Offering a support option for your products is something every software vendor just has to have, and so do we at Vaadin. In Vaadin’s case, however, the support option needs to be extra good and bring more value than your average support subscription, because the Open Source product itself already has a very good forum and tons of free help material online. Vaadin Support is designed to help you in every phase your project has, from zero to done, from design to maintenance. Here is what our support customers have to say:
"We have used Vaadin Support for difficult issues, of which we didn't have experience yet, or we couldn't find answers to in a short time. Sometimes we only ask opinions on how to use or build components. In our experience, Vaadin Support has worked perfectly. Every issue has been resolved and we are very pleased with the team’s professional skills and response time."
Ari Koskenvaara, Project Manager, Festum Oy
We have a plenty of really satisfied support customers and our rating has always been above 4.5 out of 5.0. To give you a taste of this, we are launching a first-of-its-kind Free Support Week! Our Free Support Week starts next Monday with a Webinar that explains everything about it and how you can get your own free support experience.
Vaadin Support may be used for various purposes, depending on what phase your project is in. Read below to see how Vaadin Support can help you along the way.
Design & planning phase
When a new web application is still on the concept board, it’s time to make many critical choices that will have an impact during the whole lifecycle of your application. What components to choose and what type of layout structure you should have. Namely, how to ‘componentize’ your UI designs and requirements. Vaadin Support can help you with this. Our support personnel immediately know what components or Add-Ons to use and how your layouts should be constructed. We also have the experience from hundreds of projects on how Vaadin should be integrated to various backend technologies and architectures.
Your application might also be the first Vaadin project in your company. In these cases Vaadin Support can be used as a personal mentor for making all the right choices. Well made choices early-on typically carry a very good Return On Investment (ROI) for the entire project. Our Silver package is well suited for this purpose.
Implementation phase
When you start implementing your application, it is possible to run into many types of issues you didn’t anticipate in the beginning. This is a natural course of any project. You might for example encounter some of these:
- Need for a custom component or extension, including client side implementation.
- Bug in your application, where deep Vaadin expertise is needed to debug.
- Help with custom theming.
- Help needed with new Vaadin Framework or Vaadin Pro Tools features.
- Help needed with Add-Ons.
- You actually found a bug in one of our products.
For bug fixing, we have a Bug Fix Priority included in our Gold and Platinum support packages. It means that you can mark any bug with a priority tag. These bugs will be first in the queue and fixed faster by our R&D.
Creating custom features that require deep understanding of the client side programming may be tricky. Our experts know Vaadin Framework inside out and probably can implement that kind of features in a much shorter time than anyone else. This is a good investment, since it frees your hands to do work where you are most productive. You can also take steps in learning to implement these yourself and we can provide assistance.
Long-term projects and gradually developed new releases of your application might also benefit from the new features Vaadin introduces. For example, recently many of our customers have been replacing the Table component with the Grid component. Where Table was performing well with Vaadin 6 and IE8, Grid is a much more efficient choice with modern browsers and Vaadin 7. Vaadin Support can help you hands-on with this migration.
Maintenance phase
Finally the application is put into production. But development rarely ends there. An application typically consists of many open source libraries, Vaadin Framework being only one of them. These are required to be kept up to date. Unfortunately side effects might happen and upgrades reveal latent bugs that need to be addressed. Sometimes quick answers and workarounds are needed, especially if your application is mission critical. There we help with our Platinum package by offering a short SLA time.
Free Support week is next week!
Vaadin Support is tuned and adjusted to be easily worth the investment. There are many ways to benefit from it, no matter what your phase is. Join the free support week and get your own experience while we solve a problem you are having right now.
