Corel to Change WordPerfect Support Policies

February 1996

As part of its plan to acquire the WordPerfect portion of Novell (which is expected to be announced March 1, as we go to press), Corel will change the basis for WordPerfect support. As we’ve already noted, Corel is well qualified to understand the problem of supporting complex products. It has, over the last year, reorganized its own support department to bring support back in-house and create a tighter relationship between support (and the customers) and quality assurance and development.

Corel will move to make WordPerfect support "industry standard," providing equivalent support to that provided by other major software vendors like Microsoft. This means offering unlimited free support on a toll line. This support will be provided by existing WordPerfect support staff (about 250 to 300 of them), based in Utah and not by the 70-person Corel support organization in Ottawa. Premium support services, including toll-free access, and 24-hour support will also be offered.

This is better support than Corel provides for its own products. CorelDRAW for instance, gets 90 days of free support from the time of each new product release, 30 days from the first time a customer calls for support. It is Corel’s direction, however, to move over time, to the industry standard.

Support is not all that is staying in Utah. Of the total of 700 WordPerfect employees joining Corel, quality assurance, development, and parts of localization and sales and marketing will also remain. A portion of the sales organization will move to Ottawa, especially the part related to channel, corporate and government sales. Much of localization is already focused in a facility in Ireland.

One bit of surprise news: Corel plans to move its Ventura developers (with their quality assurance and support team) to Utah. This makes perfect sense, given the obvious fit between word processing and desktop publishing and will give the small Ventura group a set of colleagues for intellectual companionship, as well as facilitating cross-fertilization between the groups in using existing concepts and code – and building future products.

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