NOTA BENE TECHNICAL SUPPORT
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“Nota Bene is the only tech place where I'll always find
a human being with the answers I need.”
— Lee Haring
Professor Emeritus of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, specializing in folklore
(with folklore fieldwork in Kenya, Madagascar [as Fulbright Senior Lecturer], and Mauritius [as Fulbright researcher])
It is our practice to provide technical support — whether by email or by phone — at no cost to any licensed and registered user for six months following their purchase of Nota Bene Workstation. At our discretion, this period of free technical support may be extended if the user is using the then current version of the program. See “Further Details” below for a fuller account of what is included, and what limitations might apply.
The current version of Nota Bene is:
14
To check which version you are currently running,
start Nota Bene and then click Help, About Nota Bene.
IMPORTANT NOTE
While in many cases installing the latest version of the program will, by itself, resolve whatever problem you may be encountering (perhaps, for example, because the current version includes fixes/adjustments for the constant changes in Windows or the Mac OS), in some cases you may continue to encounter the same problem even after installing the current version. If that proves to be the case, contact us, and we’ll work to figure out the problem. (We'll be in a much better position to do so, since we will have the active code base which we can properly debug and support.)
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THE NOTA BENE USER COMMUNITY
It has been our practice — something we have done from the day Nota Bene was first demonstrated at the MLA Convention in the winter of 1982 — to provide courteous, prompt, and knowledgeable technical support, as outlined above.
Because we know many NB users by name, either from our past academic lives, or from contact at academic conventions, and because of the quality and nature of this support (users understandably respond favorably to courtesy and competence), many Nota Bene users have become, quite literally, friends, not only with us (and we with them), but with each other. It’s not simply a metaphor to speak of a Nota Bene community.
That there is a real Nota Bene community, and that many of us are friends, however, sometimes makes it difficult for us to say, to somebody who writes or calls with a question related to an older version, “you need to upgrade to the current release in order for us to help you.” But it’s only the on-going support of Nota Bene by those who use it — concretely evidenced by upgrading to the current release — that makes it possible for us to continue to provide the kind of support that you deserve and we want to give. Put directly, upgrade monies help cover the costs involved both in supporting the program and developing enhancements to it; they help ensure that we are around in the future when you need us to be.
FURTHER DETAILS
You need to be running the current version of the program
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The first thing we do when we receive an email is to check whether you are a registered user of the current version. We do that even before we spend time trying to determine whether the problem reported is simple or complex. This rather simple rule lets us devote our full resources to serving the needs of those who are active members of the Nota Bene community. More than that, it helps you understand our policy and saves us from agonizing over every request for “just a little help” on a “small” issue from even those who are friends (no qualifying quotes there).
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Support is provided only to the original licensee
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We have, by all accounts, a very generous user license. Since only simultaneous use by others is restricted, not use by somebody else when you are not using it, we sometimes get support calls or emails from the assistants, spouses, or partners, etc., of the licensee. Given the level of the support that we provide, we are simply not able to provide that to a second person, primarily because the second person is almost always an occasional user who has had no incentive to learn on their own how the program works. This means that we might end up explaining the same thing twice (first to somebody who might not be at all familiar with the program). And this takes time away from the time we could otherwise give to other users and/or devote to improving the program.
There are some exceptions:
- If the other person is your assistant, who regularly uses your copy (again, only when you are not using it—see our user license), and is more knowledgeable about the program than you are, we will (at our discretion) talk to them, but only after receiving a request from you, the primary user, that we do so.
- We will of course talk directly to any IT person or computer professional who is helping you get the program set up. But again, you need to initiate the first contact.
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In technical support our goal is to help resolve problems that you might encounter
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This might include problems with installation and with system-compatibility issues, functions that don't seem to work as expected, or problems with specific files. We endeavor to help you get past specific issues which might otherwise prevent you from using Nota Bene to accomplish what you need to be doing.
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There may be limits to the level of support we can provide
Our focus is always on providing as much help as we can, rather than telling you what we cannot do. At the same time, the amount and timeliness of the support that we provide is at our discretion. Among other possible exclusions, the following are not normally part of the technical support we are able to offer:
- Training you how to use the program
- Repeating what is already described in the help system or tutorials
- Actually making the changes to your files that need to be made (we tell you what to do; we do not, except in unusual circumstances, actually do it for you)
- Creating customized style-formats or data-capture rules
- Figuring out why XPL (eXtended Programming Language) programs don't work
- Explaining how to write programs that convert data from one format to another
- Preparing camera-ready copy for submission to a publisher
- Offering detailed suggestions about how to organize your research or project
- Trouble-shooting problems for those who have customized their program
- Spending excessive time on unusual problems that may be specific to a user's system and/or use
- Spending a disproportionate amount of time on individual users, when doing so prevents us from serving other members of the Nota Bene user commmunity
In some cases, we may be able to help with one or more of these issues as part of a consulting arrangement. (Please write to technicalsupport@notabene.com.)
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