I’ve also added this email as a comment to the original post.

I have been a customer with LeafyHost since June of 2004 (back when they were Aetheri) and at this point I’m very fed up with them. I had great patience with them when they had their hard drive failure last year because they had been a very good host for my site. I use my domain largely for e-mail and hosting images, so downtime wasn’t really an issue for me. Also, Christopher and I had been posting on the same forum (not Ars) for something like six years and he hooked me up with a free hosting package after my prior host ( vectorstar.net) had massive downtime issues because they refused to replace a failing network card (absurd, I know). They had been prompt in handling what few support issues I brought to their attention and all was well. Things have changed for the worse since the drive failure. At this point LeafyHost is on yet another server because “our current colocation provider has been having problems with their upstream bandwidth providers, and combined with the issues with securing more power in the past that they’ve had, they are moving out of the data center where we are currently located.” This was handled with few hiccups with the exception of my site being a 404 even after all the dust had settled, but as far as I can tell that wasn’t their fault. The issue had resolved itself by the time I fired off an e-mail to them.

The problem I have with them at this point is that I have two support tickets that have been open for several months. No updated information for the tickets has been supplied in about as long as the tickets have been open. The first ticket is a real minor issue that I just brought to their attention since it was affecting all users (DSPAM died). I was told on 2/22/07 that “It looks like we have a fix, but we need to test it out through our dev server first. Once that looks to be stable, I’ll move it over to Uffish and update this ticket.” Nothing since. It’s a minor issue since Thunderbird has done a superb job of filtering out most of the junk mail I receive, but I am frustrated with the lack of *any* information since February.

The second ticket is a much more severe issue for me: I can receive mail, but am unable to send mail. The last piece of information I received on this issue was when Sam told me he was passing the issue over to Chris and that he would look into it. I haven’t heard a thing from either Chris or Sam on the issue since that day. I have sent several e-mails to them over the last two months asking if any progress has been made on the issue and have not had a single reply to any of them. No “Hey, we’re still looking into it,” or a “We’re working on fixing it now,” or even a “Fuck off.” Nothing. Complete and total silence. After the migration to their third server the whole ticket system is down. You go to the page and get a page saying that they need to install the Zend optimizer on the server before the page can be displayed.

This is complete and utter bullshit. A web hosting company should respond to a user’s requests for information pertaining to the quality of services being provided. They should respond in a prompt manner with as much information as is available at the time. Before the site went down with the migration a few other users had been complaining in the LeafyHost forum about the lack of communication from Chris and Sam, or if they got a reply it was slow in coming. At this point I have to wonder if Chris and Sam even care about their hosting service at all. Have they decided that since things appear to be spiraling down the toilet they might as well piss off their customers? Have they decided that no news is good news? Are they playing NetHack all day?

These guys need to start taking their business much more seriously if they hope to make it through 2007.

I’m sorry to report that, according to CNN, Kurt Vonnegut has passed away. This is most certainly a sad day for American Literature.

I recently installed the DiggClick plugin. Although it is a great plugin I’ve noticed a small issue with it. When someone Diggs your post and they aren’t on the actual post page, the plugin gets befuddled.

Example, if the Digger is viewing the following URL (http://digg.com/view/technology/upcoming) when they Digg your post, the plugin will get befuddled and display an error message where the “DiggIt” button should be.

Note: If you are unfamiliar or uncomfortable working with a database you should not attempt this. Also make sure to backup the WordPress database in case anything really terrible happens.

In order to fix this issue you must first get the actual URL of your Digg post. It will look something like this: http://digg.com/mods/DiggClick. Next open your Wordpress database, using a tool such as PHPMyAdmin, then browse the “{blogname}_postmeta” table. Find the entry where the “meta-key” value is “DiggClick”. The “meta_value” column should contain an invalid URL. Change this value to be the actual value of your Digg post. Commit the changes then refresh your blog. The error should disappear.

The above needs to be done for every post with an error.

Another work around, that doesn’t require database hacking, is to navigate to your blog post from the digg post page. This will set the correct value in the “{blogname}_postmeta” table.

Well it has been over 24 hours since my Gmail account has been disabled.  I say disabled because everyone else I know can log into their account without an issue.  I’ve tried using my Treo 650, my home computer, my laptop and someone else’s laptop.  I’ve tried three different internet connections.  All to no avail.

I emailed Google last night about my dilemma and they responded asking me the following questions:

1) What browser version are you using? Please specify the exact version.
(In Internet Explorer, use ‘About Internet Explorer’ in the Help menu.)
2) Which Internet security, firewall, anti-virus or pop-up blocking software is installed on your computer, if any?
3) Which browser extensions or toolbars are installed, if any?
4) Do you experience this issue when logging in to your account from another browser? Mozilla Firefox is available for free download at: http://www.mozilla.org/products
5) When did this problem last occur? Please include the date and time (including time zone) so our engineers can pinpoint the incident.

I immediately responded and a few hours later I received another email asking me if the issue has been resolved.  I replied letting them know that it wasn’t.

This is really getting me down.  Is all of my email lost?  What about messages that have been sent to me since I started having problems?
I’ve been a huge fan of Google for a long time and this is really starting to change my opinion of them.  So please Google, get on the ball and fix my issue so I can start liking you again!

I consider myself to be a Google Fan Boy. I love GMail, Google Calendar, Google Documents, etc, etc. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to access my GMail account all day! I’ve tried POP access, other computers, different Internet connections and even my cell phone.  Talk about annoying. I emailed Google earlier this afternoon and I’m hoping to hear from them soon.

What really irks me is that everyone I know can log into their account without problem. People I work with, people in nearby cities, and people all around the country can log in. It seems that it is an account specific problem which makes me curious about my data - is it still there?

Coincidentally Ars Technica has an article titled The Pros and Cons of Central Storage. It is an article that definitely fits my situation.

Recently Verizon Wireless announced a sale on the Motorola Q - it was only $99 after all the rebates.

When the Q first arrived on the market I was unimpressed. The lack of a touchscreen turned me off and I have been a user of the Palm OS for about 8 years so moving to Windows Mobile wasn’t too appealing. But because of its sexy form factor and its small price tag I figured I would give it a shot.

The new phone lasted about a 1.5 days before I decided it wasn’t for me. First off, I couldn’t find any software that allowed me to sync directly with Microsoft Money. Even Microsoft didn’t have an application that was compatible with WM 5!

The next reason I didn’t keep the Q was because I kept missing calls. People would try my cell a few times and then call my apartment. The source of the problem, as I see it, was that I had some running process that was preventing my phone from ringing. Once I shut down those processes, the phone would ring. I don’t know which process it was or why it would cause such a problem, but it did. This issue could’ve been caused by my inexperience with Windows Mobile devices, but there was no way I was going to keep the phone if I had to worry about the applications I was running causing a problem with me receiving calls.

Another reason why I didn’t like the Q was the fact that it lacked a touch screen. I found myself time and again reaching for a stylus that wasn’t there. Again, I’m a heavy Palm user so I’m used to a touch screen. The scroll wheel was nice, even though its located on the right side of the device and I’m a lefty, but I wish it had a touch screen also.

Here are the things I like about the device:

• Crystal Clear Screen. The screen is beautiful and sharp.
• Small form factor. The phone didn’t weigh much at all and it was so thin.
• Sound. The sound quality was superb.
• Bluetooth. I’ve been using Bluetooth for about 2 years now and I love it. But this phone has great Bluetooth range. With my Treo 650 I can’t walk more than 10feet away before I hear static. Also, the Q supports audio! My ringtones would play over the headset and they sounded great!
• Voice Recognition. The Q comes installed with voice recognition software that worked pretty well. Even the name “Charing” (LYJC), which most VR applications mangle, was recognized by the VR software on the Q.

All things considered, the Q is a nice phone it just wasn’t for me. I’m hoping that Palm realizes the amazing draw the Q has and comes up with something similar. Until then I’ll stick with my faithful, although brick like, Treo 650.

Due to the large volume of comment spam I’ve been inundated with I have disable all comments. It’s not that many people commented on my posts but I had hopes that I could leave it open in case anyone wanted to share an opinion. Unfortunately, like many things related to the Internet, the spammers have ruined it. I hope some day to turn commenting back on, but it won’t happen until I install Captcha or some other form of “human” validation.