Get on a Commence Maintenance Plan and Save

Customers who select Commence Annual Maintenance Programs can realise significant savings on product upgrades, new enhancements and support services.

Annual maintenance programs are quite common in the software industry and traditionally provide a lower cost alternative for ensuring customers continue to work with the latest version of the software. Commence Corporation introduced a maintenance and support program with the release of Commence RM. 

Customers benefit from maintenance in many ways:

1. Customers get the security of knowing that they are working with the latest version of the software, receiving new enhancements, patches and bug fixes as they come out.
2. Customers are able to budget for annual maintenance more easily than having to go back to management and seek approval every time an upgrade is required.
3. Customers are more willing to commit to annual maintenance than getting upgrades each year - especially if the cost of being on maintenance is far cheaper than the cost of upgrading.

Commence maintenance includes:

• Free upgrades to new versions of Commence over the 12 month period of the contract. 
• Basic technical support (2 incidents per license), by phone, fax and email.

Note: Commence maintenance can only be purchased at the time of purchasing new licenses or upgrading your existing ones.

Upgrades

The Commence development team is constantly looking at ways to improve the product. Some of the recent enhancements have been new views (grid, document, etc), Report Writer, Connect for bulk emails and significantly enhanced integration with Microsoft Office products. The Report Writer in particular provides amazing new functionality, that has never before been available from Commence.

Rest assured, the team is working on more exciting enhancements for future releases!

As well as new enhancements, the computing world is in a constant state of change with new hardware, operating systems and applications. Commence  is committed to ensuring that their software is compatible with the latest versions of Office, Outlook and operating systems from Microsoft.

As with any software product, from time to time there will be patches released to address problems or provide minor enhancements.

Our customers on maintenance receive all of these benefits at no charge. This offers great value when you consider the cost of maintenance is around half the cost of purchasing the upgrade!

Technical support

Maintenance also includes basic technical support, so we can get you the answers you need, to get you back to business again quickly.

Of course, we use Commence to manage our entire technical support process! Here is what happens on our end when you call in with a problem.

Once our representative takes your call, all of your information is checked against our Commence database. We match your company details, software and serial numbers and Commence brings up your company support details straight away.  

We then log an "incident" for you. One incident basically equates to one problem. We take all of the relevant information about the problem down and assign an engineer to work on the problem. Once we have the incident assigned Commence makes us accountable for it.

Once your incident has been assigned, in a typical technical support situation there will be some backward and forward communication to resolve the problem. This can involve different people and be via different methods (ie fax, phone or email) so we use Commence to track all of the actions associated with your incident. Everything is there under your incident so any engineer can see what has already been done, and work on the problem at any time. 

Should you not receive a follow-up or resolution in the time specified by your support contract, Commence will escalate your incident and a report of all escalated incidents is emailed to our management each day for further investigation. This may result in another engineer becoming involved, or just a simple follow up call.

If we do not hear back from you, Commence will let us know so that we can call you to confirm that the problem has been solved - simple but important!

We have a knowledgebase of frequently asked questions in Commence which allows us to share information on common problems and solutions, among our engineers.

Our goal is to solve your problem, and your incident remains open until we do this. If we can not solve it ourselves we have the full resources of Commence Corporation at our disposal.  The result is that, through our use of Commence and following the problem resolution procedures, we are able to provide technical support which exceeds our customers expectations. 

Details of all our Maintenance Agreements are available on request.

For more information please contact Advanced User Systems on 02 9878 4777, or alternatively you can use our request form which is at: http://CRMtimes.aus.com.au/feedback.