Saturday 30 June 2007

JDev OTN Forums vs Oracle Support: are OTN Forums enough?

It's a common past-time of non Oracle employees to make negative comments about Oracle Support.

This isn't one of those posts.

What this post is actually about:

In the last 3 years while I've been working with JDeveloper I've seen a great dedication by the JDev team in answering the JDev OTN Forums, as well as good input by the relative JDeveloper community at large. In fact it's so good that I rarely have to resort to Metalink or Oracle Support for support on JDeveloper; the exception being bug reports which don't appear in a public forum, but within Metalink.

So my question to you is this. Where do you now go predominately for JDeveloper support: JDev OTN Forums or Oracle Support/Metalink?

And my 2nd question: Is there any support like information you can find in the Forums that you can't find at Oracle Support/Metalink and vice versa?

What's your thoughts? Your constructive ideas appreciated.

2 comments:

Seb said...

0) Enterprise wiki
1) Google it
2) My own bookmarks
3) Jdev forum
4) Metalink

For your second question, it's true that Metalink is not an exhaustive source of information although we find unique things in it :
* verified bugs
* associated patchs and patchsets
* notes (some come from Jdev forums or blogs)

We really need a single (public) point of truth ...

Seb.

John Stegeman said...

Chris,

Welcome back. I overwhelmingly use the forums - not because I think Support/Metalink is bad, but the response time on the forums is great AND you get community responses as well, not just the JDev team's.

The other benefit is that the community benefits from my struggles, as posts on the forums are public, whereas SR's are private.

John