The Connected Business Support Center

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1 t At Connected Business, we develop powerful, fully integrated applications designed to bring all the major business processes together via a single comprehensive solution. Our applications are powerful, feature rich and include a large array of configuration and customization options so that you can fine tune it to your exact needs. Because of the breadth and flexibility of our solution, we understand that learning and setting up our applications can be overwhelming at times, so we have created a number of supporting resources for our users. This guide has been designed to help you better understand the options in the Connected Business Support Center, so that you can get the help you need in the most efficient manner possible. The Connected Business Support Center

2 Welcome To Connected Business. We Are Here To Help You! We understand that learning how to setup, configure and use our products can feel overwhelming at times. To help you get the best possible experience from our products and solutions, we have created a number of educational resources to make it easy to get the help you need. The Connected Business Blog: Check out our blogs where you can get real world tips and tricks on some of the most advanced features, performance tips and great ideas discovered through our community of users. Online Documentation and Support Knowledgebase: Our online documentation is a great reference tool to learn more about all of the various functions inside our Connected Business application. To get to the documentation, click on the Community menu from our website and select Online Documentation. We also have a growing knowledgebase and special topic videos that are designed to help users on more advanced topics. The knowledgebase is in our support portal and the videos can be browsed in our community pages. You can avail of these services for free. Want a Feature Added To The Program?: We are always looking for customer feedback and have created a new feature suggestion area on our website so that our users can help us decide what features we will include in future releases. If a new feature is crucial to your business, and we agree that it would add value to the program, you can contact our PSG team to see how you can get the feature added to an upcoming release at a reduced cost. Community Forums: We are blessed to have a vibrant community of users and partners that actively participate in our community forum and community groups section of our website. The forum is where users and partners can interact and exchange ideas on ways to use our products. Just keep in mind that the forum is not support and no support issues will be addressed in the forum. Connected Business Videos: Connected Business is an incredibly powerful program. Having a good understanding of all its features can greatly help you maximize its use for your business. To better understand Connected Business, we have created hundreds of videos to show how you can get the most out of Connected Business. The videos are 100% free and can be accessed at Connected Business Partners: We have a number of highly qualified partners that can help you make the most of your Connected Business experience by keeping your operations running at the peak of efficiency. Our partners have valuable expertise and offer advanced, personalized services such as consulting, support, web design, SEO and more. Please contact our sales team at to learn more about how our partner network can help you.

3 Understanding Our Technical Support Plans Because we understand how important support can be in an emergency, our technical support department operates 24 hours a day, 5 days a week. Technical support can be requested by submitting a ticket in our support portal: Response time can vary according to normal business hours, the technical support plan you have purchased, the severity level of the request and number of other support tickets submitted. This is detailed in the response time goal section of this document. We are proud to include our ConnectedCare support plan with each of our cloud or maintenance plans at no additional charge*. ConnectedCare is an excellent choice for companies that make an effort to stay current on our newer releases, have not customized their solution and do not require phone support. In addition to our ConnectedCare support plan we now offer our ConnectedCare PRO support plan for companies with greater technical support requirements. In addition to our support plans, many of our local partners also offer add-on support plans to complement our offerings. The benefits of working with a local partner for your support needs is that they will have a more intimate understanding of your business as well as provide expert guidance issues that are more specific to your business or consulting in nature. Choosing the Right Plan for You ConnectedCare ConnectedCare allows you to enter an unlimited number of Basic support tickets into our ticketing support system 24 hours a day however our response time will be based on normal business hours. ConnectedCare PRO (Additional Charges Apply) In addition to all of the benefits provided in ConnectedCare, ConnectedCare PRO includes faster response times, priority queuing, telephone access to a technical support coordinator during normal business hours, discounted developer services, and additional resolution support options. * ConnectedCare and ConnectedCare PRO support does not cover questions pertaining to the implementation of the solution or that are consulting (i.e. we have 3 warehouses and need to know how to ) or development in nature (including create custom reports, business intelligence, user roles, etc.). For these types of questions you will need to purchase one of our implementation plans or purchase advanced or developer support credits. Please see the Understanding the Support Options section for more details. Also note that support issues that require escalation to our advanced support / development support departments requires the purchase of additional support credits. This can vary according to the version you are running, which support plan you have purchased and the existence of custom / modified fuctionity that would affect the core data integrity of the solution. Please see the issue resolution section for more details.

4 Severity Levels We understand that not all support requests are equal. For example a support incident that causes a company s operations to grind to a halt needs to take priority over general product questions. To make sure that issues are handled with the proper urgency, we have created the following four (4) severity levels; Severity Level 1 (Urgent) Severity Level 2 (High) Severity Level 1 means an issue where Customer s production use of the solution is stopped or so severely impacted that the Customer cannot reasonably continue business operations. It may result in a material and immediate interruption of Customer s business operation that will cause a loss of Customer data and/or restrict availability to such data and/or cause significant financial impact. Severity Level 2 means an issue where one or more important functions of the solution is unavailable with no acceptable alternative solution. Customer's implementation or production use of the Service is continuing but not stopped; however, there is a serious impact on the Customer's business operations Severity Level 3 (Medium) Severity Level 3 means an issue where: (a) important Service features are unavailable but an Alternative Solution is available, or (b) less significant Service features are unavailable with no reasonable Alternative Solution. Customers experience a minor loss of business operation functionality and/or an impact on implementation resources. Severity Level 4 (Low) Severity Level 4 means an issue that has a minimal impact on business operations or basic functionality of the Service. Special note for third party services such as shipping services, payment gateways, EDI, Banking, etc.: Occasionally our third party service providers make changes to their services that may cause a feature in our solution to no longer function. In no event would these changes, or loss of these services, fall under our severity levels nor are we responsible to provide updates to active, long term or end of life products to address these changes. For these changes you may be required to upgrade to the latest release as supporting these changes may require major modifications to the core solution that can only be provided in a new release.

5 Support by Release Connected Business is always working to improve our products based on the feedback from our users. This feedback is incorporated into periodic releases that include new features, enhancements, and bug fixes to our solution. To get the best experience with our solution, we highly encourage our customers to stay current with each new release. Although we support the functionality of all of our releases, our ability to answer questions or resolve issues in older releases diminish over time. Furthermore, the expenses related to fixing an older release can be very costly as 1) we may need to reinstall older development platforms and third party tools before we can examine an issue in an older release, 2) the original developers that worked on that fuctionity may no longer be available, and 3) the fix usually cannot be ported to the latest active release. Companies on a support plan can continue to submit support tickets for older releases of our solution and our support technicians will attempt to answer these questions; however our ability to support and provide fixes to older releases decreases over time. To set guidelines of what is and what is not supported as part of our ConnectedCare and ConnectedCare PRO plans we have broken out our releases by stages as noted below. The Connected Business Release Stages Latest Active Release Active Release Long Term Support (LTS) Release When a new version is released, we consider that version to be the latest active release. All releases are considered active releases for a period of 12 months from the date of release. From time to time we will designate an older release with a Long-Term Support (LTS) status. Once a version has been designated as a LTS release, it will no longer receive maintenance fixes as part of our support plans unless they are deemed critical to the integrity of the financials (critical financial issues) as determined by our support engineers. After the LTS period has expired, we will consider the release End of Life (EOL). These releases will be identified at It's important to remember that deficiencies identified by our technicians do not imply future refinements will be made to a LTS release, and in no possible circumstance will a product enhancement be considered a critical financial issue. In many cases, the resolution for reported issues will be to upgrade to a newer release. End of Life (EOL) Release All releases that are older than 12 month old, that have not been designated as a Long Term Support release are considered End of Life (EOL). It's important to remember that deficiencies identified by our technicians do not imply future refinements will be made to an EOL release. In many cases, the resolution for reported issues will be to upgrade to a newer release.

6 Response Time Goals Our response time goal is to respond to all support issues in a timely manner according to the severity of the issue and support plan purchased. Please note that that exact response times can vary according to the issue and the number of support tickets submitted by other customers. Also note that in some cases an issue may need to be escalated to a specialist in our development team and that the final resolution time will vary. Our response time is based off 9am 8pm eastern standard time from Monday to Friday. Our goal is to respond (but not necessarily resolve) to all support incidents based on the support plan purchased: ConnectedCare Support Plan Response time Severity 1 Severity 2 Severity 3 Severity 4 Response time 4 Hours 8 Hours 12 Hours 2 Business Days ConnectedCare PRO Support Plan Response time Severity 1 Severity 2 Severity 3 Severity 4 Response time 2 Hours 4 Hours 8 Hours 2 Business Days

7 Issue Resolution When issues do arise, we strive to resolve the issues in the quickest possible manner. Issue resolution can be different depending on the version you are running and what customizations you have made (your website skin is considered a customization). customization. For ecommere related issues, we will check the website against the default skin that comes with the solution to see if the issue is caused by customizations within your skin design or any custom JavaScript libraries that have been referenced. When issues are reported to us, we compare them to our latest active release. We also check to see if customizations have been made to the core system, system databases, or if data has been entered directly into the database via a third party application or You are using the latest (most current) Active Release If we determine that the root cause of the issue is most likely not related to any customization of the solution, then we use one of the following resolution matrixes according to version that the customer is running and support plan purchased; Your Plan Severity 1 Severity 2 Severity 3 Severity 4 ConnectedCare Provide solution via script or DLL* for your installation. If the solution requires major changes the core solution, we reserve the right to address it in a future release. ConnectedCare PRO Provide solution via script or DLL* for your installation. If the solution requires major changes the core solution, we reserve the right to address it in a future release. Provide solution via script or DLL* for your installation. If the solution requires major changes the core solution, we reserve the right to address it in a future release. Provide solution via script or DLL* for your installation. If the solution requires major changes the core solution, we reserve the right to address it in a future release. Will be addressed in a address it in your installation at developer Will be addressed in a address it in your installation at advanced May be addressed in a address it in your installation at developer May be addressed in a address it in your installation at advanced You are using an older Active Release and the issue is resolved in the latest active release Your Plan Severity 1 Severity 2 Severity 3 Severity 4 ConnectedCare Option to address it in your installation at advanced ConnectedCare PRO Provide fix via script or DLL*. In some cases we may ask you to upgrade to the latest release. Option to address it in your installation at developer Option to address it in your installation at advanced upgrade to the latest active Option to address it in your installation at developer upgrade to the latest active Option to address it in your release at advanced support rates.** May be addressed in a address it in your release at developer rates.** May be addressed in a address it in your release at advanced

8 You are using an older Active Release and the issue is not resolved in the latest active release Your Plan Severity 1 Severity 2 Severity 3 Severity 4 ConnectedCare Provide fix via script or DLL*. In some extreme cases where the fix requires major changes to the application, we may ask you to upgrade to the latest release and we will provide the fix to that release, or wait for the next version release. ConnectedCare PRO Provide fix via script or DLL*. In some extreme cases where the fix requires major changes to the application, we may ask you to upgrade to the latest release and we will provide the fix to that release, or wait for the next version release. Provide fix via script or DLL*. In some cases we may ask you to upgrade to the latest release and we will provide the fix to that release, or wait for the next version release. Provide fix via script or DLL*. In some cases we may ask you to upgrade to the latest release and we will provide the fix to that release, or wait for the next version release. Will be addressed in a address it in your release at developer Will be addressed in a address it in your release at advanced May be addressed in a address it in your release at developer Will be fixed in next release. Option to address it in your release at advanced support rates.** You are using a version identified as a Long Term Support (LTS). Your Plan Severity 1 Severity 2 Severity 3 Severity 4 ConnectedCare Issues covered in our LTS policy that can be fixed with a script. All other issues, including issues covered in our LTS policy that require a DLL to resolve, will require the purchase of developer support credits for the hours required to address the issue. Option to fix in current release at developer ConnectedCare PRO Issues covered in our LTS policy that can be fixed with a script. All other issues, including issues covered in our LTS policy that require a DLL to resolve, will require the purchase of developer support credits for the hours required to address the issue. Option to fix in current release at advanced support rates.**

9 You are using a version that is considered End of Life Your Plan Severity 1 Severity 2 Severity 3 Severity 4 ConnectedCare Option to fix in current release at developer Option to fix in current release at developer ConnectedCare PRO Option to fix in current release at advanced support rates.** Option to fix in current release at advanced support rates.** * Not all possible issues, especially those that rely on code, functions and services of third parties can be fixed in an active release. For these kinds of issues, we reserve the right to make the resolution available in the next possible release. ** We reserve the right to decline requests to provide resolutions in previous releases. This can be due to a number of factors including, but not limited to, current development schedules, changes in personnel, risk of the development causing other problems in the solution, etc.

10 Support for Customizations or Heavily Customized Solutions Our solutions are designed to be customizable to meet the exact needs of any business. It is common for our customers to add new features, change the logic of existing features or write customizations that populate information in our database. These kinds of changes, if not done 100% properly, can have serious adverse effects on the performance and stability of the solution. For example, missing data in the sales order tables may cause problems later when you go to apply a payment, pay a commission or print a shipping label. Because the stability of our application is heavily dependent of the underlying data being correct, our ability to support the product diminishes considerably as the solution is customized so special support protocols need to be implemented for customized solutions. Customers with customizations that have the potential to affect the stability of the solution as well as for complex technical support issues that requires the analyses of your solution, website, database or setup configuration by one of our developers, you must first open a developer investigation ticket in our support center. Each developer investigation ticket requires 240 support credits which includes up to 4 hours of investigation. ConnectedCare plan members would need to purchase the support credits at the developer support rates (2 support credit per minute) whereas ConnectedCare PRO plan members can use the advanced support rate (1 support credit per minute). This process can take 3 business days or longer. If in our investigation we find that the customization is not the cause of the issue, then we will use the resolution matrix for the resolution process and refund the support credits back to your account. If our investigation finds that the issue is due to a power outage, data corruption, computer virus, configuration issue, misuse of the program, customization (including web design), incorrect importing of data or third party application, we may offer you the option to purchase additional support credits to resolve the issue based on the estimated time. Please note that opening an Advanced or Developer support ticket does not bind Connected Business to provide a resolution and we reserve the right to decline support for these kinds of issues based off of available resources and other factors.

11 Common Question Types That Are Not Covered Under Our Support Plans Implementation Related Questions: Our Support plans do not include setup and configuration questions that are specific to your business. This includes, but is not limited to, preferences, application configurations, pricing setup, commission setup, taxation setup, shipping setup, accounting setup, importing of data, etc. For help on implementation related items, review courses in our in our Connected Business University (Free), ask other users in our community forum (Free), submit a ticket to our Consulting Services department (paid) or purchase one of our implementation services (paid). Accounting / Bank Reconciliation Data Related Questions: Our Support plans only covers the basic questions on accounting and bank reconciliation. Questions related to the analysis of your journal entries, trial balances, financial statements, or bank reconciliation activities require a support ticket to be entered for either the Advanced Support (paid) or Consulting (Paid) departments. In no event are we able to support, under any of our support options, any general ledger / bank reconciliation transitions if a company has not been following the proper Accounting / Bank Reconciliation processes or if they have more than 2 open periods / bank statements. Training Related Questions: Our Support plans do not cover questions of how to use the program for a given business. This is because many features have configuration options, and the configuration and usage of that feature can vary greatly from business to business. For training related questions, look into our online help documentation (Free), take the appropriate courses in our in our Connected Business University (Free), ask other users in our community forum (Free) or attend one of live training sessions (paid). A list of upcoming training sessions is published on our website in the events section. Custom Reports / Business Intelligence Reports: Questions on how to create custom reports and business intelligence dashboards are not covered under our support plans. For these queries, take the appropriate courses in our in our Connected Business University (Free), ask other users in our community forum (Free) or submit a ticket to our Consulting Services department (paid). Environmental and issues that cannot be replicated: Reported issues that appear to be bugs are compared against our latest release. If we are unable to reproduce the issue on the latest release, you can request the issue to be investigated by our Developer Support team (paid) to see if it is due to a configuration issue, customization errors or third party applications. Any known environmental related items will be posted in our support portal knowledgebase. Custom Programming: Connected Business is unable to debug and correct programming / data issues due to custom programming or third party plug-ins. Please refer to the partner / developer that created the customization for support. Data Related Questions: Questions that require an analysis of your data by one of our developers will require either an advanced support or developer support ticket to be created. ecommerce issues on customized skins: ecommerce Issues reported bugs are compared against our latest Demo website release. If we are unable to reproduce the issue on the latest Demo website, you can request the issue to be investigated by our Developer Support team to see if it is due to a configuration issue or customization errors. ecommerce performance: Our ecommerce cart is tested for performance before release. If you feel that your website is slow, then search our knowledgebase for website performance articles and discover ways to investigate performance bottlenecks and design issues. If you would like to have a member of our team take a look at your website, please open a developer support ticket. Windows Server / Windows Terminal Server: Questions that pertain to the installation, setup and usage of our solution that are related to Windows Sever or Windows Terminal Sever are not supported. Please contact the appropriate Microsoft expert for help on your issue.

12 When Support Is Not Enough: The Connected Business Professional Services Group Many companies start their Connected Business' experience with our Professional Services Group. This group offers a number of optional value added services designed to simplify Connected Business understanding. The Professional Services Group is ready to help you should you require the following services or assistance: Consulting Services: Have questions on how to best setup and use Connected Business for your company? Our consulting services team can meet with you to discuss your needs and come up with a plan to accomplish your goals. Product Fit Analysis Program: Finding the right software solution for a business can be challenging. A solution-seeking company has to either get an intimate knowledge of various prospected solutions, or the solution provider has to know the major processes of the company. Our Product Fit Analysis Program is designed for busy executives who want Connected Business to do most of the work as possible in assessing the delta between the functionality of our solutions and the needs of their business. configurations in upgrading your database, website, web services and service manager set up. Installers for the new version can be downloaded from our community website. The Upgrade Services can perform the installation of the current version for you and ensure that minimal bugs and errors are encountered. Web Design / Web Store Customizations: On top of the available free skins on the ecommerce module, we also offer low cost in-house web design packages to further customize the look and feel of your website. Should you wish to customize the web store, our Professional Services Group can help you modify your skins, XML and other website design customizations. Implementation Services: Implementation services pertain to the initial setup, configuration and importing of data into our application. Our implementation services follow a very simple set process. For more complex implementations, we highly suggest that you work with one of our partners as they can provide a custom implementation process as well as consulting services. Connected Business Customizations: Since our product is customizable to fit the needs of our clients, we offer custom programming services for our solution to fit perfectly to your business' exact needs. Depending on your needs, non-existing plug-ins or functionalities such as custom fields and database changes in the application can be added. Our customization option covers everything from website, IS client, and integration from one application to our system. Upgrade Services: To maximize features of our application and keeping your system up to date, the professional services group accommodates the upgrade of your Connected Business version. This includes database backup, website, web services, Connected Business installation and other necessary Reports & Business Intelligence: Though our application has several hundred built-in reports, you may want to have a special report created for your unique needs. You can contact our professional services group for any custom reporting or business intelligence dashboard needs.

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