... and forum support for SA5 has died?

Uniwares_AS

Is there no more support at all for SA5 with the release of SA6 ?

Brian Donahue

"Support" is a funny old word. We will certainly not hang up the phone on anyone using SA 5. However, if a bug is encountered that needs a bugfix, you'll probably need to upgrade to 6. We don't maintain old codebases round here.

Uniwares_AS

I do understand your point, though it would be nice to at least leave an informational message in the forum for those still using SA5.

Red Gate has a bit of a lax relation to its customers in the forums, this could improve a lot.

Brian Donahue

Agreed. We do not have a clear policy on the forums. However the assumption is forums are for peer-to-peer support and that's why there is a 24-hour delay before anything is raised as a support call. Unfortunately our community almost never pitches in. We are looking into possibly replacing forums with StackExchange sites for a better user experience.

If you have an urgent enquiry, phone or email is better.

Uniwares_AS

Especially SA doesn't have (my guess) a large enough community for peer-to-peer support to actually work. The percentage of people actively participating is always low.
But compared with other similar sites (VisualAssist for example) the responses from Red Gate personnel not always satisfy, in either time or quality.

Personally I see forums as first-class line to company support and only in second place as peer support (as is usual for almost all other companies). If that is not the intention of Red Gate's forums, it really should be made clear.

Brian Donahue

Hi Andreas,

The best thing to do would be to email your concerns to feedback@red-gate.com, as nobody of any importance looks at the forums, just the technical staff. If you can note specific instances where you were not satisfied with your responses, we can look into it.

dom.smith

It's probably worth adding that we do keep documentation for older versions of our products online, too.

For SmartAssembly, see http://www.red-gate.com/supportcenter/Content?p=SmartAssembly&c=SmartAssembly/old_help.htm.

For other products, go to the documentation for the current version, then click 'Topics for other versions of product'.

Uniwares_AS

Thats good to know. Would be even better if that would be easier to find from the main site.