Robert Jacobs, a PS LIGHTWAVE employee, recently received a surprise honor from one of our partners, Extreme. He has been a member of The Hub, Extreme Network’s community forum, since it was formed in 2014. This active forum has around 5000 users, and they moderate it with the help of a full time support engineer and various volunteers. Extreme started an “Embassador” (E for Extreme) program a few months back and have added a few chosen experts as contributors and helpers with issues and questions that are posted.
A couple of weeks ago, the PS LIGHTWAVE team visited the Extreme Network TAC and support center in Raleigh, NC to discuss future plans with this vendor. During the first meeting, the topic of the forum came up, and Robert mentioned his forum handle, EtherMan. The VP got excited because he realized that he and the other forum moderators had discussed in an internal Extreme committee on asking EtherMan about becoming one of their Champions and Embassadors. Needless to say, once the connection was made, they ended up promoting Robert later that day, and he met the forum manager, Drew, who gave him a nice shirt pin and cup. Drew then walked the team around showing them the test bed where they “lab up” scenarios that present themselves from time to time.
Robert told us, “For me this is a honor to be recognized by our vendor Extreme as an expert who has been sharing 20 years of knowledge and experience with other customers and users via The Hub. If you go to the forum and cruise around a bit, you will see how fast questions get answered. None of the Extreme employees that post ever ask if users have a service contract or not. In fact many times, Drew told me that he forwards more technical or interesting problems to specific engineers or support personnel to respond to directly. In today’s world where we all end up paying so much for support and services, it is nice to see this kind of attitude from them in the forum. For me it is my baseline of how support forums should be run and managed.”
You can visit The Hub forum here: https://community.extremenetworks.com/extreme
