Warranty Support | open4mgt

We offer two types of warranty for our “Software Solutions”:

Software Publisher Warranty
open4mgt Own Warranty

SOFTWARE PUBLISHER WARRANTY:

The first warranty type are the standard warranties made available from the publishers of the open source software that we use in our offerings. As full GPL / AGPL software is free to use the default position is that the software is unwarranted and only best-effort fixes to software bugs, logic bugs and other issues will apply at the sole discretion and at the convenience of the software publisher.

For many commercial organisations this is not acceptable and in any event the publishers need to fund themselves. Therefore it is quite common for the publishers to offer paid-for warranties and other services (e.g. software training) to the more commercial users of their software such that there is a mechanism to resolve software bugs, logic bugs and other issues in a known timeframe.

Therefore our first warranty type simply extends the software publishers own paid-for warranty to our clients. This is sensible as often the software publishers don’t wish to deal directly with individual user organisations more than necessary (its not their core business or competence) and prefer to manage these matters via partners such as ourselves in the first instance.

From our perspective, although we add no margin to the software publishers published prices, we do sometimes gain a commission from the sale itself. Further, it also means we can offer, acting as a single point of coordination…..and thus knowing what coverage you do and don’t possess versus what coverage we might recommend in your circumstances….software publisher warranties to the clients who need or want them.

OPEN4MGT OWN WARRANTY:

The second type of warranty is, as the name implies, offered directly by us. This warranty is only available as an add-on to the Software Publishers Warranty and is typically not required for our standard products.

This warranty is in addition to the normal guarantees that apply to the quality of our work and is mainly aimed at going beyond the software publishers warranty in situations where high degrees of customisation (i.e. as opposed to configuration) and bespoke coding apply.

The most common use of our own warranty is to make warranty support available beyond the basic 90 calendar day guarantee we offer on our bespoke work such as for our “Advanced Setup Support” service. Situations in which this warranty could apply are in cases where we have, for example, on your behalf:

made fundamental changes to the operations or code of a standard software module
added a non-standard software module, particularly in cases of limited software publisher provenance, including having made fundamental changes to its operation or code
written new bespoke code to add a new feature or function
written new bespoke code to realise an interface to other systems

These and other similar examples would most commonly arise in cases where we were working with you on a significantly bespoke Extended Solution that arose as part of a major change initiative for which you were also using some of our Professional “Services” to define (e.g.) radically new ways of working to greatly increase business performance and productivity.

In all cases this type of warranty is intended to cover those things which we have been engaged to modify, extend or customise for our customers. As every warranty of this type is likely to have a least some element uniquely tailored to a particular set of customer requirements each warranty instance must be undertaken on a case-by-case basis.

PURCHASING AND TERMS OF SERVICE:

The information provided above should be read in conjunction with our business “Terms of Service” which must be accepted as part of all sales and can be accessed for review now by clicking on the above link.

Software publisher warranties vary significantly in pricing and charging terms so we recommend that you “Contact Us” about your software publisher warranty needs. We can then work out with you your requirements, along with the costs for same, and then organise the relevant warranty with the software publisher on your behalf. The same process also applies to arranging an open4mgt Own Warranty, if relevant, with ourselves.