Sense of community

VENDORS PITCH SUPPORT as a port in a storm, a lifesaver that will be there just when you need it most. Provided, that is, you schedule your crises between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern time, Monday through Friday. When you finally do get through, you might as well listen to a recording that says, “Your problem will be fixed in the next release. Press 1 to purchase an upgrade subscription.”

It’s not the same everywhere — a few vendors still treat support as an essential service. But when you look at what you’re spending on support, do you really know what your company gets for its money?

If your company decided to dump paid support to cut costs, your IT organization would probably turn to online communities for help. How well that works depends on the quality of the community and your IT department’s ability to adapt.

An online community’s quality is determined by the openness and involvement of its participants. A closed community guards its knowledge; The practitioners that would give the best advice pay handsomely for their skills and credentials. If you’re looking for specific help with a Cisco router or an SAP integration project, you probably won’t find it online for free.

In contrast, an open community is eager to share its knowledge. That attitude typifies communities built around popular open-source projects such as Linux, BSD, Apache, PHP, and MySQL. Of course, you can’t always predict where quality, free support will pop up. It’s easier to find expert advice on BeOS than on Solaris 9. Microsoft’s .Net community, though younger than Java’s community, is just as active and helpful. In the end, the only way to gauge a community’s worth is to become a part of it for a while.

Even if an ideal online community exists — look at the wealth of resources built around ASP and JScript, for example — it can’t match some of the benefits of a vendor support program. Immediacy is the first casualty: Community experts don’t give out their phone numbers or IM handles — you’ll have to wait for your answers. And getting a good answer online can require posing your question perfectly. Use too much or too little detail, too much deference to the vendor or not enough, and your query may go unanswered for a breach of the community’s bylaws.

This is balanced by the unique benefit of community participation: All questions and answers are shared by all participants. If you find a good community, there’s a fair chance your problem has already been solved by someone else and a fair chance that they’re willing to lend you some of their experience.

When good, free support exists, vendors should be forced to justify (and lower) the cost of support contracts. If communities can’t eliminate your dependence on vendor support, they might at least take care of less urgent issues, allowing you to shift to a per-incident plan. In any case, getting involved in a community is the best way to build it into a worthwhile resource.