Now available: Consulting Services and Express Remote Assistance

To Marc and Brian: I would like to answer both questions together. Our vision for documentation, support and consulting is following:

1) Create best-in-class documentation - we've recently hired another technical writer and we plan to release documentation updates as we improve it, not just with new versions. Our primary goal is certainly to build documentation that will answer all your questions. This is the most scalable way how to help all of our clients.

2) Create "feature walkthrough" videos that will be useful if you need other members of your team to use Kentico CMS.

3) Develop official Kentico CMS traning.

4) Enhance support to 24x7 and provide a real SLA for support.

5) Provide express support through Express Remote Assistance. This is a premium, paid-for service, but you will still be able to get the same answers through e-mails.

6) Offer consulting on advanced, complex topics. As Marc said, we often answer advanced topics through our support now, but these questions are usually escalated to our development team and then communicated to the client by our support engineers, so the context of the question or some details of the answer may be lost on the way.

With a consultant, you have a single person who will answer your question directly, completely and - if you work with the consultant on an on-going basis - also with knowledge of the context of your project. Even for advanced topics that are easy to answer, you will still get the answer from our support directly. For advanced topics that require deeper understanding of your environment and project and where it makes sense to do a consulting session, you will be able to use our consultant.

If your documentation was well defined, there should be no need for consulting and would indeed step on your partners toes. I can't count the number of times I've had questions that after spending a couple hours in the documentation trying to figure out how everything is suposed to work, I finally figure out most of the above.

I know you're running a business and need to cover costs but, this is getting rediculous.

Both offerings seem to be very useful. No problem with the fees, as they shouldn't be lower as those billed by us, the partners. However, I am afraid that more and more topics will be moved from standard support to paid consulting. We have had questions as described in the column "Consulting" in the past, and they have been answered by the support (of course not with the same professionalism as we expect it from the consultants). That's why it seems wiser not to distinguish by type of questions but rather by the quality of the answers. Otherwise, some partners might be disappointed by the service.