UbuntuCommercialSupport

Revision 6 as of 2006-07-27 06:15:41

Clear message

Summary

The [:UbuntuCommercialSupport: UbuntuCommercialSupport] aims to provide an interface for getting commercial support from Canonical Ltd, right into "System > Help > Commercial Support"

Rationale

Companies and businesses can't rely on getting support from random individuals. What they need is a dedicated 24/7 technical support from a company that offers that kind of services, and knows exactly what they need. The fate of their solutions and operations depends on good support.

Non-technical users are likely to have a problem of knowing exactly what they need. Alot of users don't know anything about technical details, and sometimes they are having a hard time putting up the right questions together. Technical people in chat rooms are most likely to be impatient about non-technical users who asks unappropriate questions. A non-technical user may be terrified of getting answers from chat rooms because of the fear of unappropriate technical questions. What they need is a 24/7 dedicated service support where they can be confident to ask questions.

A concrete support for a specific company that uses complex solutions, requires full technical details, and absolute answer. Random individuals from chat rooms are unlikely to be inexperience about a certain question for a complex systems. What they need is a 24/7 dedicated support service that knows exactly the answers from what they are asking for.

Scope

This will use evolution mail to send message to support@canonical.com. In the message, the user will be prompted to enter his/her billing information.

Design

Invocation and overall design

The software will be linked right into "System > Help > Commercial Support", it will asks a user with what support options he/she would like to subscribe and how many years would it be.

Billing Information

Credit card information will be sent through e-mail, before sending anything to support@canonical.com.

Inquiries

This will be possible in the software via a "Contact Canonical Ltd." Button.

Screenshots

Introduction Screen

attachment:ubuntu-commercial-support-intro-0.2.png

Ordering Support Options Screen

attachment:ubuntu-commercial-support-order-0.2.png

Providing Information

attachment:ubuntu-commercial-support-info-0.2.png

Sending the information

attachment:ubuntu-commercial-support-email-0.2.png

Code

The software is written in GTK+2.0, C.

Source Package

attachment:ubuntu-commercial-support-0.2.tar.gz Small and stable release!,

Binary Package

attachment:ubuntu-commercial-support_0.2-1_i386.deb

Comments

[wiki:JoeyStanford Joey Stanford] - I like the basic idea of this spec. Sending credit card information via plain text however is very bad as it opens up a great possibility of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_fraud internet fraud]. Visa and Mastercard have begun to [http://www.4w.com/creditcardsecurity.shtml probit sending or storing] plain text credit card information.

[wiki:StevenHarms Steven Harms] - I would recommend a web based payment approach where you can provide a more professional, and more importantly, secure channel for communication. An advantage to this would be the numerous web-based toolchains already in place so you can elminate redunancy of work and save time on unit tests etc. If I was purchasing an item for my company and they requested my information plaintext email the first thing that comes to mind is scam.

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