How to troubleshoot using the Support Portal self-service tools in Recovery Manager

Hello, I'm Sean Lutley, and Instructional Designer for Quest Software. And I'm here to welcome you to the "Troubleshooting with Support Portal" video demonstration. The first thing that you're going to want to do is go to support.quest.com. That's going to take you to the landing page. And from here, you have access to many different resources. First you have the knowledge base. And that's what we're really going to focus on in this video. You have the forms, where you can go and see what everybody is talking about, and help us solve some issues that might not be in the knowledge base. There is a Download Software link that gives you access to the latest software, patches, new builds, and such. There is also a link to our video tutorials library which has videos that can help you install the product and configure it. Then there is the contact support link. This is, if you're having some issues that you can't figure out after searching the knowledge base, you can actually contact support and open up a new support case. You can also manage your licenses and services. So you can get a new license or your existing license. And if you want new services, you can go there also. Here you can manage your account. So you can look at if you have an open support case, what products you have licenses for, and et cetera. You also have the technical documentation link that gives you the guides, manuals, release notes, and such. Then you have our consulting services, if you wanted a professional to help you install and configure the product. And last but not least, then there is also our educational services, where there is some courses that you can take on certain products to help you learn the products better. If you don't already have a support account, you're going to need to create one. To do so, just click on the little person and select Create Support Account. Then you need to enter your license number, serial number, or asset number. And then fill out all your contact information. If you don't know how to find your license number, serial number, or asset number, click on the link that says How to find your asset number. This page gives you details on how to find the information that you need. Your license information comes in an email like the one on this page. There is also a link Don't know your license or account number. Here you can fill out the form which will contact us. And then someone from Quest will get back to you with the information you need. Create a support account-- just make sure you fill out everything to the best of your abilities. Check off, I'm not a robot. When you submit the request, somebody will get back to you. So now you can get to get yourself signed in to the support portal. I'm a Quest employee. It will redirect me to sign up with Microsoft Azure. But if you're a customer or a partner, you'll be able to sign in with your information you got when you signed up for support. First we're going to start off with the knowledge base. This has most of the resources that you're going to need to find to troubleshoot your issues. On the left-hand side, you can also see it has links, just like the landing page, to all the major features that you want to access. I'm going to run a product search for Recovery Manager for Active Directory Forest Edition. It's a more mature product, so it'll give us more wide range of knowledge base articles or solutions. On the left-hand side, you can filter by different categories, product versions, topics, subtopics, and such just to narrow down your search a little bit more. I'm going to paste in a common error that I copied so we can do a quick search on this and see what comes up in the knowledge base articles. As you can see, it comes up with the exact error in the title. So chances are, that's going to be a good solution. Here you can see gives you the title, the description of the issue, what the cause of the issue was, and then of course the resolution of the issue on how to actually fix it. Then at the bottom, it gives you some additional information and the actual defect ID. So it was a defect in the product. In the future what you can do is, you can take this defect ID and then search for it in the newest version of the release notes. And then it will tell you if it's been actually fixed or not. And then on the left-hand side, you can actually see what versions of the product it effects, so you'll know if it's fixed or not in a newer version. So I'm just going to go back a couple pages. Now let's take a look at the self-service tools, a little bit more of them. Let's go down to the software downloads. Here you can see that we have the latest product version selected. And then you can see the last one that was released was an actual full maintenance release. And then you also have the general availability release, which was released a few months before. So from here, you can just click Download. It'll verify it. You just need to accept the terms and conditions and continue. And then it will go ahead and download the package in a zip file, which you can then either install or perform an upgrade with. As you can see in the bottom right-hand corner, there is the Chat now with support. This is for basic questions, low-level type of issues. If you have any complex issues, things that you can't find in the knowledge base for solutions, it's recommended to open a support