Last modified 2 years ago

Technical support

WARNING: This article is based on the  Official Documentation and its edition is limited to Zentyal staff and Forum Moderators

Open source software usually provides technical support to the application users through different methods. Ubuntu and Zentyal are not an exception.

We must distinguish between two kinds of support: the one provided to the community, which is free, and the commercial type, where a company offers its services by charging a certain amount of money.

Community support

Community support is provided mainly on the Internet. There are many occasions where the community is able to support itself. That is, application users help each other. The product development team usually have a prominent role within the community.

The community are an important, even fundamental, provider of improvement in the product development. Users contribute by discovering hidden bugs and help developers to improve the product so it becomes more attractive to more users.

This voluntary support, logically, does not offer any guarantees. If a user asks a question, it is possible that no reply is given depending on the question format, timing or any other circumstance.

The most typical community support channels are forums, mailing lists and IRC [7] channels.

[7] Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a real-time communication protocol based on text where users are usually discussing in a defined channel RFC 1459.

These are the main community resources for Zentyal:

  • IRC: irc.freenode.net server, #Zentyal (English) and #Zentyal-es (Spanish) channels.
  • Forums:  http://forum.zentyal.org (providing several specific boards in English and a general one in Spanish)
  • Mailing lists ( http://lists.zentyal.org):
    • zentyal-users, general user list.
    • zentyal-users-es, general Spanish user list.
    • zentyal-devel, developers list.
    • zentyal-announce, official announce list.
    • zentyal-i18n, Zentyal translator list.

All this information is available, with further documentation, in the community section of Zentyal web site ( http://www.zentyal.org).

Commercial support

The commercial support allows the user access to other channels, apart from the Internet, to obtain support from a company. Phone and physical presence in client facilities are also possible.

Unlike community support, the commercial support offers several guarantees as follows:

  • Maximum response time: depending on the service package that time will be shorter or longer.
  • Well-trained supporting people: in some cases the development team will be giving the support, otherwise well-trained and certified people will do so.
  • Additional features which add value to the product and are not available to the community.

These advantages are pretty clear for those companies whose business relies on this software. In addition to this, commercial support ensures no time is wasted trying to work out what is wrong with your installation.