Monday, March 07, 2005

Jira's service -- Legendary or just a legend

[Updated: See end of posting]
Recently, we came across some critical problems with our Jira installation. When we couldn't figure out/fix the problem ourselves, I posted a support request to Jira's support site. In response, I received a request for additional information. Since the request involved a fairly sizeable attachment I wrote back to clarify the request. Didn't get a response. I decided to send the attachment anyway and updated the support request with the required information and waited for a response. That was 4 days ago...The silence is deafening.

When you stick your neck out so far and claim "Legendary services"....well, you have to deliver. Atlassian's web-site quotes Jeff Bezos

"If you have an unhappy customer on the Internet, he doesn't tell his six friends, he tells his 6,000 friends"

The trouble is, there is no apparent way to escalate an issue. I couldn't find a phone number to call or any other email addresses -- other than for sales. I finally located a contact page. I filled out the form stressing the urgency of our problem and asking about an escalation process. Still not a peep.

We were considering purchasing Confluence. The one reservation that I had thus far was the lack of coherent documentation. I am now wondering if going for Confluence would be wise given the trouble I'm having with Jira; which, btw has excellent documentation.

I realize the irony of using javablogs to publish my gripe...

[Update: Mar 9 2005 2300]
Since originally posting the above, I have heard back from Atlassian. I hope the timing was just a coincidence.

The problems are being handled.

3 comments:

  1. I fully agree with you after having gone through the same troubles with Atlassian.

    Their support is really a blatant joke.

    It made our company decide for Scarab (http://scarab.tigris.org) instead of Jira and for SnipSnap (http://www.snipsnap.org) instead of Confluence.

    We do not get a better service there but at least, it is less pretentious, cheaper and pretty solid from a features point of view.

    -- Peter

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  2. I'm not sure if their service is really legendary. Jira is just too damn stable. The one problem we had was fixed within hours.

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  3. The only major problem I've had so far with JIRA was a strange issue where everything locked up after a day or so. Numerous discussion went back and forth with the Atlassian guys, who were unable to reproduce or identify the problem ( which was sad, but they did try ). I eventually found the problem was tied more to the JVM+Linux Kernel combination.

    However, support from Atlassian folk both on the mailing list, and via support@ is better than I've had from most.

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