Getting the Dreamweaver PHP hotfix - some progress

A lot of people have complained (and rightly so) about the way Adobe forces people to jump through seemingly endless hoops in order to get the PHP hotfix that fixes a handful of serious bugs in Dreamweaver 8.0.2. One of the advantages of being an author of books on Dreamweaver is that I can participate in a private forum and raise matters of concern directly with Adobe and the Dreamweaver team. Yesterday, I posted a message in the forum expressing my frustration about the “scandalous lack of availability” of the hotfix, and in the process sparked off a heated debate.

I pointed to the slew of complaints in response to my original blog post. Fortunately, Phil Adkins had reproduced the response he received from Adobe Customer Service. An Adobe representative quickly replied that Phil had got in touch with the wrong department. It wasn’t Customer Service, but Technical Support he should have contacted. Quite frankly, this is nonsense. When customers get in touch with a company, they frequently have no idea which department they’re dealing with. It’s the job of Customer Service to put them in touch with the right one.

But it shouldn’t be necessary to ring or email any department in Adobe to get the hotfix. It should be made available for immediate download like any other Dreamweaver updater. That message has been passed on to Adobe in emphatic terms by me and several other people. The Adobe rep promised to convey that message to the Dreamweaver team. (Update: the hotfix can now be freely downloaded - see Scott Fegette’s comment. )In the meantime, the following should help:

• Contact Dreamweaver Technical Support, not Customer Support (the details are in the right column of this Adobe page)
• If Technical Support doesn’t know what you’re talking about, tell the representative that it’s covered by TechNote b6c2ae2a
• Tell Technical Support that you need DW802_HotFix-0_6_0.mxp
• If you still get nowhere, ask the representative for an incident number, and post the details here - I’ll pass them on to my contact inside Adobe

Hopefully, nobody will need to go as far as the last point, and this silly saga can be brought to a close. The tragedy is that it happened in the first place.

8 comments December 16th, 2006