Zend support is really bad.

[smorrey@gmail.com]

Hello everyone, just wanted to share my experiences with Zend "the php
company".
I decided to do the test drive of the Enterprise grade developer
studio.
Big mistake![color=blue]
>From day one I had nothing but problems.[/color]
After realizing that something terrible had happened to my webserver
during the install process, I figured WTF maybe I did something wrong.

I wiped my hard drive and started again, this time using the
Apache/MySQL/PHP that comes with it, rather than pointing it to my own.

Same result, but this time I realized the installer had fubared some
scripts and locations. It also missed a few permissions that it should
have set.

I tracked them down, repointed some scripts to the right sockets, and I
was off.
At that point I decided to install the Developer Studio Client on my
workstation.

That thing just crapped out saying it couldn't find some libraries.

So I created a support ticket to ask what I should do.
They kindly pointed me to an obscure knowledge base article, that
didn't appear when searching ANY of the keyword errors.

This article told me, that I needed to hexedit the installer, then
after it installed I had to hexedit the ZDE binary!

What the hell kind of installer requires you to hexedit it, before it
can work?
Furthermore the article claimed the binary was in a place that didn't
exist, so I had to updatedb and do a search on the filename, cross my
fingers and hope against hope I had picked the right one.

Fortunately I did.

After I installed the client, I decided to double check developer
studio server, and make sure everything was going fine.
Thats when I ran into this error.

"ini_modifi er error: ini_modifier was not set"

It was the sole content on EVERY page!

I created a new support ticket asking what it meant.
They emailed me asking me to send them a file generated by thier
troubleshooting utility. So I ran the utility, and sent them the file.
Another day passes by, this time they ask for access to the server.
I give them the access they request and the password.

It's now been a week. I have updated the ticket daily asking if
anything has been done. They are completely silent.

Tonight I decided I had enough, told them thanks for showing me what it
must be like to be a real paying customer, and asked them to close the
ticket. I'll watch and wait and see how long it is until they get back
with me, or close the ticket.

And to add insult to injury, when I emailed my sales person who said in
his initial email to me, that he would be happy to answer any questions
I may have, etc and so forth. I got my message back in seconds,
stating that the email address was incorrect, the email was sent to
mark@zend.com same as the letter was sent from, same as he said was
his email! He's supposed to be the Director of Inside Sales, but it
appears in the 5 days I took to evaluate the product he has been fired,
or re-assigned or something.

Ok well I'm not out anything but a lot of my time, however I just
wanted to warn any developers considering Zend products, that they
didn't care about me when I was supposed to be evaluating the
enterprise grade product. So I hope you have better luck!

[Michael Vilain]

Re: Zend support is really bad.

In article <1127550719.646 399.5530@g14g20 00cwa.googlegro ups.com>,
smorrey@gmail.c om wrote:
[color=blue]
> Hello everyone, just wanted to share my experiences with Zend "the php
> company".
> I decided to do the test drive of the Enterprise grade developer
> studio.
> Big mistake![color=green]
> >From day one I had nothing but problems.[/color]
> After realizing that something terrible had happened to my webserver
> during the install process, I figured WTF maybe I did something wrong.
>
> I wiped my hard drive and started again, this time using the
> Apache/MySQL/PHP that comes with it, rather than pointing it to my own.
>
> Same result, but this time I realized the installer had fubared some
> scripts and locations. It also missed a few permissions that it should
> have set.
>
> I tracked them down, repointed some scripts to the right sockets, and I
> was off.
> At that point I decided to install the Developer Studio Client on my
> workstation.
>
> That thing just crapped out saying it couldn't find some libraries.
>
> So I created a support ticket to ask what I should do.
> They kindly pointed me to an obscure knowledge base article, that
> didn't appear when searching ANY of the keyword errors.
>
> This article told me, that I needed to hexedit the installer, then
> after it installed I had to hexedit the ZDE binary!
>
> What the hell kind of installer requires you to hexedit it, before it
> can work?
> Furthermore the article claimed the binary was in a place that didn't
> exist, so I had to updatedb and do a search on the filename, cross my
> fingers and hope against hope I had picked the right one.
>
> Fortunately I did.
>
> After I installed the client, I decided to double check developer
> studio server, and make sure everything was going fine.
> Thats when I ran into this error.
>
> "ini_modifi er error: ini_modifier was not set"
>
> It was the sole content on EVERY page!
>
> I created a new support ticket asking what it meant.
> They emailed me asking me to send them a file generated by thier
> troubleshooting utility. So I ran the utility, and sent them the file.
> Another day passes by, this time they ask for access to the server.
> I give them the access they request and the password.
>
> It's now been a week. I have updated the ticket daily asking if
> anything has been done. They are completely silent.
>
> Tonight I decided I had enough, told them thanks for showing me what it
> must be like to be a real paying customer, and asked them to close the
> ticket. I'll watch and wait and see how long it is until they get back
> with me, or close the ticket.
>
> And to add insult to injury, when I emailed my sales person who said in
> his initial email to me, that he would be happy to answer any questions
> I may have, etc and so forth. I got my message back in seconds,
> stating that the email address was incorrect, the email was sent to
> mark@zend.com same as the letter was sent from, same as he said was
> his email! He's supposed to be the Director of Inside Sales, but it
> appears in the 5 days I took to evaluate the product he has been fired,
> or re-assigned or something.
>
> Ok well I'm not out anything but a lot of my time, however I just
> wanted to warn any developers considering Zend products, that they
> didn't care about me when I was supposed to be evaluating the
> enterprise grade product. So I hope you have better luck![/color]

I sorta figured this to be the case. This is why I use free tools
anyway. If a company is arrogant enough to treat customers like this, I
have no use for them or their products.


BBEdit on MacOS X does all I need anyway. vim or emacs could just as
easily replace it. Pity more M$ slaves don't know about such things...

--
DeeDee, don't press that button! DeeDee! NO! Dee...

[Kimmo Laine]

Re: Zend support is really bad.

"Michael Vilain" <vilain@spamcop .net> kirjoitti
viestissä:vilai n-4E1A8C.02154924 092005@comcast. dca.giganews.co m...[color=blue]
> BBEdit on MacOS X does all I need anyway. vim or emacs could just as
> easily replace it. Pity more M$ slaves don't know about such things...
>[/color]


As long as MS slaves have Macromedia Dreamweaver, there's no need to know of
vim or emacs. since I don't use Linux on daily basis, only randomly testing
it, I've never gotten the hang of vim and I've never even dared to touch
emacs.

vim and emacs must be handy when you've used them for years, but the
threshold of starting to use them is ever so high since it appears quite
complicated. If you need a manual to learn how a text editor works, there's
something wrong with the user inerface. In my opinion...

--
SETI @ Home - Donate your cpu's idle time to science.
Further reading at <http://setiweb.ssl.ber keley.edu/>
Kimmo Laine <antaatulla.sik anautaa@gmail.c om.NOSPAM.inval id>

[Ramon]

Re: Zend support is really bad.

Thats, fair enough. As a long term user of Zend products, I have also
came to this realization. Poor support that is... But unfortunately, as
far as using PHP for a large scale projects, no other application on the
market currently comes close.

So in case of zend, its very similar to Windows 98 :) It works, just not
too well, but still better then anything out there... hopefully in the
coming month the support situation will only get better.

D.

smorrey@gmail.c om wrote:[color=blue]
> Hello everyone, just wanted to share my experiences with Zend "the php
> company".
> I decided to do the test drive of the Enterprise grade developer
> studio.
> Big mistake![color=green]
>>From day one I had nothing but problems.[/color]
> After realizing that something terrible had happened to my webserver
> during the install process, I figured WTF maybe I did something wrong.
>
> I wiped my hard drive and started again, this time using the
> Apache/MySQL/PHP that comes with it, rather than pointing it to my own.
>
> Same result, but this time I realized the installer had fubared some
> scripts and locations. It also missed a few permissions that it should
> have set.
>
> I tracked them down, repointed some scripts to the right sockets, and I
> was off.
> At that point I decided to install the Developer Studio Client on my
> workstation.
>
> That thing just crapped out saying it couldn't find some libraries.
>
> So I created a support ticket to ask what I should do.
> They kindly pointed me to an obscure knowledge base article, that
> didn't appear when searching ANY of the keyword errors.
>
> This article told me, that I needed to hexedit the installer, then
> after it installed I had to hexedit the ZDE binary!
>
> What the hell kind of installer requires you to hexedit it, before it
> can work?
> Furthermore the article claimed the binary was in a place that didn't
> exist, so I had to updatedb and do a search on the filename, cross my
> fingers and hope against hope I had picked the right one.
>
> Fortunately I did.
>
> After I installed the client, I decided to double check developer
> studio server, and make sure everything was going fine.
> Thats when I ran into this error.
>
> "ini_modifi er error: ini_modifier was not set"
>
> It was the sole content on EVERY page!
>
> I created a new support ticket asking what it meant.
> They emailed me asking me to send them a file generated by thier
> troubleshooting utility. So I ran the utility, and sent them the file.
> Another day passes by, this time they ask for access to the server.
> I give them the access they request and the password.
>
> It's now been a week. I have updated the ticket daily asking if
> anything has been done. They are completely silent.
>
> Tonight I decided I had enough, told them thanks for showing me what it
> must be like to be a real paying customer, and asked them to close the
> ticket. I'll watch and wait and see how long it is until they get back
> with me, or close the ticket.
>
> And to add insult to injury, when I emailed my sales person who said in
> his initial email to me, that he would be happy to answer any questions
> I may have, etc and so forth. I got my message back in seconds,
> stating that the email address was incorrect, the email was sent to
> mark@zend.com same as the letter was sent from, same as he said was
> his email! He's supposed to be the Director of Inside Sales, but it
> appears in the 5 days I took to evaluate the product he has been fired,
> or re-assigned or something.
>
> Ok well I'm not out anything but a lot of my time, however I just
> wanted to warn any developers considering Zend products, that they
> didn't care about me when I was supposed to be evaluating the
> enterprise grade product. So I hope you have better luck!
>[/color]

[Ramon]

Re: Zend support is really bad.

Just out of interest, you didn't get Zend Studio 5? Because that's only
available in Beta...

Ramon wrote:[color=blue]
> Thats, fair enough. As a long term user of Zend products, I have also
> came to this realization. Poor support that is... But unfortunately, as
> far as using PHP for a large scale projects, no other application on the
> market currently comes close.
>
> So in case of zend, its very similar to Windows 98 :) It works, just not
> too well, but still better then anything out there... hopefully in the
> coming month the support situation will only get better.
>
> D.
>
> smorrey@gmail.c om wrote:
>[color=green]
>> Hello everyone, just wanted to share my experiences with Zend "the php
>> company".
>> I decided to do the test drive of the Enterprise grade developer
>> studio.
>> Big mistake!
>>[color=darkred]
>>> From day one I had nothing but problems.[/color]
>>
>> After realizing that something terrible had happened to my webserver
>> during the install process, I figured WTF maybe I did something wrong.
>>
>> I wiped my hard drive and started again, this time using the
>> Apache/MySQL/PHP that comes with it, rather than pointing it to my own.
>>
>> Same result, but this time I realized the installer had fubared some
>> scripts and locations. It also missed a few permissions that it should
>> have set.
>>
>> I tracked them down, repointed some scripts to the right sockets, and I
>> was off.
>> At that point I decided to install the Developer Studio Client on my
>> workstation.
>>
>> That thing just crapped out saying it couldn't find some libraries.
>>
>> So I created a support ticket to ask what I should do.
>> They kindly pointed me to an obscure knowledge base article, that
>> didn't appear when searching ANY of the keyword errors.
>>
>> This article told me, that I needed to hexedit the installer, then
>> after it installed I had to hexedit the ZDE binary!
>>
>> What the hell kind of installer requires you to hexedit it, before it
>> can work?
>> Furthermore the article claimed the binary was in a place that didn't
>> exist, so I had to updatedb and do a search on the filename, cross my
>> fingers and hope against hope I had picked the right one.
>>
>> Fortunately I did.
>>
>> After I installed the client, I decided to double check developer
>> studio server, and make sure everything was going fine.
>> Thats when I ran into this error.
>>
>> "ini_modifi er error: ini_modifier was not set"
>>
>> It was the sole content on EVERY page!
>>
>> I created a new support ticket asking what it meant.
>> They emailed me asking me to send them a file generated by thier
>> troubleshooting utility. So I ran the utility, and sent them the file.
>> Another day passes by, this time they ask for access to the server.
>> I give them the access they request and the password.
>>
>> It's now been a week. I have updated the ticket daily asking if
>> anything has been done. They are completely silent.
>>
>> Tonight I decided I had enough, told them thanks for showing me what it
>> must be like to be a real paying customer, and asked them to close the
>> ticket. I'll watch and wait and see how long it is until they get back
>> with me, or close the ticket.
>>
>> And to add insult to injury, when I emailed my sales person who said in
>> his initial email to me, that he would be happy to answer any questions
>> I may have, etc and so forth. I got my message back in seconds,
>> stating that the email address was incorrect, the email was sent to
>> mark@zend.com same as the letter was sent from, same as he said was
>> his email! He's supposed to be the Director of Inside Sales, but it
>> appears in the 5 days I took to evaluate the product he has been fired,
>> or re-assigned or something.
>>
>> Ok well I'm not out anything but a lot of my time, however I just
>> wanted to warn any developers considering Zend products, that they
>> didn't care about me when I was supposed to be evaluating the
>> enterprise grade product. So I hope you have better luck!
>>[/color][/color]

[smorrey@gmail.com]

Re: Zend support is really bad.

Well it seems I was being a bit hasty, or maybe I gave them a bit of a
jolt.
Turns out as I suspected that they have no clue why this error would
occur, but a typical trigger is evidently a missing line in a config
file somewhere. They said mine looked fine.

Anyways, they finally got back to me. I guess being an Israeli company
they have something called a weekend (never heard of one, never seen
one), and evidently it's 2 whole days long.

They finally got back to me today, promised to keep in contact except
on weekends, if I was willing to give this bugger one more try.

What the hell I figure, maybe I'll learn something new, and they'll
prove me wrong. I'll set it back up, but I'm not going to spend an
excessive amount of time worrying about what the hell the error means,
since as another poster mentioned, for large scale web development in
PHP there really is !=


I still say support sucks at least a little, they could have let me
know that they don't work weekends there.

[Michael Vilain]

Re: Zend support is really bad.

In article <1127721261.307 601.289090@g14g 2000cwa.googleg roups.com>,
smorrey@gmail.c om wrote:
[color=blue]
> Well it seems I was being a bit hasty, or maybe I gave them a bit of a
> jolt.
> Turns out as I suspected that they have no clue why this error would
> occur, but a typical trigger is evidently a missing line in a config
> file somewhere. They said mine looked fine.
>
> Anyways, they finally got back to me. I guess being an Israeli company
> they have something called a weekend (never heard of one, never seen
> one), and evidently it's 2 whole days long.
>
> They finally got back to me today, promised to keep in contact except
> on weekends, if I was willing to give this bugger one more try.
>
> What the hell I figure, maybe I'll learn something new, and they'll
> prove me wrong. I'll set it back up, but I'm not going to spend an
> excessive amount of time worrying about what the hell the error means,
> since as another poster mentioned, for large scale web development in
> PHP there really is !=
>
>
> I still say support sucks at least a little, they could have let me
> know that they don't work weekends there.[/color]

Or on Shabbot. There's even a book written by G*d that says not to work
weekends. Imagine that? Try using that excuse with your boss...

--
DeeDee, don't press that button! DeeDee! NO! Dee...

[Volker Hetzer]

Re: Zend support is really bad.

smorrey@gmail.c om wrote:
[color=blue]
> Anyways, they finally got back to me. I guess being an Israeli company
> they have something called a weekend (never heard of one, never seen
> one), and evidently it's 2 whole days long.[/color]
This is part of the gregorian calendar, and most countries that have
their cultural/religious roots from "people of the book" i.e. jewish,
christian or muslim people try to have at least one, nowadays two days
off per week. Often this is saturday and sunday.
They sometimes violate that custom but only for very serious reasons.
Installation problems during *evaluation* typically mean that there's
no assembly line standing still or blast furnaces cooling down and
therefore you can wait until monday.

To name an US company, oracle has, when you open a "ticket", a special
button for this really serious type of problem where you want the camp-beds
to fold out from under the desks at oracle support. They then require you
to provide a 24h phone number and to stay where you can actually work with
them and your database. But you are not to press this button lightly
if you want them to respond seriously ever again.

Lots of Greetings!
Volker

[Justin Koivisto]

Re: Zend support is really bad.

smorrey@gmail.c om wrote:
[color=blue]
> Hello everyone, just wanted to share my experiences with Zend "the php
> company".
> I decided to do the test drive of the Enterprise grade developer
> studio.
> Big mistake![color=green]
>>From day one I had nothing but problems.[/color]
> After realizing that something terrible had happened to my webserver
> during the install process, I figured WTF maybe I did something wrong.
>
> I wiped my hard drive and started again, this time using the
> Apache/MySQL/PHP that comes with it, rather than pointing it to my own.
>
> Same result, but this time I realized the installer had fubared some
> scripts and locations. It also missed a few permissions that it should
> have set.
>
> I tracked them down, repointed some scripts to the right sockets, and I
> was off.
> At that point I decided to install the Developer Studio Client on my
> workstation.
>
> That thing just crapped out saying it couldn't find some libraries.
>
> So I created a support ticket to ask what I should do.
> They kindly pointed me to an obscure knowledge base article, that
> didn't appear when searching ANY of the keyword errors.
>
> This article told me, that I needed to hexedit the installer, then
> after it installed I had to hexedit the ZDE binary!
>
> What the hell kind of installer requires you to hexedit it, before it
> can work?
> Furthermore the article claimed the binary was in a place that didn't
> exist, so I had to updatedb and do a search on the filename, cross my
> fingers and hope against hope I had picked the right one.
>
> Fortunately I did.
>
> After I installed the client, I decided to double check developer
> studio server, and make sure everything was going fine.
> Thats when I ran into this error.
>
> "ini_modifi er error: ini_modifier was not set"
>
> It was the sole content on EVERY page!
>
> I created a new support ticket asking what it meant.
> They emailed me asking me to send them a file generated by thier
> troubleshooting utility. So I ran the utility, and sent them the file.
> Another day passes by, this time they ask for access to the server.
> I give them the access they request and the password.
>
> It's now been a week. I have updated the ticket daily asking if
> anything has been done. They are completely silent.
>
> Tonight I decided I had enough, told them thanks for showing me what it
> must be like to be a real paying customer, and asked them to close the
> ticket. I'll watch and wait and see how long it is until they get back
> with me, or close the ticket.
>
> And to add insult to injury, when I emailed my sales person who said in
> his initial email to me, that he would be happy to answer any questions
> I may have, etc and so forth. I got my message back in seconds,
> stating that the email address was incorrect, the email was sent to
> mark@zend.com same as the letter was sent from, same as he said was
> his email! He's supposed to be the Director of Inside Sales, but it
> appears in the 5 days I took to evaluate the product he has been fired,
> or re-assigned or something.
>
> Ok well I'm not out anything but a lot of my time, however I just
> wanted to warn any developers considering Zend products, that they
> didn't care about me when I was supposed to be evaluating the
> enterprise grade product. So I hope you have better luck![/color]

It is interesting to hear these kinda of support horror stories. I have
this type of situation before. However, I must say that my experiences
with Zend have been great. They've always gotten back to me with at
least a point in the right direction. Granted, their response time could
be a bit faster, but I never had to wait more than 3 working days for an
answer on an evaluation period, and never more than 1 for something I
had purchased. I will consider myself lucky for now. ;)

--
Justin Koivisto, ZCE - justin@koivi.co m

http://koivi.com