Skip to main content

With friends like these... (Business Partners and support)

Some time ago, Graham Dodge posted a great discussion point on business partners and brand loyalty. (See: When is an IBM Business Partner not a real partner). Today, I got to experience this first hand.

Today, we had a discussion about Active Directory. It's something we need to install, mainly to tick the business continuity box, and not something I'm particularly keen on. It's a messy rip and replace job with very little business gain. As is often the case for Microsoft products, there's no upgrade path. That's right, we're going from Old Microsoft product to New Microsoft product and the only way to do it is to throw our baby out with the bathwater and start again. I'm not happy, but it's no worse than I expected.


Messy Introductions
Our contact arrived during a painful ISP outage (more on those amazing adventures in a different post - soon). We explained about the outage and he started telling us about how he'd been head hunted by them and was considering his options.

Observation No 1: If you are a business person trying to sell a service. It's probably not wise to let potential clients know that you're thinking about leaving the company.


Product Knowledge
Discussions moved on to our systems and I mentioned that I wasn't particularly keen on Active Directory and that overall, it wasn't critically important to us except to tick some boxes. "We're primarily a domino shop", I said, expecting him to understand. I went on to suggest that although we currently have file shares, we'd probably want to replace them with something like Quickr eventually.

Our BP then launched into a giant spiel about how it was dangerous to deviate from the Microsoft Windows platform and how "maybe you know these systems really well but when the time comes to replace you, there'll only be people with Microsoft certifications about".

I stopped him and explained that our Domino servers were running on Windows but that it was great to have a choice and not be tied to a single platform. The BP went a little loony and started talking about this dangerous Quickr thing "whatever it was", and how cloud computing would fall apart as soon as your ISP did something stupid.

I had to stop him again and ask... "Are you guys really IBM business partners?". He briefly answered "Yes" and then went back to flogging the MS view of the world.

Observation 2: If you're going to use the word Business Partner to describe yourself, then you must at least have a passing familiarity with your BP's products.

Observation 3: Nobody likes being told that their roadmap is "incorrect" - particularly not by people who aren't privy to it. That sort of behaviour doesn't sell services.

I have a bunch more observations but they essentially say the same things. As a customer, I demand product loyalty from my service providers. Sure, it's ok to not be happy about moves that a parent company makes (I whine about IBM too - as I'm sure people have noticed).

There's a big difference however between whining and betrayal.

Comments

Graham Dodge said…
Gavin,

I've seen your Police Box friends in other client accounts and they certainly make it clear that their Kool Aid is brewed in Seattle.
.
Gavin Bollard said…
I'm not naming names but are you sure you don't have the building staked out?
BrownieBoy said…
Re: "maybe you know these systems really well but when the time comes to replace you, there'll only be people with Microsoft certifications about".

Unbelievable FUD. I guess you should take it as a backhanded compliment though: anybody that's half-way competent can't easily be replaced by an army of MCSE reboot monkeys (to borrow Ed Brill's term).
Gavin Bollard said…
MCSE Reboot Monkeys - I must have missed that term. It's made my day.

Popular posts from this blog

How to Change Your Notification Options for New Lotus Notes Mail in version 8.x

Don't worry, I'm not patronizing you (my readers), I just decided to re-document this for one of our internal users and thought you might want to be able to use it in your own user documentation. WHAT IS THIS DOCUMENT ABOUT? Some people who don't get a lot of mail, like to be notified when such an event occurs. Notification can be; via a sound via a pop-up box via the system tray (where the computer clock is) The pop up box looks like this; Other people, who like myself, get too much mail would rather not be notified. The aim of this document is to tell you how (and where) to turn these options on and off. CHANGING YOUR SETTINGS To change your settings from the Notes 8.x client; On the Menu, click File , then Preferences... On the left hand side , click on the little plus sign to the left of Mail to expand the options. Click on the option marked Sending and Receiving . In the middle section, under receiving, you can control your notifications. If you untick the box mark

How to Create an Auto-Response Mail Message in Lotus Notes 8.5.3+

Why would you do this? Suppose that you have an externally accessible generic email address for your company; support@mycompany.com or info@mycompany.com. You might expose this to the web and allow people to send messages to you. Setting up an auto-response email will tell the senders that their message reached its destination and that it will be dealt with accordingly.  It's also good practice to include links to FAQs or other useful information. Why 8.5.3 The techniques we'll be using here work in older versions of Notes but some of the options seem to have moved around in 8.5.3.  I figured it was a good time to show you where they've moved to. The Procedure Start Domino Designer and open the Mail file to be modified.  A really quick way to do this is to right-click on the application tab and choose "Open in Designer". In the Left hand panel of designer, expand Code and then double-click Agents.  A new window should appear. Click the action

How to Do a Mail Merge to Email using Lotus Notes

Why do one? In today's "green" world, it makes much better sense to send out emails than letters but you still want to personalize them. Sadly, by itself Lotus Notes doesn't support mail merge to email. Of course, we know that outlook does (but then it lets anyone and anything send emails for you - even when you don't want them to). So, how to do it in Notes? OpenNTF The first port of call is OpenNTF ( http://www.openntf.org/ ). This place is full of great things but most of them are really badly documented. Still, these guys give things away for free and they develop in their spare time, so we should be grateful for what we get. There's a great little project there called MailMerge Excel to Notes . Go there, click on releases and download the ZIP file. Getting to the Code The installation is tricky though I've noted that since I asked the author about the install, it's been updated (so maybe these steps are less necessary). Unzip the files to somewher