ShotGrid Support Update

[Jmalan]

Thank you for your valued business and use of Autodesk products and services. Please note that there is currently a higher than usual volume of Support cases related to ShotGrid, which is resulting in some delayed response times. ​

​Our customers are of the utmost importance to us, and we are working diligently to address the Support case volume and temporary response delays. Thank you again for your continued patience as we work through your current Support requests and improve the ShotGrid Support experience for the future.

Recommendations

• If you need self-help and documentation access, please check out our Autodesk Knowledge Network content at ShotGrid | Autodesk Knowledge Network (you can access other product documentation at https://knowledge.autodesk.com/).

• If you are waiting on a response to an open Support ticket, please do not submit another ticket related to the same issue – we ask that you log only one ticket per issue to ensure duplicate tickets do not further delay response times.

• If you have migrated your ShotGrid site and need to create a new Support ticket, please create a ticket at Contact Customer Support | Autodesk Knowledge Network.
  Using this system provides your Authorized Users with access to our entire ecosystem of Support specialists and helps to ensure you get answers more quickly.

• If you have not migrated your ShotGrid site and need to create a new Support ticket, please create a ticket at Submit a request – Shotgun Support

Important Note: As a reminder, ShotGrid site migration should be completed by your company’s Autodesk Administrator(s) before October 1st, 2021 to maintain access to ShotGrid sites and Support Benefits. Please contact your Autodesk Administrator(s) for questions related to the migration of your ShotGrid site.

[Ricardo_Musch]

Thanks Jmalan,

Communication really is key in these instances.

I hope it is also noted that the new Autodesk Ticket support does not seem like an adequate system for technical support. Its very clunky and slow, there is no way to CC anyone, there is no way to see my organizations support requests, these are all very vital features when you run a business.
There is also no way to mark a ticket as “Show Stopping” as in priority.
You have to realize many of us have ShotGrid as the backbone of our pipeline and business, we should at least have a red button incase everything goes awry.

I hope these comments are taken on board.

[Jmalan]

Hi @Ricardo_Musch, thank you for your feedback. I would be happy to connect and learn more about your concerns. If you are interested, please reach out to me via direct message and we can set something up.

[Patrick]

@Jmalan there’s nothing to learn more about Ricardo’s concerns, they are clearly described and a concern for us all. Have you tried submitting a ticket in both systems to compare the experience yourself?

I’d suggest SG support explain how you plan to implement the features we currently have with the legacy support system(SS) in the new AD Knowledge Network(AKN) system, and how the you plan to improve the overall experience.

For clarity :

• AKN performance is slower than SS.
• AKN new ticket workflow is convoluted (I have to click through 3 forms before I can start writing a ticket).
• AKN has no page to view existing tickets. (Assuming I’ve overlooked the link, this is a real deal-breaker).
• AKN has no means to define ticket priority.
• AKN has no means to flag tickets for urgent support (eg response within minutes).
• AKN has no cc field.
• AKN has no site field so support can group tickets by organisation.
• Browser “Back” button exits the AKN page completely (!)
• AKN has no submit button.
• AKN ticket is limited to 500 characters. (totally insufficient).
• AKN has no means to upload files. (on the main ticket page at least)
• AKN confirmation page is broken; it doesn’t provide a ticket number.
• AKN requires separate accounts for each vendor (I am a SG consultant and have multiple SG accounts across multiple clients; I just want a single login for SG support)
• No confirmation email received on submitting ticket.

I just tried creating a test ticket, and the page I’m given doesn’t even have a submit button!

It turns out that after drafting my ticket, I need to click on “See Options”, which opens a new page where I can then click on “Create a Case” which then opens up a new page.

I then click my browser “back” button and I’m back to the page I was on BEFORE browsing to the AKN website; losing my previously entered ticket text in the process. This is an unacceptable design feature.

Ok, now I’m on this new ticket page, we’re given an additional 500 characters to our text-field. This is still insufficient. On the plus side, we now have the ability to upload files.

After submitting a ticket, the confirmation page is missing the ticket number.

After investigating this I’d go so far as to say that AKN is unfit for purpose currently. It’s a pretty depressing experience with various design anti-patterns in place, and core features broken.

As Ricardo explained, a good support experience is a critical feature of SG that we all rely on. I hope we can continue to use the old ticket system beyond the AD migration? Can you confirm if there is a date set for when the old support site is due for closure?

Thanks for your understanding.
Patrick.

[jcollier]

I second Ricardo and Patrick’s observations here, with the additional note that they, and I, have probably quite frequently submitted complicated cases with a lot of text and logs and so on and haven’t had problems getting timely replies prior to the ADSK migration announcement.

While I’m sure you’re all extremely busy, I’ve also noticed that a number of people many of us had reliable, personal contact with over the years at Shotgun are no longer with Autodesk as of June of 2021, or have moved on from the ShotGrid org to other ADSK roles.

Is the ShotGrid support operation still working at the previous headcount? If not, we’re going to require a rundown of how the AMER support team expects to address the gap in domain expertise caused by departures. Thanks!

[scottballard]

@jcollier I asked the following simple question of our AD account executive Adam Perlman and was met with following response which is clearly not true and not helpful. Its clear that AD has a strangle hold on SG and the industry and doesn’t care much for providing the same level of service we’ve come to expect from the legacy SG team. We expect more from AD especially for an enterprise account like Riot Games. Our support ticket from a month ago goes unanswered.

• who from the original Shotgun team (with legacy knowledge) will be supporting the product going forward?

– Adam –

We cannot discuss the status of individual team members and their employment at Autodesk.

Support requests for our products are routed and tracked through our Autodesk support channels so they can be addressed in a timely manor.

I am not sure what you define as “legacy knowledge” or if it is something that can be quantified. The development teams will indeed continue with their work and we can provide updates to the roadmaps as that information is made public.

[jcollier]

(The following response is the “I’ve had two weeks to discuss this with people inside and outside my org, and I am a film critic by training, a VFX technical director by aptitude, and an actual Shotgun Pipeline Hero by the grace of Rob Blau, Tannaz Sassooni, and others” one. Proceed as you will.)

Scott, the two counts I see in that response are “one, if there is a support roadmap we don’t wish to discuss it with the product user base at this time; two, HR says I can’t talk about former employees.”

Of course people maintaining a 24/7 mission-critical service in an industry where one slip can cost you an entire show need to know how it will be supported. That’s called a “service level agreement,” and that’s pretty standard stuff. Not discussing support SLAs when the status quo has radically changed and not giving a timeline for it makes maintenance of such an integral component difficult to scope for future work.

And, Mr. Perlman’s duties to HR aside, one notices when people start changing their social media profiles while formerly reliable product support becomes extremely out-of-spec. We’re all pretty good at LinkedIn.

Mr. Perlman presumably routinely speaks to people who are themselves support engineers, critical resources for their production teams, and developers, at any studio size. (As a pipe and imaging TD, I’m still one person in an “11-20 employees” situation.) We know what we’re about, where possible, which leads to the bit about legacy knowledge/ domain expertise…

When people talk about the unquantifiable nature of “legacy knowledge,” that’s a bit of a canard. We know that an established base of domain expertise is important to the maintenance and care of any long-term software development project, especially one that can be extended on the customer side. Software engineering and organizational behavior are both quantified fields of study, after all, so researchers (and Riot has a lot of behavioral researchers you can ask, Scott, I’ve had the pleasure of having dinner with one of them once! can definitely explain brain drain and domain knowledge at a reasonably high level for those who have ears to hear.

This is not undiscovered turf for professionals, in other words.

The same goes for high case volume, which is an input to a process, and not a condition inflicted upon a support team by heartless end users. (If we were heartless end users-- and we’re not-- we wouldn’t be vocal about “our colleagues are no longer in a position to work alongside us on these projects, what has happened.”) Sudden inputs to processes happen, as anyone who’s had someone roll on their desk like “can I stuff this Lightwave model into our Houdini pipe” knows.

The controllable part of that is how the pipeline manages the inputs, even unexpected ones. (“Is there a triage engineering role in the new SG support org” remains one of my questions. I don’t need to be told who it is, I just need to know if the job exists.)

Doing even one of the things that has happened here since May 2021-- the disappearance of established domain experts, the assimilation of ShotGrid into ADSK proper, or the massive overhaul to authentication-- should have “high case volume” as a predictable occurrence. All three at once, in a company with the resources ADSK has, should require a comprehensive response to an expected increase in requests.

High case volume is a condition, not an explanation. What you do to manage it is the explanation.

Perhaps Jeremy Malan would like to ring in? It’s been 14 days since he opened the discussion.

[patrickwolf]

I resonate with all your clear illustrations of how bad support has become for ShotGrid unfortunately. It used to be incredibly good, in depth, fast when it was still Shotgun. From the outside it seems like the move to Autodesk Support wasn’t planned out, staffed etc. So it might take a while to hear back on this thread too

[Patrick]

15 days since I reached out, and no response. I had hoped my detailed breakdown of where the proposed ticket system fails to meet user expectations would have elicited some kind of acknowledgement. The lack of response is somewhat concerning.

[ABuller]

First, we’d like to sincerely apologize for the delay in reaching out to the community and this thread. We’ve been incredibly busy with the migration process taking place and we know that’s having an impact on our responsiveness. Again, our most sincere apologies.

@Ricardo_Musch & @Patrick, this is the kind of feedback we want to hear about. We are moving towards a consistent experience with our other Media and Entertainment solutions and yes, there’s always room for improvement. We really do appreciate the feedback.

@jcollier & @scottballard, you’re bringing up some great points and concerns as well. We hope you understand we’re doing everything we possibly can to help the current backlog situation and have a plan in place to address this from multiple angles. One of our highest priorities is ensuring we have the talent and numbers to support our ShotGrid users.

[Romey]

@ABuller thanks for the response. The best way to earn back the trust of customers is to deliver. Looking forward to brighter days on these matters. Until then, how do we push critical show stopping issue up the flag pole? I am currently sitting on an issue where our Webhook services appears to be down for 12 hours. This is impacting our productions and many users. It would be nice to get some visibility as to how ADSK plans to triage these events with limited resources.

[ABuller]

Hey @Romey, I completely agree. We’re working on improving some internal processes and also now have a dedicated resource that’s performing queue management and triage. They’ll be going through the queue and checking in on such cases and working with internal assets to get things looked into as quickly as possible. We’re still actively hiring and targeting candidates with industry experience so that we get You (the community) the best people on these cases.

[kim]

This seemed like maybe the best place to post this question:

We’ve heard that the Zendesk site with nearly all of our Shotgun support conversations will be offline and inaccessible to us by the end of this month. Has anyone found a way to pull out the data from their support conversations?

I’d love to keep them locally for reference. There were some really great discussions with knowledgeable staff that are no longer at Autodesk that I’d hate to lose that history.

Thanks,
Kim

[Patrick]

Same here, I have years of useful info in my support accounts.
Ideally these would remain available on the new system, or failing that, being able to download them would be appreciated.
Thanks
Patrick

[brandon.foster]

@Jmalan I’m kicking the tires on the new support site and am having trouble locating where I can see my open support issues and their status. Can you (or anyone else on the thread who may have found it already) walk us through where to access this information?

[ABuller]

Hi @brandon.foster. Check How to find my support cases with Autodesk Technical Support?. I hope this helps.

[brandon.foster]

Thanks, @ABuller. That does the trick. I’ll bookmark it :).

How do users find that naturally on the support site? When I searched I get a bunch of results which have nothing to do with support:

Turns out I just needed to persevere and go to the next page of results to find the link to your support article (that’s my bad).

[jesse_morrow]

I just spent all morning trying to get a new user activated on our shotgun. The genius accountant that came up with this new licensing scheme and support should be fired. The old way was so much easier, robust, and client friendly. As is typical with Autodesk - they have taken yet another software, fired all the support people, stopped development and jacked the pricing. Totally not cool.

[Ricardo_Musch]

What steps did you go through?

Because I have seen some people do it all through the Autodesk ID UI and then again through the SG UI.

For me the following works quite well:

1. If you need to add or reduce seats, login to Autodesk ID and go to subscriptions
2. Add/reduce your seats (prices for adding seats are prorated as long as you add on the same subscription)
3. in Sg activate your user

Don’t add new subscriptions for each user, just get as many yearly/three yearly licenses you think you need as 1 subscription, and buy 1 more subscription as monthly seats for your freelancers etc… you can then easily add/reduce that one to match needs.

It’s 1 extra step indeed but I haven’t found this to be hugely complex myself.
But I don’t know your use case so you may be running into other issues.