MSYoung

I am not a vendor, I am just a technician that has worked on these products. All I am doing is assisting other technicians that are having problems.

My help is worth at least as much as they pay for it, nothing.

This site is not set up by, or run by, any vendor. This site is for the users of these various machines and what is being done here is not forbidden by any vendor. The stuff that is forbidden is stuff we can't do here because we do not have access to it, only the vendor can do that.

Every vendor's product represented here allows customer administration and that is what we deal with here.

That being said, what's your problem?

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Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

Marty

slagburn

Personally I don't think vendors make much in the way of profits from the type of things that this site addresses - if anything they might make more as customers are exposed to new products and features that they wouldn't have known existed otherwise; case in point - look at the IP1100 thread in the Nortel section where a poster commented on how much they liked the look of the phone and mentioned that they had already requested a quote from their vendor - that sounds like potential profit to me and might not have happend had that person not seen that product on this site.

Most of the time the techs and engineers on here won't recommend configuration changes (in public) that could cause system degradation to the point of having to get a vendor involved (and when the vendor does get involved in fixing changes a customer made it's usually t&m) of course any tech who has been around for more than a week knows that you always document and back up before making changes.

Those of us who have been around here for awhile know who is who and how far to discuss things in the public forums as opposed to using the PM system.

Java_Bob

DITO and almost drunk

JulianW

I'm a computer programmer and my product development started to use a PBX that I was unfamiliar with. I've asked a few questions about the PBX and had good answers. While I've been there I've answered comms questions for other forum users. As far as I'm concerned this is a good resource for anyone maintaining a PBX whether new into the PBX field or long in the tooth as even the most experienced engineer won't be able to remember all of the things they need.

smaunsell

I've been a PBX engineer for over 10 years and these websites help people like myself in real world scenarios. There's only so much that books can tell you. When you get stuck in a situation where the book doesn't help, other engineer's real world experiences can help you out a lot.

Most of the people who use the sites are engineers. Technical people who have been trained on the systems and just need advice from other people who might've come across the same situation in their experience. True, there are some who are end users who have not technical training and are just trying to do things themselves to save money. But those people break it then it's their own fault. Nothing can replace training and experience.

As far as the vendors losing money goes, I don't think that's a problem. Manufacturers of systems ie Nortel, Avaya, NEC, Ericsson etc will always make money because they just sell the systems. They provide technical support only to those who have been properly trained. They do not waste their time answering questions from end users on how to set a call forward. As far as distributors go, they will always make money as they are always selling systems to resellers and providing support to trained engineers from the reseller. The also don't support end users. And as far as resellers go, they are always making money by selling systems to end users. If end users come to sites like this and find out how to do things then yes, the reseller could possibly not make as much money but that's their issue - they should password protect the system so that only they can get into it. Depending on what contract the end user has, they may have the legal right to have access to the system and if so then that's just the way it is. If it's clear that an untrained end user breaks their system and the reseller has to fix it then they are entitled to charge the end user for their time to fix it.

jack

This site is and always has been for techs by techs.

Sure there are a number of vendors and some manufactures reps on the site, but they are the minority by far. Rather than thinking that this site is designed to take away revenue they see the value a site like this provides to the end user community in general and the tech's especially.

This site's members run the gamut from folks who never logged into the system to some of the best most seasoned (not just old foggies just plain good solid tech's) folks around.


As mentioned by others we all pretty much no each other via our time here and when a new poster asks for a solution we can pretty much tell by the way the question is posted how much information to give in the response. This is not done to withold info. but rather to protect the questioneer. There are times when the correct answer is simply to contact the vendor, on the other hand changing the time on your PBX is not something I think should be among those times.

Just curious are you a vendor?

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Dogs rollover Phones hunt

Archibald J. Cox

I use this site to contact would-be Russian brides.

Oh, and answer questions that are beyond the scope of product documentation.

monkeylizard

In a past life I had to admin a Nortel PBX. Before that task, my exposure to telecom was dialing phone numbers. My vendor at the time actually trained me on how to do basic MAC tasks by setting up a one-on-one day with their lead tech. We paid for his time that day of course, but the vendor was more than happy to have us doing our own MAC work. Otherwise they had to send out a person to do 15 minutes worth of work who could have otherwise been billing time to a bigger project elsewhere.

My vendor wanted us to be self-sufficient in the day-to day garbage. I found this site years ago to get a little help when I knew what I wanted to do and where to go, but couldn't remember exact syntaxes. In the long run it really helped out having this site, my vendor, and the NTPs. There wasn't much we wanted to do but couldn't except upgrades and hardware malfunctions.

Telecom is no longer in my job (please don't kick me out) so I stay around for the off-topic and hittables. Occasionally I'll venture into the technical forums just to stay informed of what's going on. I'd like to be doing telecom again someday and some projects I have on my programming horizon could include some integration work with our Avaya.

Saying that sharing info steals from vendors is like saying a site for auto repair takes money away from garages and stealerships. If you feel confident doing it yourself, why not?

rwhite

I'm not a vendor either and I certainly don't feel any threat or pressure from those who are who frequent the site.