Smoothwall Support

[bamin]

Has anyone contacted support recently and noticed how long they take to respond to requests.

 

I contacted support last month about an issue with filtering. they took over a month to respond to my request.

 

Last week I contacted them for another issue, its now been nearly two weeks and still no response from the support team.

 

You have people in triage who constantly lie.

 

I complained to the customer success managers however, they don't seem bothered at all. They keep saying how overwhelmed they are with support calls and they are doing their best to support everyone.

 

Would like to know if anyone else is having similar issues with smoothwall support as I personally have lost confidence in them and am seriously thinking of moving to a different filtering supplier. Any recommendations?

 

thanks

 

Amin

[Aprice]

Support does seem to vary a lot throughout the year. Last ticket we put in was with it not filtering certain games sites despite it saying that they were blocked. We had a session with them which didn't resolve the issue, then a while later it was just closed.

 

For us I really think the appliance option needs to improve fast, we've asked about Chromebook authentication and were basically told they need Smoothwall cloud filter to authenticate Chromebooks.

[thompsonc]

I completely agree with you here!

 

I have an example of a ticket that was passed to 2nd line which took 2 months until I got a repsponse.

 

Once you manage to speak to someone in 2nd or 3rd line though you can generally get any issue resolved reasonably quickly.

 

Good luck!

[tom_newton]

If you have instances of people lying to you - tell me ASAP.

 

We are under a huge amount of strain at the moment - a large ticket volume, plus lots of sickness and other absences throughout this year has meant support isnt where it should be. We're currently training new hires to help. I know it is frustrating, but we are working to fix it.

 

With regard to Chromebook auth - yes, cloud filter is the way to go. It's no cost and it does a much better job, as theres no MiTM needed.

[jamiewyc]

Hi,

 

Chipping in my two cents here: I've looked after quite a few schools with Smoothwall in place - back a few years ago Support used to be amazing. Now, I would never recommend (or will take any schools over) to Smoothwall now. Today for example, P1 incident with half a college using 2-3 Mbps because of a Smoothwall fault, 2 days in I'm still waiting to even SPEAK to an engineer, let alone get it solved. Call handler refusing to update ticket from P3 to P1 because they "think" it's an internal issue without even investigating (Even though I have plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise). We have 4 Smoothwalls, so even a large network customer still gets treated poorly - after 10+ years working in IT for Education, Smoothwall support is by far the worst I've ever experienced.

[dapaulio]

I’ll offer my two cents also. Smoothwall is a great product but Smoothwall are a shadow of their once self in terms of support and they really need to get their act together to return to the days they once were before it’s too late.

 

With most of the schools I support using on prem smoothwall and for the last 20years of my career mostly using smoothwall I am increasingly finding it difficult lately to defend smoothwall to strategic colleagues when renewals come about.

[Fazza]

We lose internet connectivity fairly regularly due to something going on on the Smoothwall box so we have to keep rebooting it. We've got to the stage now that we schedule it to reboot out of hours every other day. Logged months ago and Smoothwall dont seem to realise the importance of an internet connection during GCSE and A-Level exam time! Reported to out account manager who replied saying support is really busy. It sat with 1st line for 3 or 4 weeks before even being looked at by 2nd line. When it works Smoothwall is great, when it doesn't there's very few people in support to look at the issue let alone fix it.

[tom_newton]

We know support hasnt been where we would like it to be this year - lots of additional demand, much of it unexpected. I know we're on a much better track now, however as we are adding to the team, and the backlog of tickets is way down. I am always happy to help investigate any issue that's ongoing.

[robyholmes]

Same as many comments above. Smoothwall is a good product, but support has been a problem for a number of years now. The cloud products are progressing, but still for us at least a long way off replacing the onsite web filter. However the onsite web filter hasn't progressed for a number of years now.So for us it's not only support that seems a bit stale at Smoothwall, but development as well.

 

I will give Smoothwall credit that our support issues do tend to get looked at by someone who knows the products in 2nd line, so do get resolved in the end. Plus their commitment to keeping track of UK Government / Department policy changes and communicating these to customers is also very welcome. It provides you with some confidence they are matching the product to the requirements schools must follow. The risk however is this only works if the product works, which replies on development & support.

[tom_newton]

There's a lot of development going on - and I hope you will see it bearing fruit this next year. The newest "Maiden" release of on-prem is rolling out as we speak, and next up is "Newport" which has been in development over a year.

Cloud will be linking up with our colleagues at Linewize to give improved directory sync, and more integration with our classroom product, as well as newer agent software.

[bjeffery]

We found the same with support so have moved to cloud filtering and Ubiquiti UXG-Pro for a one-off £400.

[PotNoodleTech]

We are under a huge amount of strain at the moment - a large ticket volume, plus lots of sickness and other absences throughout this year has meant support isnt where it should be. We're currently training new hires to help. I know it is frustrating, but we are working to fix it..

 

It is very refreshing for a company to actually tell us what has gone wrong and how they are aiming to fix it.

 

Most companies would ignore us or outright lie and say everything is fine.

 

That does get brownie points in my book, versus whatever the current temporary setbacks are.

[tom_newton]

It is very refreshing for a company to actually tell us what has gone wrong and how they are aiming to fix it.

 

Most companies would ignore us or outright lie and say everything is fine.

 

That does get brownie points in my book, versus whatever the current temporary setbacks are.

 

Thanks - no point not being honest with ourselves, or with our customers. I am confident that you'll have felt things better these last few weeks. Just from a pure numbers of tickets open PoV I can see it. Additionally I think our new guys are starting to get up to speed. They ask ME interesting questions anyway, that's always a good sign. We've another new starter in the team today, as well, hopefully they will be ready for battle by the time s-month rolls around.

[kennysarmy]

Just opened a P4 ticket.

 

The support portal blurb says.

 

P4 - Low

Examples include:

Minor change to customer environment.

Questions or How to's.

Password Resets.

Change Requests (AD Groups, Distribution Groups).

We aim to respond to all P4 incidents within 2 business hours and resolve within 5 business days

[ricky15100]

well here i am in April 2025, had a support ticket opened for over a week about cloud filter not working, and nothing from support. Ive been with smoothwall for over 10 years now, but the support is dreadful, obviously still no difference nearly a year on 

[tom_newton]

Ping me the ticket number - there are, as I see it no tickets with no responses in a week in the queue.

[ricky15100]

Ubelievably ive had a response as soon as i posted this. Thanks Tom

[tom_newton]

Nowt to do with me guv, I still don't know which ticket this is

[craigci]

Has anyone been experiencing issues with soft lockups? its been happening to our S5 appliance for about 2 weeks. Alex is on the case and its with the Dev team but at present were seeing it happen 4/5 times a day needing a reboot to resolve.  During inspection week too, rather stressful !

[tom_newton]

Not something we are seeing a lot of Craig - send me the ticket number and I will take a look

[craigci]

will do cheers

[CrootUK]

Support has been spot on for us in recent years. Really owt to send the team some chocolates tbh! 

[synaesthesia]

Odd, the few times I've had to raise a ticket they've been dealt with in excellent time over the last couple of years!