Service levels

Each option is designed to provide you and your team with the technical support you require to keep your development process running at maximum productivity.

Standard Support and Maintenance

With the Standard Support and Maintenance option you will receive personal, written answers. Replies are sent within four business days at latest, and often within hours of receipt. Answers come directly from hands-on experts, involving members of our software development team whenever necessary. Read more about standard support and maintenance service level.

Premium Support

If you decide to purchase Premium Support services in addition to Standard Support and Maintenance, you will be entitled to utilize high-priority support channels and will be assigned a dedicated escalation contact who acts as your personal liaison within Trolltech. In addition to the services provided with the Premium Support offering you can extend your service level with optional services. Read more about the premium service level.

* Support working days are Monday through Friday, except public holidays: New Year (January 1st), Good Friday, Easter Monday, and Christmas (December 25th and 26th)

Availability

Support services are available to all customers with a commercial license for any Trolltech product. The first year of standard Support and Maintenance Service is included with the purchase of the commercial license, and is not available as a separate purchase. Subsequent years of Support and Maintenance Service may be purchased, but need to be contiguous.

Premium Support services can be purchsed by all customers using the commercial editions of Trolltech products, in addition to standard support services.

Version Support

Support services are only offered for the official stable releases; not for snapshots, beta releases, preview versions and other unsupported releases. Product version x.y.z will be supported and maintained until one year after the release date of the following version (x.y+1.0 or x+1.0.0, whichever comes first) unless stated otherwise.

As an exception of this rule

• Qt 3.3 will be supported and maintained for two years after the release of Qt 4.0, i.e. until June 2007.
• Qt/Embedded 3.3 will be supported and maintained for two years after the release of Qtopia Core 4.1.0, i.e. until December 2007.
• Qtopia Phone Edition 2.2.0 and Qtopia Platform 2.2.0 will be supported and maintained for two years after the release of 4.1.3, i.e. until June 2008

The Extended product-lifetime support option can be purchased by premium support customers requiring an extended support period.

Trolltech Support Workflow

Trolltech uses an in-house developed, Qt-based support system, with a PostgreSQL based database backend. This system is used in all offices around the world by all departments in Trolltech, including the technical support department, the sales organization and the development teams. We use the system on a variety of windowing systems, and operating systems.

Mail Processing

A team of first-line support engineers reviews all new mails constantly. Mails that open a new issue are assigned a new issue number (or multiple issue numbers if appropriate), and responded to immediately if the first-line engineers can provide an answer right away. If the issue requires some researching it is assigned to a second-line support engineer. In this case, an automated response with the issue number is generated.

Mails that follow up on an existing issue are automatically added to the respective conversation. The support engineer assigned to the issue will communicate with the customer until the problem is resolved, the suggestion is fully understood or the bug identified and reproduced.

Premium support incidents are prioritized in this process.

Confirmation

If the conclusion of this conversation is that a modification of a product is required (bug fix, implement suggestion etc.) the support engineer will generate a new task for the development team. A selection of those tasks generated for the development team are made public through the Task Tracker.

Scheduling and Prioritizing

A team of Trolltech engineers will review those issues regularly, and priorize and schedule them based on severity of the issue for the customer reporting, and impact of the defect on the product affected. Priorities rank from P1 to P5, with P1 being the highest priority. An issue can be scheduled for the next maintenance release, the next minor product upgrade, or registered for a future product version. Typically, the following types of changes will be scheduled for the next maintenance release (x.y.z+1):

• Fix bugs caused by changes to previously working code.
• Fix build issues on supported platforms.
• Fix defects specific to a single platform that are not present on other platforms.
• Fix critical defects, including (but not limited to): crashes, data corruption, loss of data, race conditions.
• Update documentation and license information when deemed necessary.
  

Non-critical fixes that do not meet the above requirements will be reserved for later product versions, as the risk of destabilizing is greater than the benefit.

Premium support incidents are followed up by the support engineer assigned to the issue, and are scheduled and prioritzed immediately. The customer will then be informed about the timeframe and action plan for a resolution of the issue.

Resolution

The Trolltech engineer assigned to the issue will make the changes as scheduled, ordered by priority. Changes in existing code will be reviewed, and have to pass the regression tests before becoming available in the daily snapshots. New functionality will be made available in the earliest pre-release of the new product version.