spoke too soon..

So, that whole thing yesterday about having chocolate cake and a slow day, and what could go wrong? Yeah, I spoke too soon.

I used to manage a Learning Management System which as transitioned to an in-house version. We cancelled our contract with the vendor, and to make a long story short, they continue to send us bills... why.... because 328 of our lovely employees are somehow getting into the system since January, and taking courses! They just told us this yesterday.

We had an internal re-direct URL that we disabled, all of the literature went out about the new system, and there's a huge sign that I created when you login that says "DO NOT USE THIS SYSTEM" - again, proving that no one reads!

It's a 2-fold problem... A - SumTotal never shut down access to the system (which they blame us for, and I'll get to in a minute) and B - somewhere in MSH, a few people have the real URL to the LMS bookmarked, and are getting to it.

They are trying to say that we advised them on Feb 8th that we wanted our system back up again. No, what happened on Feb 8th was that I spoke to the director of their hosting environment, discussing the transition of our data records to our system, and asked him for a report out of our system to validate the data that he's sending us. We were hosted, therefore I never had direct access to the data. He advised me that there would be a cost associated with it because he would need to get professional services involved. Or, I could login to the system myself and use report manager. He said that would be the easiest and most efficient way. So they put in a ticket to open the access up so I could login for a day and run the report - they never shut it back down. And considering that there were conversations with our SrVP and Legal going back and forth at that time, the intent was obviously that we were no longer customers. Now they are trying to take that single request as a statement that we wanted to maintain our service. Therefore we owe them over $50,000 and because of a few jerk employees who don't read - they have validation that people were taking courses on it.

Now we are calling the 328 people to determine how they are accessing the website, as our SrVP wants a full report... and the one lady my boss spoke to denied logging in, and walked her through the process for logging in to the other system. Those two systems don't talk to each other.. there's no way her record could transfer - so her memory is faulty. She probably logged in, someone saw what she was doing, or said something, and then she created an account in the correct system.

Why can we just be done with this.... and why is SumTotal out yet again to make a buck. We have paid them over millions of dollars, and I still did not get an exceptional product. They hated when I called, because it wasn't for something stupid. Their "out of the box" product had so many bugs in it, I don't even know how it passed Quality Assurance. They have compensated for my complaints so many times with "free features", it's insane! They got to a point where they would bypass the general help desk and just give me to one of their engineers, and they were all excited about meeting me at the annual users convention. I've saved their butts on more than one occasion, speaking to potential customers for them - yet they are doing this.

BUT - on a good note... Jordan came in today to say goodbye. She's moving back home to Savannah to be closer to her family - which I think she and Danny are both looking forward to. She brought in cupcakes from cakelove - OMG, they are amazing! I just had a strawberry one... heavenly... I was so happy to see her before she goes, and I know I'm going to miss her terribly! But, now I have more reason to take a road trip to Savannah! :)