info@polyhedra.com
Evaluators can contact us for Technical Support by email to report any difficulties or problems, including suspected faults; customers with an ongoing support contract can report problems by phone or fax as well as by email. The product support is provided by the Polyhedra development team, which is based in the UK, but customers can also contact the world-wide field engineering network for help outside UK office hours.
Technical support is purchased with Polyhedra development licenses, and is renewed on a yearly basis. It covers access to all new releases during the support period, as well as telephone, fax and email support. Extended application assistance from design advice to code reviews can be provided on a consultancy basis.
The Polyhedra product is continually being developed and improved. Major releases (for example v4, v5, v6) are released roughly once every eighteen months. Maintenance releases occur about once every three months. Release notes are provided with each release, and the migration path from one release to another is kept as simple as possible for customers; all code is now developed to strict compatibility principles: we ensure not just that client-server connectivity works across versions, but also that a new version of the database software can act as standby to a master database running with an old version of the software. Thus it is possible to field-upgrade mission-critical systems with no downtime.
Suspected faults in the software should be reported to Technical Support. Every effort will be made to reproduce the fault, and the customer is kept up-to-date with the progress. The outcome of this is generally that either a flaw in the customer's understanding of the product is found in which case appropriate advice is given; or that a software fault is discovered. In this case, workarounds will be suggested where appropriate and available, and the fault will be passed to the engineering team to be solved. Usually faults are resolved for the next maintenance release, but intermediate patches can be made available on a case-by-case basis.