atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Toshiba Telephones & Systems Customers Doing MACs

What is your opinion/policy on giving customers eManager so that they can do their own MACs?

Are there any eManager licensing issues by doing so?

The customers are only supposed to get the My Phone Manager.

But saying that I have installed the eManager for customers in the past so long as they are shown what to do and a different login is created and not the administrator profile that way you can deny access to a lot of the engineers areas you don't want them playing with.

Also get them to sign a disclaimer saying that any programming issues in the future will be a chargeable callout and not a maintainance call.
Otherwise you can always restore it to your backup from your last maintenance call.

Ive got mixed feelings about this. First off, the sales guys here love to use that as another selling point "We'll throw in the administration software at no extra cost to you!". The problem here is that they dont know if the customer has a pc with the minimum system requirements to run eManager. Most do but there are some who dont. Second, there are alot of people who just should not touch a program like this. Third, when you give the customer this program, it can create certain instances where they bitch about having to pay for you to come fix something they screwed up. Fourth, you are gonna get calls from the customer asking you how they do certain things in eManager, things you have already told them how to do twice or more. Try sending them an invoice for your time on the phone and expecting them to pay. Thats a tough sell. And finally, eManager is a PITA to install. You can easily spend an hour or more just trying to get it up and running.

There are a few of our customers that have eManager and know what they can do and also know exactly when its time to call in the experts. Just a few though, not many at all.

From customer's viewpoint, as an IT Director, I love having access to eManager. Not only for your basic things like configuring extensions, but also more advanced things.

Without it I wouldn't even have thought some things were possible, and I never would have thought of asking our vendor about it.

But at the same time, I do realize that you can mess up quite royally, and if it were to happen, I wouldn't have any problem about paying to have someone come over and fix it.

Also, you could look at it this way. Would you let some (possibly unknown) installer come and connect to your network on his laptop, and not know what they're doing? I like to keep tabs on what goes on in my network. That's why I don't let the electronic lock guys touch anything in the network.

Even when the copier guy installed required software, by watching him, I realized it would work, but his method wasn't optimal.

So it is a two-way street. How much do you trust the customer, and how much does the customer trust you.

I make my living by knowing how to use eManager and other admin programs. Another thing lost on the salesmen. It kind of goes hand-in-hand with the philosophy of this board, "tell em what to do, not how to do it".

Again, there are some customers out there that I completely trust using eManager, very few of them.

Is there a licensing issue in giving or selling the software to your customers?

Mikko you have a very good argument. It is your network and your PBX, you should have a right to manage it (or screw it up). It sounds like you are the type of customer that I want to do business with; fair, honest and willing to accept the responsibility (and cost) for your mistakes.
Knowing your limits and when to call in the experts is very important.

I feel your pain about some vendors that don't consider your entire environment. I look after our print servers. We are not going to allow our copier/printer vendor from touching any of our computers. They just waltz in install a printer, shove the CD into the server and install whatever default crap the program suggests with no regard (ignorance) to the impact it will have on the other 60 printers that the print server services. As a result I recently spent 2 days trying to figure out why our PCs keep crashing every time they click the properties button for a specific printer.

I didn't even think of that angle... But it's true, we own the PBX, we own the system, therefore it's ours to screw up if we want to.

Of course, as a vendor, you're free to charge extra if we screw it up...