Infrequently Noted

SitePen has been building an amazing team and today we're bringing a little of that team to a lot more of the Dojo world.

As part of the relaunch of sitepen.com, we've unveiled our new support offerings (the available packages are here). For some time now SitePen has been offering consulting to firms using Dojo, and we've recognized that many of our clients aren't prepared to engage us for a consulting engagement but need more than an intensive training session for their teams. In this middle area lies the need for a support product which can help capable teams get un-stuck quickly when the going gets tough. Other customers have expressed a strong desire for professional support due to their enterprise's nascent experience with Open Source, and for them we've built "lightweight consulting" into the Enterprise plan to help get architectural issues addressed in addition to handling pressing fixes.

SitePen is adding this support product to our already successful application development and Dojo/DWR training businesses. Since we're also building apps, we know how important it is to have the right person an email or phone call away. Support is a logical progression for us as a company and for Dojo as a project, and we're committed to doing it right. Everyone we've assembled to provide support to our clients are committers on the projects we support (sharp tacks, all) and as we described recently at DDD the plan for SitePen's support business is designed to help us improve the toolkit at every opportunity. Right there on the page describing the packages you can see our commitment to keeping Dojo a healthy Open Source project:

When you find an issue with Dojo, DWR, or Cometd, we...provide you with emergency bug fixes. We also commit these patches back to the relevant open source project as appropriate.

SitePen has also recently been working to help ensure that Dojo's API documentation tool is top-notch and that the introductory material for getting started with Dojo are solid, all of which we'll be releasing in the coming weeks alongside the release of Dojo 1.1. In all of the support team discussions, it's been clear to me that everyone involved gets it: not only are we here to support our customers, we're here to make Dojo and DWR better for everyone in the process. It's the kind of positive feedback loop that only happens when you have the right people on the bus and when the whole business understands the real value of Open Source both to customers and to the community.

Speaking of making things better, we're convinced that the last thing you need when working with our support team is a headache. The support UI has to be as easy-to-use as it is good looking, so we’ve built a custom support interface that lets customer submit tickets, check the progress of ongoing ones, and use completed tickets for reference. Check it out: