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Conference 7.286::digital

Title:	The Digital way of working

Moderator:	QUARK::LIONELON

Created:	Fri Feb 14 1986
Last Modified:	Fri Jun 06 1997
Last Successful Update:	Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:	5321
Total number of notes:	139771

4362.0. "CSC "trade" in information. DIGITAL INTERNAL USE ONLY" by GIDDAY::SETHI (Rent this space) Mon Jan 15 1996 00:07

    Hi All,

    I have received an interesting message regarding the use of information
    from TIMA STARS database.  Working in the CSC we "trade" in information
    to get our customers solution in a fast and efficient manner.
    
    What get's me are the following line in the EM ....
    
    "It is imperative that you do NOT make this information available, IN
    ANY FORM, to customers, distributors, Digital partners or other
    third-parties.
    
    This information is for DIGITAL INTERNAL USE ONLY.
    
    Making this information available to people outside of Digital would
    put us at high risk of legal action. ".
    
    Now say I have a solution from STARS but it's marked "DIGITAL INTERNAL
    USE ONLY".  I am unable to give the customer a solution, so this means
    I may have to use the following options:
    
    1. I tell the customer to approach the 3rd Party and ask for the call
    to be closed.
    
    2. Waste time and ask management to take up the issue and if the
    customers system is down, well .... tough luck.
    
    3. Or be up front and tell the customer who has a support contract that
    I am unable to help because the information is for our use only.
    
    4. Dialin at best and solve the problem but the customer may be
    capturing what I am doing.  For PC based problems I cannot dialin so I
    have to go on-site, costs more to this (for digital).
    
    So what's the deal with this one ?
    
    Regards,
    
    Sunil

T.R	Title	User	Personal Name	Date	Lines
4362.1		setimc.soo.dec.com::OSTMAN	http://setimc.soo.dec.com/ostman.html	`Mon Jan 15 1996 06:19`	18
	Don't know if I miss something.. But the way I read your note, Digital have received some (specific) information from a 3rd party under a non-disclosure, so we can't pass it on to our customers? IMHO if we have an agreement not to release some information we should keep to what we agreed on. Or, are you refering to that articles (in general) with information that should be accessible to customers are marked as Internal Use Only. In that case I suggest that you make a comment on those articles with a note that they should really be customer readable. That way the customers can also access the article via AES and DIA and you wont have to read it to the customer. /Kjell (Ex. TIMA manager)
4362.2		setimc.soo.dec.com::OSTMAN	http://setimc.soo.dec.com/ostman.html	`Mon Jan 15 1996 06:22`	6
	For a quick resolution if it's about a specific article you might contact the author (press 'H' while viewing the article and you will get information on who the author is etc). /Kjell
4362.3	another interpretation	ALFAXP::M_HYDE	From the laboratory of Dr. Jekyll	`Mon Jan 15 1996 08:47`	28
	At least one other interpretation of this limitation is that you can use the information to solve the customer's problem, but you can't transmit the article to the customer verbatim. For example, a technical article received from a vendor might say Due to a design flaw the buffer size for the transfer must be limited to 64K or the operation will overwrite adjacent memory cause data corruption. To help control this we added an undocumented symbol called FRAMITZ_MAX_TRANSFER_SIZE. Define the symbol to a value of 64K or less to prevent data corruption. The legal contract between us and the vendor prohibits you from giving these details to the customer, however you can tell them that their data corruption situation does appear to be a known problem and that it can be worked around by defining the undocumented symbol FRAMITZ_MAX_TRANSFER_SIZE to 64K or less. It may be semantics, but things are tough enough without having the lawyers crawling all over us. mark MCS Technical Information Management Group (the source of some of those warnings)
4362.4	.3 is right on the money	STOWOA::KALINOWSKI		`Mon Jan 15 1996 11:53`	35
	Sunil Note .3 is correct. Some information provided via TIMA is for internal USE only. The reason is that resolution may not be at a point of being perfect, or there may be a disconnect with another vendor. You can use the information to fix the problem. You cannot give the actual article to the customer. I can remember several years ago when a competitor's product was not working well with one of our new buses. We were not sure at first if it was their problem, or ours. So an article warning the field was issued. A copy was given to a customer who showed it to the competitor who used it to in a legal action saying we may be at fault. It was not a good time. This is same reasoning I gave several months ago when someone asked why we don't just open up all of MCS's technical databases to everyone. When TIMA was originally developed in the early 80's, capabilities to limit internal distribution were in place for highly sensitive articles to ensure technical competency of the support person in understanding what was being explained. We have since opened up these articles to all internal readers. Please use the information to make our customer's happy. But don't give them copies of such articles. These same article are automatically flagged so customers cannot view them via online methods. Should conditions change, the authors will update and redistribute the article. If you have any further questions please contact either Mai Douglas in Sydney or myself. John Kalinowski Asia Pacific MCS TIM Mgr.