JeremyKerwin,
We do try to engage as much as we can here on the community but also the community is about customers helping customers. In the instances where a case number was provided could be due to the complex nature of the issue that is being discussed and that the customer really should open a case with support to assist and the number provides a reference for support. This should not always be the case but we do something similar internally to help Support Engineers by using these reference case numbers.
Support will generally direct customers to open cases so that sensitive information is not exposed to the community at large. The more complex the issue the more likely specific customer information will be needed due to the complex nature of NetWitness. As such putting this information back onto the Community can potentially expose information the customer is not comfortable with. It you see a post that references a case number that is generally to help a customer provide an internal reference that can be used by Support without exposing further customer information. Anything that Support can expose we will end up turning into a Knowledge Base article here on the Community. We suggest that customers always search the Knowledge Base articles first for this reason.
When it comes to engagement on user scenarios and other analysis type posts, those have generally been answered by our Sales Engineers and Professional Services groups. These groups are not the same as Support. I can certainly let these groups know that the Community is feeling less participation from them and it will be up to those groups to decide how they would like to engage with everyone. Support does engage the Community but, just like Sales Engineers and Professional Services, we do so in our area of expertise. Support is a break/fix organization and that is where our knowledge and experience are. This is also why we engage less with the Community and ask to work issues via cases, once again due to the customer specific nature of what we need for troubleshooting. However when it is something more generic, we will attempt to provide what assistance we can.
I am sorry to hear that you have experienced issues when working with Support concerning time zones. Please note that it is within every customer's right to request their case be moved to another support person that is better aligned to their working hours. If a case is opened that is outside of normal hours the case will tend to stay outside of these hours unless requested to be moved. The reason for this is that we don't assume to know when the customer will be available to work an issue after the initial case was opened. The other thing that can happen is that your case is picked up by someone that rotates shifts. We try to move cases around when this happens but sometimes cases do get missed. In any case if you feel that the timing between you and your Support person is not conducive to your schedule, please let them know and we will move the case appropriately. If there was a request to move the case and it doesn't happen, a customer can escalate to support management, either via the case or by calling into the Support number. We will be more than happy to realign a case to any time zone being worked as Support is global.
I am sorry for your Support experiences. I hope that I have provided some additional information that will help you and others in any future Support requests, and help to provide a little more insight into how Support interacts with the Community.
