[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen web page for paid support vendors

[Joshua D. Drake]

On 07/10/2013 10:45 AM, Mike Rylander wrote:
>
> While I am personally an active community member, I'm also an employee
> of a service provider, so unless I see something that seems
> particularly antagonistic toward service providers I'll stay out of
> most of this discussion except to say this: in my opinion, the purpose
> of the page is not well served if there is not at least some
> demonstration of competency for the specific services or products
> offered by a vendor or service provider.  I don't know what sort of
> vetting should take place, and I realize that there is a burden
> involved to fearless our volunteers, but I'm of the opinion that a
> blanket "caveat emptor" is enough to help those looking for Evergreen
> services if there are, in fact, inaccurate offerings listed.  I wish I
> had a solution, or even a suggestion, but I'm not sure I'm the one to
> be offering such in this particular case.  That said, if others feel
> my input would be valuable I'm happy to speak publicly or privately
> about possible solutions to any real or perceived problems.

This is something we run into over and PostgreSQL.org. There is a base 
set of rules (like you must list that you actually do support postgres) 
but there is no vetting process. There is both good and bad to this:

CMD for example is not 100% competent in Evergreen as a whole because 
the code base is huge. However, we are very good at very specific things 
in evergreen, mainly around debugging and fixing long standing 
performance issues. Of course, I would also put CMDs PostgreSQL (and 
Linux Sysadmin) ability up against any provider on this list, happily.

Those abilities put us in a unique situation in that we fully support 
Evergreen and we do it well but there is a very real possibility that we 
will have to do some digging should you present a problem we have not 
encountered before.

The thing about support providers is, good support providers known how 
to find and diagnose the actual problem regardless of the source of that 
problem. Once diagnosis is complete, it is relatively easy to make 
progress in finding a solution or work around.

One rather simple solution would be that the list has the ability to 
write reviews of performance very much like Yelp.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake



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