Yesterday I read a blog post about what happens if you not cancel the famous Windows Error report dialog, but hit "Send information" instead. If you're the first one having this problem, a new entry in Microsoft's bug tracking database is created. each subsequent report from other people for the same bug increments a counter. When deciding about which bugs to fix first, among other things they rely on that counter.

Why I'm mentioning this? Because I would love to have the same for SwyxWare. However, that will not happen soon. And I doubt that our customer base is big enough to derive bug severity from the number of reportedly affected installations. We have to use other criteria for the time being. However, it would still be very useful to get such error report information.

Even if we will not have such a feature in the foreseeable future, we will do something in this area for the next version (after v6.1x). At least it's planned to do so. It was already planned for v6.10, but we had to postpone it. We get complaints from our partners and from our own support stuff that the process of getting trace files is too difficult and requires too many round-trips between customer, Swyx partner and Swyx support to get the right trace files. 

The tool I'm talking about will run on the SwyxWare server system and will

• enable logging (tracing) in all installed SwyxWare components per default
• allow easy enabling/disabling tracing globally for all services.
• make sure that old trace files are deleted automatically so that your hard disk is not filled with traces nobody needs anymore.
• allow uploading trace files, system information, event logs and SwyxWare crash dumps to Swyx with a couple of mouse clicks.

The upload mechanism has a catch, however. Swyx has no first level support. As customer you contact your Swyx Partner which is supposed to help you. If he can't, such a support case finally reaches Swyx. To prevent that we get trace files we have no support ticket for, you will have to enter a support ticket id which is validated online before anything is uploaded. The tool will be open to Swyx Partners, i.e. it will support uploading to an arbitrary location. Optionally Swyx partner can implement their own ticket ID checking mechanism.

I've a couple of ideas for future versions, but that's worth another blog entry.

BTW, the upload will not be done by FTP, but use a Windows Service called "Background Intelligent Transfer Service". I'll write in another post why we choose to use that.