Monday mornings can be a tough on any 9-5 worker, but are especially rough when you have to finish the work a co-worker didn't finish before he left on extended vacation last Friday. As was the case with a friend of mine and long time blog reader Justin this week. I call him Justin to keep him and his co-workers safe. I get an email from our dedicated support team to help out with an in depth question that they know I have experience with. They know I have taught many Inventor classes over the years and that I am a hard guy to stump.
Justin had just returned to Inventor after being away from the software for about 6 months and had not used it since his company upgraded from 2008 to 2010. He had a problem with his sketching geometry not remaining constrained to itself. Essentially the sketch would not create automatic geometric constraints. This aggravated Justin very much so he pulled out his support contract and gave us a quick ring to our Support Number. Although he did have a lot of other options instead of a phone call, but this is usually a more preferred direct contact method and too small an issue for our Remote Desktop log in. Here you can see all the options available to a ProductivityNOW member.
Now this is a common troubleshooting issue to a lot of returning or new users to the software and once you see the solution it makes total sense. Now since Justin had been away from the software for a while he didn't have time to dig in the Help system for an answer and no one to ask at work.
After taking Justin's call and hearing his story I immediately took it upon myself to help Justin get reacquainted with the software and our solution options. I quickly pointed him to a section of our Ascent course ware to help him find the correct solution and even a quick data set where he could try out a solution. Since we keep a running data base of all our sister company's course ware in ProductivityNOW it allows Justin to not only read about a topic in a more practical and less technical way but to also develop his own personal development agenda to get back up to speed on important updates to Inventor.
Over the course of the phone call I ended up answering four more questions for Justin and got him back on track for his companies project he needed to get started. I showed him how to log Support Cases for email response and if he really gets in a jam with his Content Center how to request Remote Access for our experts in our Solution Center to diagnose. At the end of the phone call he asked..."Is that you in that picture on the left side of the page?". Inside ProductivityNOW we also stream all of our blogger's RSS feeds, IMAGINiT news releases, and Autodesk hotfixes and service pack updates. This opened up another issue Justin found and noticed the Service Pack was designed to fix it.
In just under 30 minutes we were able to quickly address Justin's issue, solve 4 more he didn't know he had and get his Inventor patched and all up to date. He thanked me and said if he needed anymore help he now knows where he can start. There are many ways our Solution Center can help with your questions and design questions ranging from the quick response answer to a more in depth study of parametric design. Take a look at the support options and overview of the different levels of ProductivityNOW (click below to enlarge). You never know when you will be Justin...Justin Case.
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