Got this last week:

“Ken, thank you for this comparison. I wish I had had it before I selected my previous Crystal Viewer…. I purchased quite a few licenses of a product and intended to schedule reports on it. The scheduling aspect never worked and no matter how many messages and emails I sent to the support people, no one EVER called me back or seemed to care that I was having problems. They literally ignored me.”

This vendor tells me that they responded to the Emails they received, and at this point the customer has moved on. However, if this customer had contacted me at the time, then their would have been no question about a response from the vendor. I review most of the products on my LINKS page at least once a year, and I write about most of the others as well. So most of these vendors are very responsive to issues that I raise. Keep that in mind next time you have a problem with any product listed on my site. You let me know and I will make sure you get a reasonable response.

Fortunately, most of the comments that I get are positive, like this:

“I wanted to let you know that I downloaded and tried the Report Runner viewer from Jeff-Net…. I had a report that was reporting off of an Outlook Exchange Calendar but generated an issue and wouldn’t run in Report Runner. The software allowed me to submit the problem and a support ticket was created.

About 10 minutes later I received an email that they wanted the offending .rpt file and were looking into the issue. About 30 minutes later from that, they had found the issue and released an update. I applied the update and it fixed the issue and my report ran in Report Runner. Amazing support considering I am using the FREE version!!”

That reminded me of my own experience with Data Link Viewer by Millet Software. I was on-site at a customer who was using DLV.  We uncovered an issue with their RPT file names which conflicted with the parameter feature of DLV. I called Ido Millet and explained the problem. Within a few hours we had an updated version that solved the problem. Since then many customers have commented on the high level of support that Ido provides, like this comment from last week:

“Also, Ido Millet provides incredible support. As a long-term user, I recommend users evaluate and embrace this product”

Have you had a notably good or bad experience with one of these vendors?  If so, please let me know.