Web Hosting Help - Software Questions

Last year, we acquired a multi-user license for Perldesk to handle a majority of the customer supports issue through our website. We had 4 full time support staff setup with individual accounts and one (license) for our outsourced support partner. In terms of install and customisation, I have to admit it was fairly straightforward but that’s really where the pleasantries end. From our customers’ perspective it was good but from an administrative and management perspective, it was not so good.

We noticed from day one that the program is peppered with nasty bugs i.e. access control issues and is poorly documented. A week after we purchased our licenses, we were promised a free upgrade. We promptly upgraded the day it was released to clients. However, during the upgrade we ran into installation problems with database corruptions and all sorts of weird errors popping up. Some of the support staff stayed up all night trying to troubleshoot it and send numerous support calls to Perldesk with little success. In the end, we had no choice but to wipe the database and do a clean install. Luckily we made a backup of the database and contacted existing support ticket holders to resubmit their tickets.

As you can see the exercise was both costly for my company and tarnished its reputation. I really hope they pick up their game and do more testing before release their products into the “real world”.