ICommander Corporation charges only a minimal annual "Support Access Fee" for
continued access to ICommander Support and to ICommander Updates. Many
accounting software packages require very expensive annual support fees and
often you need to pay by the hour for actual support time on top of it.
ICommander charges only for actual support time required (although we do offer an option to pay a flat annual fee for entities where that works better with their budgeting process). The actual support time is normally fairly minor once ICommander is fully implemented and your staff is trained to use it. ICommander application programs that update files (primarily posting routines) are designed very carefully to enable very rapid problem resolution. This includes automatic print screens to an icerrors file for each user so we can determine exactly what error was encountered. It also includes program controls that track every update of each record to each file to which it is posted to in order to allow for restarting a posting process that aborted for some reason. It is almost unheard of that an ICommander customer must restore from a backup and re-enter transactions because of this careful attention to the potential for errors.
Since getting most multiple user sites onto the Redhat Linux platform, the occurrence of errors due to a problem with the operating system has dropped to almost none. Additionally, the error detection and correction utilities available as part of the ICOBOL Runtime System (which is what actually executes the ICommander programs) have nearly all been brought into the General and Management Utility functions available from any ICommander Application System Menu. This allows users to run these routines themselves (or with our help, if they are intimidated by this task) without needing to pull out the manuals on the ICOBOL utilities and spending large amounts of time. Execution of these utilities from ICommander actually creates executable scripts that handle the necessary processing including backing up the files and logging the results. This makes it very simple for ICommander Support Staff to diagnose what went wrong should the utility choices fail to fix a problem.
Most of our customers running ICommander on a Redhat Linux Server are also setup
to allow us to access their system remotely via an encrypted tunnel through the
Internet. They also install the ICOBOL Watch Facility that enables ICommander
Support Staff to remotely observe or take control of a user session. This often
speeds up our ability to assist with problems and questions. It also lets us
update programs over the Internet when the condition encountered requires it.
We can also remotely run "backdoor" fix programs, if a user manages to find a
way around the extensive validation routines and gets bad data into a live file.