Recently, however, Continental switched to become a member of the star alliance, making US Airways an affiliate partner (shared benefits for elites and mileage credits for flights).  In addition, our flight window was tight due to our schedules and the wedding.  US Airways had by far the best connecting service through Charlotte that put us there in the least amount of time from Austin.  Continental had a non-stop from Houston, but it only went on certain days.  Here are some things I encountered that, looking back, made me very pleased w/ US Airways:

1. Initially we were going to leave our 9-month old daughter with her grandparents for the weekend (a first and big step), but after re-considering and finding out the wedding would be fairly baby/kid friendly we decided to bring her along.  We had assigned ourselves in exit row seating w/ extra leg room.  The flight from Charlotte to Grand Cayman was completely full except for the exit row.  In other words, there was no place else to seat us given children aren’t allowed in exit rows.  I explained to the agent at check-in and again to the gate agent that there were several other friends going to the wedding on the same flight and that they’d be happy to switch with us.  They said that was fine, but they needed the computer to issue a boarding pass for our daughter which it wouldn’t do because we were in the exit row.  So, it was a bit of a computer catch-22.  Instead of blindly following the computer like many agents due, the gate agent actually used her head and issued a hand written boarding pass.  It was easy, we got on board, switched seats, everyone was in compliance and happy.
2. When we deplaned in Grand Cayman my wife accidentally left her iPhone in the front pocket of the seat she was sitting in.  She discovered this the next day.  After reading horror stories about US Airways lost and found, I was sure it was gone forever.  Low and behold a day later I received a voice mail from the Grand Cayman airport letting me know they had her phone.  This is pretty incredible for two reasons.  One, the phone was completely out of batteries and they went out of their way to charge it.  Two, they looked through her contacts to find her “In Case of Emergency” contact listing to get in touch with me.  I called them back to let them know we’d pick it up upon our departure.  They kept it locked away and when we went to leave, we received the phone back.
3. When we booked our ticket there was no valid connecting flight returning to Austin.  Instead we booked to Houston and were planning to catch a late night one-way continental flight back to Austin.  A couple of days before our departure I checked the Charlotte – Austin flights.  Sure enough they’d added a later flight that would be an easy connection.  I called the US Airways customer service team and explained our situation.  At first they asked for a $150 / person change fee, but after re-iterating that the flight literally was not available when we booked our ticket they did a one-time courtesy change at no charge.
4. On the way out, seeing we were star alliance gold members and traveling with an infant, the check-in agent went out of her way to put us in the bulk head row and block out the middle seat so we could have the entire row to ourselves.
5. Upon arrival in Charlotte we were all able to access a very well appointed US Airways lounge and enjoy a delicious glass of wine together before heading our separate ways.

So, thanks US Airways, for making our trip an enjoyable part of our wedding vacation; as opposed to something we had to grin and bear.  I will gladly fly your airline again.

Upon our arrival Manuel and Juan (two of our team members) picked us up from the airport.  We went promptly to the loft apartment we’d rented for the week in Palermo Soho – a very nice neighborhood in Buenos Aires and fairly popular with tourists, ex-pats and tech entrepreneurs.  As is standard, we paid for the apartment in cash upon arrival and everything seemed to be in good shape.  The place was a bit more run down than the pictures on the listing had lead us to believe, but that is somewhat expected.

The loft was nice – it was on the 4th (top) floor and had three levels itself.  Per the listing it  had two of our main requirements: equal size bedrooms w/ full size beds in each & decent Internet w/ an office space to work from.   As is standard in Buenos Aires there was a keyed front door entrance to get into the building and then a keyed door to the apartment.  All doors lock when shut.

So far so good.  We unloaded all our bags, got settled in then went over to Manuel’s office to work for the day.  After work we went and met everyone at a local restaurant / pub ( Bangalore ).  Had a great time seeing the team and getting caught up with everyone.  After a few beers, we were thoroughly exhausted from all the travel and we decided to call it a night.  Juan dropped us back off at the apartment on his way home.

The next day started slowly.  I went to the super market to get some basic supplies.  It was a gorgeous day in Buenos Aires – clear, breezy, mid 70′s.   Perfect.   We opened the windows and proceeded to get settled in on our laptops.  I setup at the office upstairs and Jimmy setup on the ground floor at the kitchen table.  Both of us were responding to e-mails and taking care of various work duties.

The next thing Jimmy knows, a hand slaps him on the shoulder.  He turns around – stunned – and the person is putting his finger to his mouth “sshhhhhh” telling Jimmy to be quiet.  Jimmy exclaims and the guy starts telling him “Piso! Piso!” in English “Floor! Floor!”.  Jimmy started to resist and the person reached in his pocket as if to pull out a weapon.  At that point Jimmy got down on the floor.  There were a total of three guys in their twenties.  They began to pick up any and all electronics.  Jimmy’s mac book pro.  Two lenovo laptops.  an iPhone.  a flip HD cam.  along with the chargers, Jimmy’s notebook bag and a few other random things.   These guys were completely silent and had entered the apartment without making a sound.  At some point during this I noticed something was up.  I looked downstairs and glimpsed a stranger.  I picked up the phone upstairs to try to call the police, but it wasn’t working.  I then thought I would IM one of our team members and have them call – probably better anyway as it would be silent and they are native spanish speakers.  By the time I was about to do this, they had gone.  I went down stairs to find Jimmy shaken, but otherwise unharmed.

Upon inspection, they had gotten away with most everything.   Strangely enough they had left an iPad that was brand new in the box sitting right there.  An even stranger thing is that they brought with them and left behind cheap toys.   I swear I saw this in a movie or something.  Sound familiar to anyone? Really weird. We were wondering if they were the “toy gang” or something.

After we pulled ourselves together we contacted Juan and Manuel who drove over immediately.  We also contacted the owner of the apartment and the administrator who handled the letting.  She also came over an hour or two later.  We went down to the local police station and they took our statements and gave us a police report.  It was pretty standard for them I suppose – and they were pretty much all business, not surprised.  Afterwards we went back to the apartment and decided that we were going to move to a hotel.  We still had a fair amount of electronics and when the robbers left they’d taken a set of keys with them.  Even though the administrator was going to change the locks that day – it still didn’t feel safe.

The biggest mystery to me is how these people gained access to the apartment so silently.   In retrospect it felt very organized, targeted and professional.  I’m not sure if we were specifically setup or if they just knew that tourists often stayed in this apartment and we were the unlucky ones.  It is possible someone from the park simply saw us enter the apartment w/ our laptop bags. But it still doesn’t explain the easy entrance.  There were no forced doors / locks / anything.

To the owners credit, he agreed to give us our money back.  Still his attitude about the event was “we should expect things like this” and that “there was nothing he could do.”   I found that a little disingenuous.   Below is an e-mail I sent to him:

Dear Owner:

I almost hesitate to send this to you.  But, I wanted to follow up.  We checked into a hotel and are doing well.  It is obviously much more secure w/ a 24 hour front desk attendant and keyed entrances to the elevator and hotel room.   You asked me, what more you could do?  Well, I wanted to give you some suggestions:

1. The apartment is across the street from Armenia Plaza Park, so there is ample opportunity to observe the comings and goings of the people staying there.  It was probably pretty clear seeing two people get dropped off w/ laptop bags that we had some valuable computer equipment.   You have done very well for yourself in marketing your apartment.  It comes up reasonably well in the search engines and it has a nice page on vbro.com.  It also touts the Internet as a nice feature of the apartment.  As such, I imagine and Patricia confirmed that many people staying there usually do have iPhones, Computers, etc.   As such, it seemed just a matter of time that this would happen.  The apartment across the hall (#3) appeared to have much better locks on the door.  Given that you have so many people staying at that apartment and that you are catering to a more “high tech” crowd, I think it is reasonable that you put a more sophisticated – possibly electronic – locking mechanism in place on the front and apartment door. This way keys could be issued to the tenants and access rights taken away when they are finished with their stay.
2. I know that the policia aren’t terribly aggressive in going after this type of crime.  However, it would have helped tremendously if there was some sort of picture of the perpetrators.  Installing a camera at the top of the stairs that monitors the comings and goings from the apartment and records it to a computer hard drive (possibly even uploading it to a server) would be really easy and effective.   You might have a look at this: www.vitamindinc.com
3. It occurs to me that for the amount of computers they stole from us, it would be highly cost effective if someone rented out your place for a few days, made copies of the keys and then were able to wait until a suitable target appeared.  The people entered the apartment completely silently.  My associate was sitting at the kitchen table down stairs w/ his back turned to the door.  He did not hear a sound until someone grabbed him on the shoulder and told him to be quiet and get on the floor.  I barely heard anything sitting at the desk upstairs.  These people clearly had access to the building or were excellent at picking locks quickly and silently.  In addition, it is pretty easy to see when people would be staying in your place if you can access your listing and look at the calendar.   Maybe these people were not that sophisticated, but the intrusion felt planned, organized and targeted to me.  You are marketing your apartment at the high end of the market.  Typically we stay in an apartment in palermo hollywoodt, but we have had many problems w/ the Internet there in the past.  Thus we decided to give your place a try.   This particular apartment has a gate, a front door and then the apartment door – with very modern locks in place throughout.  It is about half the price of what you are charging.  We stayed in your place this time because we wanted to take a step up and stay in a nicer place w/ solid Internet as we wee planning to work out of the apartment much of the time.   Given that you charge this premium, I think the security of your apartment most certainly needs to be improved.

I hope that this doesn’t happen to future guests of your apartment.  I will say that I was very happy that you were agreeable to refunding our money.  And that you had the locks immediately changed.  This speaks to your character and I am not going to link to your listing when I blog about this incident.  But, I hope you heed this warning and beef things up on your end.

So that about sums it up.  I’d like to emphasize again that this was one incident out of an otherwise wonderful and productive time.  But, it did affect our entire trip.  We ended up in a hotel which was less than ideal as we would have liked to have more space to work.  Jimmy, in particular, was extremely inconvenienced as he had to finish the duration of the trip without a laptop or iPhone.  It was certainly a handicap from the get go.  Still getting to work w/ the team, getting to know everybody better and spend time with them was well worth it.  Next time we will certainly be a lot more cautious.   Lesson learned.

Luckily I had tweeted asking and Continental had tweeted back that they still accept continental currency.  So, the exclusively accepting credit card thing, wasn’t so exclusive after all.  As a result, I had brought a couple of continental currency coupons and also had plenty of cash.  So, I was relatively unaffected by this occurrence.  Still, it lead me to ponder on my 8 hour flight from Dublin to Newark the use cases of only accepting credit cards.

I asked the flight attendant if they could run tabs.  He said they could, but they generally preferred to just close out after each purchase.  That better be one fast credit card machine.  I also sincerely hope they don’t print a receipt each time.  Thinking about this more, the entire concept just seems inefficient.  Sure, it appears to solve the problem of the flight attendants always having to find change w/ cash purchases.  However, it seems as though the credit card machines just create a new set of problems.

One wonders why you even need a credit card.  Shouldn’t you be able to just “sign for the purchases” like you would at a hotel? When you buy your ticket, you can essentially setup an account and the final bill is paid when your flight is over.  This would be incredibly convenient and would address a majority of passengers.  Those that booked – not on continental.com – could still present a credit card; however, it should only need to be swiped once “to cover incidentals.”  Even better yet, why would this account simply not be setup via the on-screen display?  To take it a step further, why can’t I just put in my drink order via this same display?

In short, having to process a credit card for every on-board purchase seems like a nightmare and I would bet will result in diminished service.

A week or two ago I went to unpack the printer.  I installed everything and went through the entire setup process, which completed successfully, except when it printed there was little to no ink on the page.  After inspecting the print cartridges it appeared that they had expired.  No problem, I went down to our local computer store and picked out a brand new set of series 02 ink cartridges.   These are the individual color cartridges – five of them – plus black.   I brought the old cartridges to the store to ensure I got the right ones.  After the purchase I tossed the old ones in the trash at the store.

Back at my office, I installed the new print cartridges.  Immediately I was presented with an error “Wrong Ink Cartridges Installed” on the control panel display.  A bit confused, I decided to google the issue.  I found this HP knowledge base article.  This page indicated:

This error normally occurs when print cartridges that did not come with the printer are installed during initial printer setup. The print cartridges that come with the printer are called introductory print cartridges . Introductory print cartridges carry special ink formulations required for printer initialization.

A bit surprised I decided to contact their support via the chat feature.  What follows is a brief transcript from that chat session:

Gypsy : i would like to inform you that this message displays when the orginal cartrtidges are not being used up with the new printer
JP Maxwell : I bought HP cartridges
JP Maxwell : specifically for the 8250
JP Maxwell : it says so on the box
Gypsy : please provide me few moents to use my resources to resolve thsi issue
JP Maxwell : ok thank you
Gypsy : thank you
Gypsy : please let me know the date of purchase of this printer
Gypsy : please let me know are you receiving my responces.
Gypsy : Not to rush are you still online iwth me.
Gypsy : with*
JP Maxwell : it was about 36 months ago
Gypsy : yes and teh warranty has been expired
JP Maxwell : yes I’m sure
Gypsy : and the installed cartridges were not working because you were not using the printer
Gypsy : so they dried up.
JP Maxwell : probably
JP Maxwell : so what can I do
JP Maxwell : should I just throw the printer away?
Gypsy : you can go for trade in option
Gypsy : and get a new printer from hp
Gypsy : as we have great offers
JP Maxwell : is there a way I can order new initial cartridges
Gypsy : sorry
JP Maxwell : so you’re telling me
JP Maxwell : that because the initial cartridges didn’t work
JP Maxwell : the entire printer is worthless?
JP Maxwell : I mean this printer is completely uselss?
Gypsy : yes, but you can go for trade in option on the printer

He offered to have his supervisor contact me to discuss the trade in options.  He offered me the HP OfficeJet Pro 8000 Wireless Printer for $179.99 plus a $50 rebate if I sent in my useless photosmart printer.  That would be a total of $129.99.   A quick search on Amazon showed the same printer brand new retailing for $91.77.  Obviously the trade in wasn’t a good deal.

I then asked him about the issue w/ the photosmart printer and if I couldn’t just order the initial cartridges.  He informed me that it was impossible.  And he said that all cartridges that ship w/ these HP printers expire after 1 year.  I asked him if that then meant that the printers effectively self-destructed after a year?  So, all printers that HP ships w/ these cartridges are completely useless if they aren’t used within a year?  He informed me that was correct.

So there you have it folks.  Unbelievable.  Because the initial ink cartridges expire after 1 year.  And because they are impossible to replace.  HP leaves you w/ a completely inoperable device and w/ no apologies or options beyond over paying for yet another HP printer.  So in essence, all these printer ship w/ a self destruct mechanism that if they aren’t used they destroy themselves. Don’t know about you, but think I’ll be going with a different brand from here on out.

I talked to some of our developers and immediately we got to work on connecting a p2theme blog, status.jpmaxman.com, to my twitter feed.  It worked brilliantly.  Now, I can do all my status updates on my p2theme blog and they will instantly make it over to twitter.  From there I have a conduit to facebook & friend feed.  But, the origin feed, the master feed if you will, exists on my server and the content stays with me.  Should twitter get acquired and start inserting massive ads or get driven into the ground, I still have my status history.  In addition, as more and more services adopt the cloud feed, people can actually just subscribe to my conduit.  It can be a 100% peer to peer distributed twitter.  Dave Winer has been on a soap box about this for some time, and I’ve always agreed with him.  The Internet is meant to be distributed!

After thinking about this some more, I realized this goes way beyond status updates.  Any site – in particular news sites which we happen to run – could benefit greatly from a cloud feed conduit into other social media.  This conduit could update twitter feeds, facebook profile or fan pages, etc.  As stories are published to the news site they could instantly be syndicated to any number of places across the Internet.  As such, I decided to register: instafeed.net and put a public face to this.

We will be setting it up as an open source project and will be soliciting any help we can get in building this out.  Right now we are working on some top level architecture schemes as well as improving the core for an initial launch that will essentially just be RSS Cloud to twitter.

This is one of those projects that two weeks ago I would have never thought I’d be this deep into.  But, the pieces just kept coming together and it was too tempting to not see where it lead.  Contact me if you are interested in getting involved!

That said, it is much easier to write a blog post when something negative has happened and much more difficult to remember and write about all the positive things that happen numerous time each day.  This week I had one incident that clearly stood out and made me pause to say – now that is how customer service is done!   That company, Room and Board, is somewhat known for their good customer service.  We’ve been to their store in SoHo numerous times and have many pieces of their furniture in our apartment.  Since moving back to Austin, there is no store so we rely on their website.  Recently, we were buying some chairs for our office.  These chairs happened to be on special 15% off when we ordered them.

Unfortunately, when they arrived we had ordered slightly the wrong ones.  They did not have adjustable arms – something which makes a huge difference in comfort, in my opinion.  The ones w/ adjustable arms were not much more and it was a simple oversight when we clicked order.  And, in my mind, one of the downfalls of web shopping – had we been present we surely would have sat in, tried out and picked out the right chairs.

I called into customer service to arrange a return and hopefully to get the correct chairs sent out.  When I talked to the CSR she informed me that while she’d be happy to place the order for the new chairs, she would not be able to honor he sale price as the sale had ended the day before.  I understood why she couldn’t do it, but some how it just felt wrong.  After some discussion, I told her to just go ahead and process the return and that we’d get the chair someplace else or another time.

After I hung up the phone I was sitting there feeling bad about the entire thing.  If I had just paid more attention we would have gotten the right chairs.  If Room and Board wasn’t so inflexible.  etc, etc.  Just then my cell phone rang.  It was the Room & Board customer service rep.  She explained that she had just not felt right about not being able to give us the sale price and that she’d gone and presented our case to her manager.  They’d agreed that despite the policy, in this instant, it made since to go ahead and extend the sale price for the replacement chair, if I’d like to order it.  Absolutely, I said…. and the rest is history.

There are a few things about this that make this customer service done right.  The foremost is that a customer service rep actually looked at the situation as the unique set of events that it was and was able to step outside of the rules to make an exception.  The second was that she actually used her head to make this decision instead of just blindly following the computer screen.  And finally, that she actually cared enough to take the time to see if she could make things better.

It was a small effort, but it went a long way and in my mind they’ve earned serious points and they’ve earned a customer for life.  Anyone looking for quality home or office furnishings should seriously check them out.  Online at http://www.roomandboard.com

• LDAP time out errors
  Since I was migrating from one server to another, I wanted to get the second server setup before taking the other completely offline.  This meant that the DNS for the hostname was still technically pointed to the old server.  Once I manually put in an entry in the hosts file pointing the mail server domain name to the local public IP address, the timeouts went away and the install completed normally.
• libpcre3 missing
  During the install process it complained, though it did not error out, about this missing library.  Simply doing an apt-get to install it fixed this error.
• Helpful Hint – Logins / Password from the old server
  One thing in the instructions provided that you need to do is get your LDAP / MySQL passwords and your accounts used for spam / not spam.  To do this, on the old server:

  zmprov gacf | grep -i account

  And to get the ldap passwords:

  zmlocalconfig -s | grep -i password

  Much thanks to ZImbra support for that tip!  Made things much easier.

• SMTP Freezes after MAIL FROM
  The install and migration of the files went relatively smoothly.  When I fired things backup I did a manual telnet to port 25 to check that it was receiving mail.  The SMTP server would just freeze after I issued the MAIL FROM.  I decided to take a page from the other migration guide that said after you had finished migration to re-run the installation script.  After doing so this problem cleared.
• parts_decode_ext FAILED: Unix utility file
  Finally mail was being accepted, but I noticed it was all getting deferred.  After looking at the error message, “zimbra parts_decode_ext fail,” and doing a search – it turns out it was missing “file” a command line tool.  Again using apt-get to install file cleared this up.
• Cleaning up
  I then had to do some random clean up stuff, like adjusting the IPs that were allowed to relay to include the IP of the mail server.  Finally, some mail was getting deferred because it was trying to deliver it to the old mail server.  Once I finally switched the DNS (I had put the TTL down to 5 min) this cleared up.

So, I now have a successfully running mail server on the Rackspace Cloud.    It will be interesting to see how this performs vs. our dedicated server.  It feels much speedier already, but we’ll see how that goes as time passes.  Stay tuned.

P.S. Much thanks to Santosh Rao w/ Zimbra Support for his help during this process.

Update: Whoops!  One snag.  Road Runner is blocking the IP address of this new server – so we can’t get e-mail to road runner accounts!  http://security.rr.com/cgi-bin/block-lookup?67.23.29.240 Working w/ RackSpace to resolve this, though it is cumbersome via a chat-only support system.  Wish it had a “ticket” system like classic Rackspace.

Migrating from: RedHat EL 5 32 bit

To: Rackspace Cloud Ubuntu 8.04 LTS 64bit

This mail server only has about a dozen users.  Still, I’m going for the 2gb cloud option as I want nice performance.  We rely on e-mail more than any other form of communication at Tipit.  I am following the instructions here:

http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2007/10/moving-zcs-to-another-server.html

The first ting that concerns me is going from 250gb to 80gb.  Sure enough after moving everything over, the drive is at 60% capacity.  May need to look at bumping up the storage / increasing the server size since Rackspace cloud doesn’t let you add more than the allotted storage to the various instances.

Everything went very smoothly and being in the same data center the file move was extremely fast.  The final step:

As Root: rerun the installer without the -s option

just blew up on me.

The system will be modified.  Continue? [N] Y

Shutting down zimbra mail

Backing up the ldap database…failed.

./util/utilfunc.sh: line 1221: /opt/zimbra/openldap/sbin/slapcat: No such file or directory

After some further testing, this file does appear to be there, though it’s a symbolic link:

ls -la /opt/zimbra/openldap/sbin
total 8
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 May  3 22:30 .
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 May  3 22:30 ..
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 May  3 22:30 slapacl -> ../libexec/slapd
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 May  3 22:30 slapadd -> ../libexec/slapd
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 May  3 22:30 slapauth -> ../libexec/slapd
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 May  3 22:30 slapcat -> ../libexec/slapd
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 May  3 22:30 slapdn -> ../libexec/slapd
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 May  3 22:30 slapindex -> ../libexec/slapd
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 May  3 22:30 slappasswd -> ../libexec/slapd
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 May  3 22:30 slaptest -> ../libexec/slapd

I checked out the utilfunc.sh script and tried to run it by hand:

/opt/zimbra/openldap/sbin/slapcat -f /opt/zimbra/conf/slapd.conf -b ” -l /opt/zimbra/openldap-data/ldap.bak
-su: /opt/zimbra/openldap/sbin/slapcat: No such file or directory

Same result.   Checking the dedicated RedHat original server, the structure looks identical.  Permissions look identical.  Symbolic link looks identical.  There, taking a backup of LDAP using the same command works fine.

Alse tried:

/opt/zimbra/openldap/libexec/slapd -f /opt/zimbra/conf/slapd.conf -b ” -l /opt/zimbra/openldap-data/ldap.bak
-su: /opt/zimbra/openldap/libexec/slapd: No such file or directory

Same result

Opened a support ticket with Zimbra.  Rolled back and put original zimbra mail server back online.

Just received a very speedy response from Zimbra support:

Ideally you should have followed : http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=Network_Edition:_Moving_from_32-bit_to_64-bit_Server

I am not sure if what your are following is a very good idea if migrating between architectures. Things are bound to fail because the underlying binaries are pre compiled 32 bit binaries. It would be best if you remove the current install and do a clean install of the same version as of the old server and copy over the store,index,ldap and mysql data manually. The steps are outlined in the above wiki.

Do let me know if you run into issues.

Regards,

Santosh Rao
Zimbra Network Support

Ok, fair enough, though the symptoms of the symbolic links not working in Ubuntu don’t seem to be a 32 bit vs 64 bit binary issue.  But, sure, let’s follow the other method and see what happens.

Ok there’s the concept – now just hire the writers to do the hard work and make it an interesting story!

Tomorrow is the quarter end for WebEx. If you are interested in our core service of Meeting Center, I can offer you your first month of service for free if you sign up by tomorrow.

Great!  They’re being pro-active, they want my business both good signs for a ongoing service relationship.  I had him sign me up.  During that first month I was in the process of moving and didn’t get chance to use it too much.  During the second month I setup a handful of webex conferences.  Each time, something else went wrong.

Bad Service

One time, my screen wouldn’t refresh for anyone viewing it unless I accessed a drop down menu.  So every time I navigated to a new page I had to go up to the drop down and ask everyone on the call if they could now see the updated screen.  Made for a very painful demo.

The next time the teleconferencing was horrible.  There were massive delays, one person would finish and different people would hear that person at different times.  Everybody was unsure of when to speak and people kept getting cut off.

Variations of these problems continued.  Ok, not so great a service.  It’s not good, but not the end of the world.  I’ll keep using it as I shop around for an alternative.

Bad Usability

Throughout the service it had been difficult to navigate.  The meeting organization system seemed very clunky.  When the usability (or lack there of) really shined though was when we got a paper invoice.  That’s right, for a web service that we signed up for online they sent us a paper invoice.  How annoying.  And for $69.  Ok, let’s go setup paperless billing and pay this w/ a credit card.   After what can only be described as a process I get to the point where you have to register to be able to see / pay your invoice online.  Yes, that’s right, I already have a login, am the only user aka the admin and have a complete control panel (confusing as it may be), but now I have to register.  Ok, fine.

Yup.  The error message says it all.  After going through several web interfaces to try to get to support, I finally dig up a sign up e-mail giving me my user name that has a direct support e-mail address in it and send them an e-mail letting them know of my problem.   As of starting this post, I had received no response.  In the middle of writing it I got a response telling me that they had now associated my e-mail address w/ their billing system.  This was 5 days later.

Bad Support

In the mean time, given the bad service and terrible usability of the service, I decided it was best if I just flat out cancel it.  Well, this is when I really got irritated.  One of the worst things a web service can do, in my opinion, is make it difficult or impossible to cancel.  There is no information online that I could find on how to go about this.  There was a lot that talked about MeetMeNow (their other product), but nothing for meeting center.  Finally, I decided to just fill out the support form.  In the middle of it, when I selected it was an “emergency,” it popped up w/ a phone number.  I decided to just expedite this process and pick up the phone.

I was directed to a call center in India.  The representative told me I had called support and I needed to talk to another department.  Thankfully he transferred me.  When the other representative was on the phone the accent was so thick I could barely understand what he was saying.   Not that it matters a lot, but in my current mood it really made the process even more unpleasant.

After telling him I wanted to cancel and after being asked telling him all the problems I’ve had with the service, he agreed to go ahead and cancel it.  He then came back and said, ok, you need to give 30 days and then it extends to the end of the next billing cycle, so the soonest I can cancel the service is on July 27.  Are you kidding?  I responded.

No, sadly he was not kidding.  So, they’re milking me for another $140 for a service that never even worked for me in the first place.

I write all this for one simple reason.  If you are weighing your options and considering one of these services, heed my experience and do not use webex meeting center.  I have subsequently had serveral good experiences w/ citrix go to meeting and would recommend them any day over the webex product.