Jon's proposal from the 11/4/2008 meeting.
- Standard -
This would replace Full Support. This is the standard full-service support we give up to a reasonable point. After speaking with representatives from the Help Desk, the consensus seems to be that the term "Full" is misleading and a cause for recurring customer frustration due to unrealistic expectations. I think we need to move to terms that are somewhat different if we are going to redefine what they mean anyway.
- Basic -
This would replace Limited Support. This is for software with very limited support only. Most packages right now either have Full Support or heavy support restrictions. This would accommodate the latter.
Further granularity isn't very useful for customers because they aren't going to sort through the various restrictions on each package in a meaningful way, but we should add a support statement to the product page if it's something dramatically different than basic setup and configuration support.
- Unsupported -
The only things that use this are old, dead packages we once supported.
This shouldn't come up unless the user does an advanced search of some sort and specifically includes archived software. It's gone for a reason. When packages are archived, they should be marked as "Unsupported" and archived. I don't think a separate term for that state is a useful distinction in a support scheme.
- External / Third Party -
The biggest gray area is for packages that we don't support but are vendor-supported, or are supported by another group on campus (like the Chem Lib package on the Windows page). I think something like
- Recommended - (nix)
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Jonathan McIndoe Hunt MIT EECS '97 617.253.0172
Senior Manager Software Services
Client Support Services
Information Services & Technology, MIT