Constructive Criticism, I hope......

General Discussions
1

I was introduced to this place by a friend and have been messing around with it for a little while. Testing it, trying to get familiar with it. Looking at some of the other products offered. I think it’s a really good idea that you have a free product that ties in a lot of the other services that can expand the free service. I like that there are tons of other products that could be used in various capacities. Right now I am trying to decide what product I would like to use as I start to build my MSP business. Having this free product to build off of really helps for the bottom line. However, In the time that I have been here, I have noticed several things that are not quite right.

I understand that Comodo One is a free product but you offer it as a base for your other products. Essentially you are using it as a marketing tool to get people to buy your other products. While support is not normally included in free products, free products are usually not used as marketing basis to get people to buy other products in the company. In this strange scenario, the support on your free product directly relates to the support of your paid products. For example, if you have an new customer and they know you are offering this free so that you will see how good the service and buy other products. Then you provide a minimum of support, how does that make your paid products look?

As a continuation of the support topic. I had an issue trying to figure out how to use the trial of NxSIEM and finally got into it after a link on an unrelated post in the forums. After that I could not seem to add what ever service that actually is to Comodo One even though you are supposed to be able too. I did post in the forums about that and as of yet have yet to receive any help on that. Once I set up my account for that, I could not figure out how to log in since the directions were not clear. I am actually in it now but two forum posts, a support ticket and a chat with support did me no good. This was support for a trial of a paid service and still could not get any meaningful support. As for the chat session, I explained the issue and was asked for my subscription ID. When I provided that I was informed that support does not handle that and I need to contact sales with a disconnect immediately following that. No, “Is there anything I can help you with?” No “Have a good evening.” I do not have a transcript of that chat because that feature did not work either. I put my email address in and sent but the transcript never showed up. Also on this topic, I have been waiting almost 48 hours now for the customers that I entered into the trial of NxSIEM and they are no where in sight. I have no idea who or what I should consult for support on that.

I would like to have a better suggestion before presenting this one but I’m just not sure how to do it. There are at least 2 forums, a support section and a consortium to keep track of to get full benefit of the products. Also, on that note, The sheer number of products. Some of them are rather confusing on what they are. Is there anyway to narrow them down or something?

In the forum, there are quit a few issues that have been answered with “We have escalated the issue” and never see anything after that. Are these issues actually being worked on? Is there any updates to looking into the issues? It just seems like you throw out the canned response and hope it’s good enough to keep people happy.

I think it is awesome that you provide a free service but in my opinion, if you are going to base future customers on and try to build a relationship with customers off this free product as a way to introduce your other paid products, might I suggest that you provide a similar level of service to everyone? Aren’t the free people the ones you are trying to impress? That is why you decided to offer a normally priced per PC product for free anyway right?

I hope this was constructive and not to negative. I was hoping to get you to rethink your support experience and maybe make things better for all of us.

Jim

2

Well said. I’m seriously rethinking my decision to use Comodo One. Based on the support I’m getting I see no reason to keep my clients on this service. Unless things change I will be moving to a different service.

3

Comodo one platform resembles a minimum viable product (MVP) as of right now. Our priorities have been captured but visibility is lacking and this experience has been frustrating for the community which your post is also capturing. @melih and @Ilker have been re-assuring that they are making this investment for the long term. The question is where does our threshold to work through these challenges lie…

4

Hi all,

First of all, thank you very much for the feedback. We understand that we need to work more on visibility and usability part of the solution to better help you.

However, please be sure that every comment, bug report, suggestion, feature request, idea is noted and related actions are planned.

Let us discuss more about this topic posts and come back to you with more action items about further improvements on product, progress and technology soon.

Best regards,
Ilker

5

As an MSP trialling the Comodo ONE platform and using some features/solutions currently with clients I would say that companies which are in business to make money, they will want to see a return on their investment. In this case the investment in Comodo ONE, Comodo will get some revenue by the MSPs selling licences of the products in the App Store. There is no obligation to purchase their services and hopefully more 3rd parties will have solutions in the App Store to promote competition. Acronis is a good example of a market leading solution now available, Comodo could have promoted their own backup solution first.

I have used a number of competing RMM tools, paid and “free, with adverts”, I currently use MAXFocus in production with my clients. It is not perfect as Comodo ONE is not perfect. Going in to the pros and cons of each solution is best left for another post. As for support from other suppliers, I have good and bad experiences, overall I would say Comodo tech support is good, not excellent. The best and most efficient way to get support I have found is to email c1-support@comodo.com​ directly, posting in the forum can be done but I find it best used as a discussion area not a support forum. Solutions to common problems could be posted by Comodo for all to see.

I agree with the overall point of @Charger440 but cannot comment on his individual technical support issues.

My final point would be that we could all setup our own individual installations of osTicket, TightVNC an open source RMM and Patch management solution but as a 2 man small MSP business, I do not have the time and hardware resources to do so. I see Comodo as helping me stitch all the services and information together and saving me time to more efficiently help my clients. MAXFocus and others offer similar solutions but at a price. Comodo ONE is evolving and with their CDM solution becoming more prominent in the ONE platform I think the solution will be compelling. Give it some time to mature and then we can fully compare it with competitors.

Mikael.

6

@Charger440 – thank you for the feedback. We always welcome feedback from the community, especially when it relates to things that can be done to make the forum a more useful resource for MSP Consortium members. That said, here a couple of points to address your concerns.

The MSP Consortium and Comodo are separate entities. The Consortium is designed to give its members access to the information, solutions and people they need to better run their business. Yes – Comodo does back the MSP Consortium. Yes – Comodo ONE is available at no charge to MSP Consortium members. But MSP Consortium members are not required to use Comodo ONE. Members are free to choose whatever solution they feel best helps them meet the needs of their managed service client base.

With regards to support, please know that though the forum provides access to the Comodo ONE development team, it is not intended to serve as a primary support tool for Comodo ONE users. The forum is a medium where members can exchange views and ideas, and where solutions can be posted to resolve known problems or issues. It is not intended to be the definitive Comodo support channel.

Formal Comodo ONE support request can be made in one of two ways:

In either case a process is started which will return a unique ticket number that can be used to track progress and promote escalation of issues should that be necessary.

If you need further assistance on your support issue, feel free to direct message me with your contact information and I can follow-up with the support team to actively address your issue.

Thanks…

Mike

7

how can we improve it exactly? If you can tell us where we should improve, we will most definitely go ahead and improve. Please try to be very specific. thank you and we are here for you

8

I would suggest more transparency and follow-up. Rather than “it’s been escalated”…and silence… maybe more info about projections and setting expectations. I received two emails this week that told me when two features were likely to be added (Q1, 2016). That’s a good step.

A nice public road map of what features are planned for when and where bug fixes are in relation to that would be a very good step.

9

Hi @PromptCare,

Thank you for appreciating the improvement on our transparency… you already posted on other topic some of the responses that you received from us :slight_smile:

We will be responding to new requests with intended time frame from now on. Also, we started to reply the old requests that we captured before with time frame as well.

We are working very hard on upcoming releases that you would start to see in a week and will continue about a month. We will start communicating these upcoming features as well as the long term goals soon.

Stay tuned and please let us know if you see any other point that we can improve.

Best regards,
Ilker

10

Indeed, we have now setup the infrastructure to be able to give this to you. We are hoping going forward, as Ilker stated, we should be able to respond with time lines to your requests. Also would it be to have a “hotline” for you guys to ring apart from the forum?

We want to be there for you 24/7/365. We need to understand every which way we can be there to help you.

11

“Hotline” would be useful for urgent support requests. As some of us are outside USA, a local number would be good. How about Skype for chat or “free” voice calls?

12

ok, let us figure out which ways we can provide for communication. thank you.

13

As discussed earlier Comodo ONE support is available by:

  1. Submitting a ticket via support.comodo.com
  2. Emailing your support question to c1-support@comodo.com

Doing so allows us to formally track tickets and monitor progress against our internal process measures. Once a ticket has been opened a support agent will often use a free remote session (Skype, GoToMeeting, etc.) to more quickly address customer issues.

Comodo MSP customers can also open tickets via our dedicated phone support number (973-396-1232). However, opening a ticket via one of the two options listed above is still preferred as doing so allows the agent to get a jump on your issue prior to getting back to you. For those out of the US, while we work on an international number, just email your issue and an agent will be happy to use a remote session to help you resolve it.

14

I’ve had good support experiences so far. I agree that people are using the forum as a way to receive support. I do think that using the forum as a way to receive support from other members works well too.

Remember that we are a community and no one is perfect. I think Comodo have done a wonderful job with taking our criticisms and feedback.

That said, I do think there could be a bit more transparency on what is going on. If there is a bug that is preventing a large amount of us, please post a sticky or send us an e-mail to let us know you’re aware and an ETA on when you can get it resolved.

15

there will be a bug fix release coming very soon. We will have squashed quite few bugs in this release, but as you know bug fix is a continous thing. Our support department will do its best to provide visibility. Sometimes its difficult to get a date from development as developers are in the middle of development and stopping them in the middle of their sprint and asking them to analyse and give date would be disruptive. But of course they will do their best to give you as much as visibility we can.

For support, you have 24/7 telephone lines as well this forum.
If you want to learn and dig deeper into the functionality of the Comodo One Platform, you can always request a one on one with our Product Engineers who will be more than happy to walk you thru and answer any questions you have on the product…for free.