Which support level should we choose?

There are 4 support levels that are commonly chosen.

OSE Support

can be purchased for your Open Source version of Zimbra. The usual troubleshooting procedure for open source software is to search for hours in Wikis and Blogs for solutions, ask in forums and wait for a reply or rebuild your system from scratch. This can be very time consuming and while your system is down the pressure for a resolution can be immense.
OSE Support offers you the reassurance that, for a small amount per mailbox, you can access the same level of technical expertise that Network Edition users can access. This is going to be an easy sell to your CTO!

Zimbra Open Source Support guarantee an initial response target time of 8 business hours for all levels of support request. OSE Support is accessed via Web-based Service Requests and Phone-based Service Requests.

Standard Support

can be purchased for your Perpetual licence on a yearly basis (or 3 yearly), and is one of the options for a Subscription licence too. It offers Web-based and Phone based Service requests in business hours. This level of support is not intended for high-visibility production platforms, and should be considered only once your organisation has gained enough experience with the Zimbra platform.

“Business Hours” means the period Monday 06:00 Pacific Time – Friday 18:00 Pacific Time, excluding the major US holidays.

Premier Support

is available on the same basis as Standard Support, and in addition to Standard Business Hours support, includes 24 × 7 support for Severity-1 issues, with an initial response target time of 30 minutes.

Examples of Severity-1 Issues

Severity 1 can be described as a Critical Service Outage. A production service or application is down or no longer producing output (“Out of Production”). No workaround is immediately available. Examples include the following:

• Problems that affect a production application, and cause output to no longer be produced or useable.
• A critical production service or application – such as users unable to access or utilize the system, mail access or delivery, or web server or application required for usability of the system – is down or not responding and cannot be stabilized or restarted.
• >50% of users on a platform or server are affected.

The 4th option is

No Support

which is only an option if you are using the OSS version without Zimbra Suite Plus or you have decided not to maintain your version of Network Edition that you have as a Perpetual licence. Our advice is don’t go here – ‘There be dragons’.