Working With Liferay Support

My Three Rules for Working with Liferay Support

Whenever I start working with a new client, I always share with them my three rules for effectively working with support:

1. Open tickets as soon as you think you will need Liferay Support. With each new ticket there is sometimes necessary "back and forth" in order to gather necessary contextual details, confirm what is being reported, etc. Opening tickets as soon as possible will hopefully help to clear this portion by the time you are ready to actually start working with Support to resolve the problem. Waiting until the last minute and expecting immediate Support assistance never ends well.

When opening a new ticket, the system will suggest documentation and links to help with self diagnosis. Check them out as they will often be relevant to the issue you are reporting.

2. Provide more context when opening the ticket, even more that you might think is necessary. Often Liferay Support will ask for logs, screen shots, thread dumps, heap dumps, property files, version details, steps to reproduce the issue, etc. If you collect and provide that context when opening the ticket, you’ll progress to issue resolution much faster. It is better to have too much information in there that support ends up not needing than to not have enough and cause support to ask for more details...

3. If Liferay Support asks for something, respond as soon as possible. The Support engineers aren't just working on your tickets, they're also working with tickets from other sources. If they ask for something they need to help troubleshoot an issue, they’ll often switch over to other tickets while waiting on a response. The worst-case scenario is when you get a follow up from Support asking if you have additional details/feedback; that gets triggered when the ticketing system prompts the Support team that a ticket has been sitting idle for a while and they're trying to determine if it needs further action or whether it can be closed due to inactivity and the message you're receiving is a sure sign that you are not responding to Support tickets in a timely manner. Responding to Support requests as soon as possible will keep the ball in Liferay Support’s court, keeping the focus on the ticket and your issue.

I have to admit, I know most of the Support engineers. They are a dedicated group of professionals who want nothing more than to help clients resolve issues as soon as possible. They amaze me at times at how quickly they can resolve issues when they have all of the context; the knowledge and experience they get helping clients every day gives them the necessary tools to diagnose and resolve issues that will impress anybody.

When I hear complaints about working with support, often times they boil down to communicating via a ticket-based system, not to the parties on either side. The process of adding a message to a ticket and waiting for a response can make issue resolution drag on longer than either side wants.

Following the three rules above though can help to take a lot of back and forth off the table, allowing Support to zero in on the issue and make suggestions for problem resolution sooner in the process.