Reporting bugs or any other issues

[SvivaManager]

Hello,

I am a customer of many different ESRI products and I am being supported by a representative company at my country, which supports all my needs and problems which I may have regarding the products of ESRI I own.

This means that whatever way of communication I would like to have with ESRI, it all must go through the representative company and not directly.

This arrangement is all good and nice until the point I witness many "unimportant" bugs and faults which are not reported to ESRI for mostly the reason of complexity to open a case/bug or the expected answers or just the importance of such report and I cannot help but wonder how ESRI claims to understand the needs and requests of users and customers and make a true connection if all communication is being made through a 3rd party company?

In the last 3 years a lot of "small issues" I found was filtered out instead of being reported to ESRI and I am fine with this, but today I have 3 bugs I'm URGING to report and I really must admit I'm very annoyed by knowing that I cannot report it to anyone other than my representative company - which will probably find me a different solution / work around so we could forget all about those bugs as most times and not report them.

And still... I wanted to ask, as customer, is there actually a way to communicate with ESRI directly or am I forced to go through a 3rd party as always?

[GabrielUpchurch1]

It is a challenging situation so I understand your frustration.  Just as there are reasons why the current support structure is problematic, there are also reasons why it was advantageous (and even necessary) to set it up this way.  The points you raise are not lost on Esri and efforts are being made to create a more unified support experience for all users.  This is not something that would just be beneficial to users but would also allow Esri to be more responsive to the needs of all users (globally) and the issues they encounter.

Big changes, especially global ones that involve numerous independent organizations, take time so in the meantime, I would suggest doing as others on this discussion suggested.  If you are not making headway with your local distributor then post your observations to GeoNet.  My situation may be unique when compared to many other Esri employees but spending time on GeoNet is actually an optional (but paid) part of my job.  I enjoy supporting customers through GeoNet so I take advantage of the opportunity when my other responsibilities allow.  I have even submitted defects to Development on behalf of GeoNet users or confirmed that there was already a documented issue.  I have also observed members of various product teams throughout Esri doing the same for their relevant products.

It is definitely a shot in the dark to post an issue to GeoNet and hope that an Esri employee with the necessary skillset and role in the company sees your post but it is always worth trying.  Even if this doesn't occur, there are many incredibly knowledgeable users (such as those in this discussion) that are active on GeoNet and happy to assist you if they can.

[SvivaManager]

It's very nice to know that ESRI's employees are that much caring and taking their work seriously beyond what expected in some cases.

I really hope ESRI will eventually take this support issue into consideration to find that this community is a strong enough support channel + customer's point of contact and invest more effort on combining it with its existing support structure - deeper that is.

Simply (or not) by being more involved and adding new features here like extra "admin buttons" that can link topics or their comments to different bugs and issues which are opened at ESRI's other systems. This could do wonders on the way ESRI approaching issues.

If this community really was some kind of a formal direct "communication line" for ESRI's support, since there is no "middle man" here, all that is left to do is acknowledgement on the issue and finding workaround suggestions, or in some cases, full solutions - easier said than done of course, but still worth consideration.

As an admin, you can get a lot of statistics to distinct real bugs from misunderstanding all through some simple tagging to topics and even then you can understand what needs to be added at the documentations for example. The possibilities are almost endless.

I'm honestly really curious about ESRI's progress with the bug I mentioned at my previous comment which I personally wrote the full solution and reason for that behavior (Portal - Configurable App Templates - Installed).

If ESRI could have linked this answer to their investigation team, this could have surely saved a lot of time.

[GabrielUpchurch1]

It falls outside of my skillset so I lack the expertise to provide anything meaningful for the configurable app issue issue you referenced but I did do a quick check.  I found that there is also a specific bug that has been documented regarding the erroneous URL that is generated.  Here is the info:

BUG-000089526:  In Portal for ArcGIS 10.3.1, a wrong URL is saved for an application created from the My Content page using a template.

The analyst that submitted this defect did a good job of relating it to BUG-000087735, which is how I was able to find it.  Both defects are marked as "Assigned" which means Development has acknowledged there is an issue and they are looking into it.  I am not in Development so it is not possible for me to obtain any specific details regarding where they are at in addressing the issue.  Hope this info is helpful.