How MAK Support Works and How to Make the Most of it
- Jim Kogler
Our goal at MAK is to support you. We recognize that your success is essential to our success. To a large degree, this is what COTS products are about—we are not bound by the terms of a single contract but rather by our customers, who have diverse and sometimes unconventional requirements. You need to deliver software and systems that work, and we are here to help make that happen.
To better serve you, it is important for you to understand how MAK supports our products. This article addresses the following topics:
How the support team is structured—who we are and how we help you.
Ways to make it easier for us to support you, as well as actions that can make support more challenging.
The limits of our support—specifically, when we may need to say we can no longer assist.
Who Provides Support at MAK?
The MAK Support team IS the MAK Product team. Everyone on the MAK Product team contributes to support—there is no dedicated support engineer. The same engineers who assist with support also design features and develop the product.
Some teams may have junior engineers start in a support triage role for a specific product, as we believe this is an excellent way to train them on product use. Teams may also assign an engineer to rotate through support, spending a few weeks managing incoming support questions. However, typically most support inquiries are directed to individual engineers who have the most expertise on a given topic.
It is important to note that no single person oversees all the support tickets; individual teams manage their own support workloads.
Tips (and Challenges) for Getting the Most Out of MAK Support
Let Us Know Who You Are:
Our engineers may be handling up to 15 tickets at any given time. Unfortunately, we don’t always know you or fully understand your project or your deadline. In fact, the Jira system often will not show us your email address or real name. As of November 2024, MAK has introduced a way to take notes about your project and save them in our system. This helps us provide better support by giving engineers some context about your work. If used correctly, it means engineers won’t need to ask the same questions to you over and over again: What platform are you on? What version of the product do you have?
The more information you can share (at least in your initial request), the better. Ideally, we would like to know:
Who you work for: What company and what program.
What country are you working in/for.
What you are working on (generally).
Which MAK products you use.
We understand that many of our customers work in classified environments where many details cannot be shared. That’s okay—but providing even a little context can help us assist you more effectively. At a minimum we need to know the company you work for and the country you are in. This minimum requirement allows us to track down what you have purchased and what support you are entitled too.
Ask Only One Question Per Support Ticket
Different engineers handle different types of questions. If you ask multiple questions—especially across different products—we can’t assist you effectively. The ticket will be assigned to an engineer who can address one of your questions, but that person may not have the best answer for other questions.
This often leads to unanswered or poorly answered questions. Over time, these tickets have long threads between you and the initial engineer that make it difficult for a second engineer to step in. If your ticket needs to be transferred to another team, the context may be lost, requiring repeated explanations and causing delays that could be avoided if you ask them in separate tickets. Every subsequent person who looks at the ticket would need to read and understand the whole conversation from the start.
The best approach is to submit one ticket per question. Yes, this may mean opening 10 tickets, but we would rather answer all 10 properly than address 2 effectively and drop the other 8.
Please Note: We cannot easily split up tickets ourselves. While it is technically possible in Jira to break a multi-question ticket into multiple tickets, it is extremely time-consuming. To do it effectively, we would need to significantly edit your request, which is not feasible given our time constraints. If you submit too many questions in one ticket, we may ask you to resubmit them as separate tickets.
Raise New Topics in a New Support Ticket
If you have a simple follow-up question closely related to your original topic, feel free to ask it within the same ticket. However, if your question is broad or introduces a new, unrelated topic, please open a new ticket.
There are three main problems with mixing multiple topics in a single ticket:
Long tickets are difficult to manage. Engineers can only see the last few comments at a glance, and reviewing a long thread—especially one with more than 10 comments—takes considerable time.
New engineers or managers may need to get involved. If a different engineer takes over your ticket or a manager needs to step in, they will have to review the entire history, much of which may already be resolved and unrelated to the new topic.
We use support tickets to tell us a story. We track our support tickets and our support load to better understand where we need to do better. When a ticket addresses multiple products or features, it's difficult for us to look back at it and quickly understand how we could improve.
Please note: If your question strays too far from the original topic, we may ask you to open a new ticket and restate your question. As mentioned earlier, we do not have the capability to easily split an existing ticket into multiple ones.
Understanding the Limits of MAK Support
MAK is committed to going the extra mile for you, but there are limits to how we can effectively assist. If you require more support than what we offer here, please contact sales@mak.com to inquire about Premium Support—dedicated engineering service hours designed to help you meet your specific needs, no matter what they are.
We will do everything we can to help you succeed, but here are some situations where Premium Support may be necessary:
Support for Products No Longer Under Maintenance
MAK engineers may answer questions about older, unsupported products if they know the answer offhand. If no one knows off the top of their head, we may ask around to see if an engineer still has the product installed. If they do, we may ask them to take a look. We also will frequently look into releases a year or two after their end-of-life date if the release was heavily used. However, we typically cannot provide in-depth investigation or troubleshooting for products past their end-of-life. The longer the product has been out of maintenance, the less likely we will be able to help.
Assistance with Non-MAK Products or Unrelated Topics
Unfortunately, we cannot provide support for general C++ programming, Linux firewall management, or video driver updates. We also cannot deeply support third-party products like ArcGIS, Creator, Blender, Global Mapper, Docker, Padman, or VMWare. Similarly, while we can show you how to configure models, we cannot teach you how to build them. While we are experts in Modeling and Simulation, terrain, and interoperability standards, we often do not have the time as part of standard support to explain these standards and protocols to you. We are always happy to offer training and consulting in these topics through Premium Support hours.
Plug-in Development Without Completing a Developer Course
MAK offers a one-week Developer Course covering the basics of C++ modifications for specific MAK products. For example, the VR-Forces API is highly complex, and we cannot provide a full development course via support tickets. If you haven’t taken a Developer Course, we encourage you to do so before seeking plugin development support. For some simple API products a course is often not required if you have a strong understanding of C++ and the protocol (DIS/HLA) being used.
Extensive Plug-in Development
MAK products like VR-Forces and VR-Vantage are incredibly flexible—you can do almost anything with them. Many of our customers are experts who push the boundaries of what’s possible. While we can typically point you in the right direction and help you get started, some topics are too complex for standard support.
If you encounter such a situation, you have two options:
A) Contract MAK to develop the functionality for you.
B) Purchase Premium Support, which allows us to provide deeper assistance.
Too Many Questions Overall
Yes, it happens. Sometimes, the sheer number of questions reaches a point where we need to recommend Premium Support. This often depends on how much software you have purchased and the complexity of your project. Some projects are just really complicated. Ultimately, we have a limited number of engineers and must balance our time to support all customers effectively.