  Reporting problems directly to engineers? 
 The Question is:
 
Who is the equivalent of Steve Lionel for
VMS in general, UCX etc?  In other words,
when bugs are encountered, or what I think to
be bugs, sometimes the overhead associated with
a proper bug report through official channels just takes
too long.  I would think that Compaq would be
interested in all bugs, or things that relatively
experienced users think might be bugs.  With
Fortran, my experience is that reporting bugs
(I have discovered a few) directly to Steve is easier
for me and probably for Compaq as well.  Often, one needs to be assured
it is a bug before submitting a report, but often the information exchange
for this is all that is needed.
 
 
 The Answer is:
 
  The Compaq Customer Support Center is the most appropriate mechanism
  for reporting problems with OpenVMS.
 
  Direct contact with individual engineers may appear faster, but it
  bypasses all of the reporting and support mechanisms designed to answer
  your questions quickly and in a manner that makes efficient use of the
  support staff and of engineering -- and to make sure that you get an
  answer back.  This can also mean that the problem reports are not fed
  back into the support databases, meaning that engineers can be repeatedly
  and unnecessarily contacted for a problem that has already been resolved.
 
  Historically, directing reporting of problems to engineers also often
  duplicate efforts -- more than a few reports are "spammed" to a variety
  of support contacts and direct to engineers.  (On one occasion, the
  OpenVMS Wizard received no less than five different copies of the same
  problem problem from the same site, all via different channels.  The
  OpenVMS Wizard does not know how many other folks received and answered
  the same problem report.)
 
  As a start, you will want to consider examining your support contracts,
  as there are various contracts available, and differing levels of support
  and response times are key features among the available contracts.  Also
  often available with support contracts is access to support databases,
  via mechanisms such as DSNlink.
 
