Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncc!atha!lyndon
From: lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA (Lyndon Nerenberg)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Cayman on the net
Summary: This is why the biz groups were created.
Message-ID: <592@aurora.AthabascaU.CA>
Date: 23 May 89 16:51:35 GMT
References: <2877@cayman.COM> <7345@hoptoad.uucp> <2895@cayman.COM> <7382@hoptoad.uucp>
Reply-To: lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA
Organization: Athabasca University
Lines: 49

In article <7382@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes:
>To summarize for news.misc readers:  A company has stated its intent to
>provide technical support over the network.  The last time I heard this
>discussed, there was a very strong consensus against it; this was with
>respect to Wollongong making a similar announcement in the early
>1980's.  Many people expressed the unwillingness to pay for forwarding
>these commercial messages.  In the light on the greatly increased
>traffic, this may have changed, and I solicit comments from system
>administrators in particular.  I personally think e-mail support is a
>good idea, and I feel the earlier reluctance may have had more to do
>with a lack of respect for the quality of Wollongong's products than
>with a general policy.  In any case, this matter needs to be clarified.

The last time this made the rounds, a new top level distribution
was creates: biz. It's purpose was to carry commercial traffic from
vendors, be it advertising, product support, whatever. Only sites
explicitly requesting a particular subset of biz would receive
the postings.

One solution would be to create biz.comp.caymen. This group could
be sent to those customer sites wanting to exchange product support
information. Customer sites could get it "direct from the source" or
make arrangements amongst themselves for distribution.

As far as support via email is concerned, my feeling has always been
that if you're only sending a couple of messages a week, don't worry
about it, unless you're sending large files back and forth. Otherwise,
set up a direct link with the other site. In our case, we maintain
general email links with alberta, decwrl, and ncc. However we also
have direct links with attcan, attvcr, cedm01, lsuc, and sq for
support related mail. Given the volume of mail we exchange with the
latter group of sites (not much) I don't think any of our mainstream
feeds would complain about us routing through them instead, however
there is another overriding reason we went with direct links to our
vendors: security. In many cases, we are exchanging proprietary
information with them that would be much too vulnerable to outside
scrutiny if we routed through "third party" nodes.

Many people will argue that it's too expensive to set up a direct
mail link with a vendor who may be located across the country somwhere.
I disagree with this. If you consider the amount of time you spend making
a voice call (going through switchboards, listening to elevator music,
explaining the problem, etc) vs the amount of time it takes to transmit
an electronic document describing your problem, you'll find your phone
bills will be less if you concentrate on using email. Of course this
argument presumes you have trained your vendor to respond as quickly
to email as to voice calls.-- 
Lyndon Nerenberg / Computing Services / Athabasca University
{alberta,decwrl,ncc}!atha!lyndon || lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA