Support - get it from vendor or from ST?

[Jlorenz]

Originally Posted by Jenn

I didn't see that anyone mentioned the following huge difference between Enterprise & Partner Support - With ST Enterprise Support, ShoreTel will NEVER come to your site and support you. If a switch becomes defective, you have to wait for next day delivery and if this occurs after UPS picks up, then you've got another day to wait. Many Partners keep spares and have SLA's in place that will get you back up and running within a few hours. That's my biggest beef with Enterprise.

Party truly and a lot of misinformation.

What is true about Enterprise
Site support is not the charter of ShoreTel or Enterprise. ShoreTel is not a Service Provider i.e As with Chirs' company (Will explain further). It is very clear in the Enterprise contract, you must have a knowledgeable competent trained engineer to do the hands on. If you as a Enterprise or Partner support need specific specialized or installation of, you can contract with ShoreTel to do this. It is not part of the Eprise contract.
You get depending on your Eprise contract 24/7/36ish support by TAC for system outages, you get hardware support aka RMA, you get direct access to KB, Downloads, Application documents and the expertise of the ShoreTel TAC.

For System returns, you stated until ups picks it up, not true. You will get a next day RMA if requested on the web log in and you will not ship the original back until the new one arrives. In the box is a UPS call tag at no charge to your the Eprise contract.

I have also and so has many other TAC engineers go the extra mile and contact Service Providers on behalf of the Eprise contract if they have spares and proceeded to get them connected, via partner to partner to make the swap.

I am not sure what type of Eprise contract you have, some are full 100%, some are no phone, some are no phones, no hardware software only. I do not know what the situation was that you had to ship the SG back first, but that is not the norm for Enterprise Support.

[Jenn]

I understand that site support isn't Enterprise Supports main focus. When a customer is looking at the options though, having on-site support might be important to them.

What I meant about UPS pick-ups wasn't about picking up the defective switch. It was about when the good unit ships from ShoreTel. If a switch goes out at 5:00pm pst, the chances that ST gets a replacement shipped out that day is slim. So the replacement would go out the following business day, next day UPS. It just pushes things out a bit...all the while the unit is down. That was my point. My apologies for the confusion.

Very nice of you (in the past) and the other TAC engineers to go the extra mile to contact the partners. I think that's great.

I don't have an Enterprise contract. I've worked for 2 ST Partners in the last 6 years (in telecom for 14 years). One of my many areas of work was support contracts - regardless of Enterprise or Partner Support.