Last week, Bobby Lombardi (Sibelius Product Owner), Randy Fayan (Director of Engineering) and I met with some of you to discuss the future of Sibelius. I was there to reassure everyone that, even though there are changes to how Sibelius will be developed, there are no changes to the way support for Sibelius is run. So, let's take a look at the team and the current Support options.
First, the Support team is staying the same. There are three of us in the UK. In the US, we have six employees who share the UK call volume. We have one team member in Australia and one in Japan. Our experience goes all the way back to cover Sibelius 1, the Sibelius Educational Suite and we'll even help you write a custom sound set for Sibelius 7.
Free Support
We will continue to provide free support for your registration and activation issues as well as help you get up and running (i.e. assistance if Sibelius is crashing on start-up or if the installers are not working, etc.).
The Sibelius Forum is a great place to get help and to help each other. It’s available for everyone to read, but only registered Sibelius users can post. You will often receive a reply from an experienced Sibelius user or one of the Support team sometimes within minutes of posting.
Support resources on Sibelius.com are due to be re-vamped in the coming months, I'll update everyone on this as it happens. We've recently copied all the Sibelius.com Helpcenter articles to the new Avid.com Knowledge Base. For example, a good catch-all article for getting up and running with Sibelius.
Assisted Support
If you need assisted support to help you do certain things in Sibelius, work out why your score isn't doing what you are trying to achieve or help setting up your 3rd party plugins, then you will need to use an Avid Support Code (ASC) to access support. These are provided for you when you register Sibelius and are valid for 90 days from that point. If you have registered recently and don't know what your Avid Support Code is, you can retrieve your ASC details by email.
Once your Avid Support Code has expired, there are two options for further assisted support. You can either buy an individual ASC or an annual support contract that entitles you to contact us as you need to for up to a year. These can be purchased as Annual Assisted Support or Individual Avid Support Code from the Avid Store.
To give you some background on the history of the available support for Sibelius: We have always had a policy that we'll help you get up and running, regardless of if you're within your first 90 days or not and this continues today. For assisted support after this initial period, you have always needed to pay for support. Back when Sibelius was an independent company, we provided telephone support for 90 days after registration or new copies (not upgrades) and support via email from then on. We had an annual support contract too that you could buy but that was only available in the UK. Now, the 90 days of support is for new copies as well as upgrades and the support contracts are available worldwide. The main changes we made back in 2010 was to limit the email support to the 90 days too and that the 'gate keeper' for getting access to support is now a computerised system rather than a human.
Our contact details may have changed since you last needed our help. Bookmark the latest numbers and links to our contact forms.
For more details about our recent our meetings, Bobby Lombardi has updates on his blog. You can read the New team meets Sibelius’ UK community and Sibelius team meets with the Musicians' Union.
If you have any questions or feedback about support for Sibelius, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
Sam
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CS Manager, Sibelius | Avid Audio
Services and Customer Success
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