Magento EE and Go questions

Question

Magento (the company, part of eBay, etc) states provides support for EE and Go customers. From my experience as an ex-partener and from my customers experience, Magento support is not really keen on supporting you.

As an example: we worked alot with one of our customers to grow his business and went from Magento CE to Professional Edition and then upgraded to Enterprise. Now, as a developer, if you try to do this process on a vanilla Magento, you will see that you encounter many issues with the upgrade scripts that are not working.

Content Staging and Merging doesn't work (database consistency issues) and Magento's official response was: your database doesn't look like it should after the upgrade process. Well, yes, but what are all those upgrade and install scrips for? Aren't those part of Magento? (end of large parenthesis)

Back to the main issue, Magento EE and Go questions:

• I believe the customer/developer that asks a question should first open a case for Magento Support
• We might end up encouraging Magento to keep the current support policy (because "it works") as developers are eager to show their Magento skills and help other developers/customers

What are your opinions?

Answer 1

I don't see the problem.

Most of us Magento partners are very familiar with the "support process" with Magento's core team - and I can well imagine those not in the know to be pursing better/faster answers from a 3rd party.

EE is a licensed product - but that shouldn't detract from the fact there are questions surrounding it - after all, Microsoft Windows is a licensed product and questions about that are not forbidden on other SE sites?

I believe the customer/developer that asks a question should first open a case for Magento Support

If this becomes policy. The first answer or comment on a question will be "Have you asked Magento yet" - which would cause useless clutter. Whether we work on the proviso the question has already been submitted to Magento, or not, it is irrelevant to a SE member electing to answer the question.

We might end up encouraging Magento to keep the current support policy (because "it works") as developers are eager to show their Magento skills and help other developers/customers

Magento aren't going to be dictated to by the community; the addition of a dedicated Magento SE site isn't going to change that.

Answer 2

We should discourage people from posting questions that can only apply to EE; however, the fact that someone with a question came across it on EE shouldn't require him to prove that it also applies to CE if it's not already obvious. In essence I think it's fine for people to post questions about EE as long as they:

1. Don't violate the ToS (for example, by posting proprietary code).
2. Are widely-enough defined as to be of use by CE users.

A good example of such a question might be something like How do I write an extension that can be used on both CE and EE? that contains examples of the extension code and references a troublesome overriding template that is difficult to handle generically for both EE and CE.