Support Policies
Envyr Corporation has a long history or providing excellent support. That support includes fixing problems and listening to your comments and concerns. If you have a software problem with the supported versions, it can normally be fixed and a workaround made available to you very quickly after the problem is reproduced in our lab.
Note Well: We will NOT provide ANY support to a company whose account is suspended because of non-payment of past due invoices.
Pre-sales Support
Pre-sales support is available via email to potential customers who are interested in trying our product, or to existing customers who are interested in trying new, licensed features. We can arrange to provide temporary licenses for pre-sales situations.Post-sales Support
Post-sales support is available via email to new customers for 30 days after their first system purchase to make sure they get off to a good start with our products.Support Categories
The type of support that a product or release is eligible to receive changes as the release ages and is replaced by newer releases. The type of support available falls into one of the three following categories:
- Active: Support includes the investigation of reported software problems (bugs) and the development of fixes and/or work-arounds. Active support is provided for current revisions of the product where we are pursuing active development and for recent revisions for which we have the system resources in our lab to be able to investigate reported bugs and develop fixes.
- Question-only: Support is limited to answering questions about the product and generally does not include investigating problem reports. Question-only support is for past releases of products for which we have the resources to be able to load a particular version and answer questions related to the product.
- Unsupported: Support is no longer available available for the product. In some cases we may handle questions on a pre-paid per-incident support basis.
Support moves from Active to Question-only according to the following guidelines:
- The last release of a previous major revision moves from Active to Question-only one year after the new major version is released (for example, ICOBOL 4 to ICOBOL 5). This transition occurred for ICOBOL 4 (4.89) effective December 31, 2015, a year after the release of 5.00.
- The last minor revision of a previous generation of ICOBOL moves from Active to Question-only one month after the replacement generation becomes available (for example, when 5.3x replaced 5.2x). This generally means that we will ask you to attempt to reproduce the problem on a more recent, Active revision before investigating the problem further.
- A previous minor revision within a generation moves from Active to Question-only once the replacement version is available (for example, when 5.36 replaced 5.35).
Support moves from Question-only to Unsupported according to the following guidelines:
- Any release that is more than 5 years old moves to Unsupported. Note: This affected Revision 4.89 at the end of 2020.
- Any release that is 2 major releases back moves to Unsupported. Thus ICOBOL 3 became unsupported when 5.00 was released.
- Any release or platform is declared as Discontinued moves to Unsupported.
A comprehensive description of support category for various versions is shown on the Supported Revisions page. In summmary, version 5.50 is in the Active support category, previous versions of ICOBOL 5 are in the Questions-only category, and all other versions are now in the Unsupported catoegory.
Ongoing Support Options
The following options are available for releases that are in the Active or Question-only support categories. Failure to provide the product revision or a license number at the outset will delay processing.- High Priority Support
You may contact us directly by telephone or indirectly by email.
Problems and questions are given high priority, and typically a response is returned within one business day.
Annual contracts are $1200 and are issued on a calendar year basis with the cost pro-rated based on the month it was purchased. - Per-incident High Priority Support
High-priority support without a contract can be purchased on a per-incident basis. The charge is $100 paid in advance by credit card. You will be invoiced electronically with a payment link. The per-incident support covers up to one hour working on one particular problem or question. - Low/No Priority Support
You may only contact us via email.
Problems and questions are given low priority, and typically a response is returned after two or three business days.
Reporting a Problem
Following these recommendations will allow us to find your problem more quickly:- Before submitting a problem report or support question, please check the Documentation page, FAQ page, and make sure you are running the current release of the software. We have found that very often problems found in an older release have already been fixed.
- We always need to know the version number of ICOBOL you are running as well as the operating system type and version, so please provide this when you first report a problem. A good way to provide this information is to run our icinfo utility with the -a switch, which produces an audit file named icinfo.lg. Simply attach a copy of icinfo.lg to your email when you report a problem.
- Since ICOBOL is a large and complex product, we also typically ask that you provide us with a sequence of the steps necessary to reproduce the problem as well as information about the system setup. Items such as the output from the icinfo utility, program samples, sample data files, and the system configuration (.cfi) file are often helpful and sometimes necessary.
Failed License Protection Devices
From time to time the license protection device (serial, parallel, or USB) fails. Please see the product documentation and license server FAQ for instructions on how to use our failsafe features to get your system running again. If you are unable to get the failsafe mechanism to work, we can send a temporary replacement license.
We no longer stock replacement devices, so please contact Sales right away to arrange for a replacement license. Send us the license number and the operating system type (Windows/Linux) and version. In some cases, it may be possible to convert the protection to MAC protection. In other cases, it may require upgrading to an ICOBOL 5 MAC license.
Non-ICOBOL Problems
From time to time, we are contacted to assist our customers with problems that are eventually determined to be due to errors in their COBOL application, their operating procedures, or their operating environment (such as computer viruses) rather than the ICOBOL product. And, from time to time we are asked to help solve operating system and network problems. In these cases, we reserve the right to invoice for a consulting fee based on the amount of time spent handling the request at a rate of $100 for the first hour and $75 per hour for subsequent hours.