Overseer Support
RSI provides unlimited email support to schools with active support agreements. New software purchases come with one year of free email support which can be renewed annually for 20% of the current purchase price of the supported product(s).
Our Commitment
At Robust Software Inc we are committed to delivering a software
product which is easily installed, intuitive to use, and robust. Our primary
design philosophy, as our name suggests, is to get it right the first
time. We are proud of our track record
of fewer than 3 support requests per school per year.
Nevertheless, we expect to uncover Overseer bugs from time to time. We will do our best to post information about reported bugs and provide software updates (on our web site) to resolve them.
Our Recommendations
Your most important habit when developing and using your Overseer school database should be that of performing regular backups to diskettes or another disk drive. This will protect you against corruption due to power line brownouts, Windows crashes, hard disk crashes or other causes which may corrupt your Overseer database. A high capacity floppy disk drive or backup tape drive is a good investment. Alternatively, create a backup copy on a different hard drive (other than your C: drive); a server drive is ideal. Although RSI will endeavour to resolve any software problems in Overseer, we cannot assume responsibility for permanent data loss resulting from a lack of a backup database. It is good practice to keep multiple backups (e.g. daily, weekly and monthly).
A special word of caution is appropriate with respect to floppy disc backups. These can be unreliable. Backups to diskette via Overseer may appear to be successful, but may fail during a subsequent restore procedure because of one or more faulty diskettes. The only way to be certain that a backup to diskette was reliable is to copy the backup file from each backup diskette in turn to another medium (e.g. a hard drive). If the copy succeeds, then you know that the diskette is readable.
To get the maximum benefit from Overseer, we recommend that you equip your secretary, resident computer specialist and/or principal with desktop e-mail. Alternatively, have an associate use his/her e-mail account to contact us on your behalf. Remember, it is hard for us to support you through someone who does not use the Overseer application or lacks an understanding of the Windows operating system.
First Steps in Problem Resolution
If you encounter a bug, please go through the check-list of common problems with Windows applications. We cannot provide unlimited support for problems related to the Windows operating system, or to computer hardware.
If none of these issues is relevant, then check our web site to see whether yours is a known bug for which an update has been issued.
RSI Technical Support
If the above steps do not resolve the problem, then contact us (at support@robustsoftware.com) with detailed information about the problem. If your problem is not an installation problem, please specify your software license number in the subject of your e-mail message.
Supplying the following information will help expedite your e-mail request for support:
- The operating system you are using (Windows 95, 98, NT4, 2000 or XP).
- The amount of RAM memory on your PC (should be ≥ 16 MB).
- The available disk space on your C: hard drive (should be ≥ 100 MB).
- Did a standard test under the ScanDisk Windows utility run without errors?
- How many files are there in the ...\Overseer\MainDB directory?
- Is your PC connected to a local area network?
- Do other Windows applications run ok?
- Does the problem you are reporting occur when no other applications are running?
If you are reporting an installation problem, the following information may also be helpful:
9. Are you installing from a CD-ROM drive in the target PC or was the installation software installed from the Internet?
10. Did you try uninstalling (via the Windows Control Panel), then re-installing Overseer?
