GS lack of support

[HMorrison]

Is it just our lab or is anyone else not getting much help these days? Not from Indianapolis, Branford, sales rep, anywhere...getting a bad feeling about the future of this company.

[nickloman]

Lex Nederbragt just wrote a blog post asking a similar question:

http://flxlexblog.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/what-is-going-on-with-454-gs-flx-sequencing/

Come on Roche, show you care!

[epistatic]

Our really good 454 rep just left Roche and the roll out of the FLX+ has been very slow and disorganized. Maybe their efforts are on putting out the next best thing or I agree they are soon done.

[HMorrison]

How do I even get 2.6 s/w? I see people are using it and we weren't even told about it. Still on 2.53.

Read the blog; now thinking I should hold off on scheduling the upgrade if we can't even keep Ti protocols working. 90% of our work is pyrotag sequencing anyway and amplicon protocol may never be developed officially.

[RCJK]

You can get v2.6 via your customer FTP account with them.

Roche support has always been lacking, so I don't think things are much different now than anytime last year. At least that's how things are here.

[MissDNA]

Agreed with RCJK.

We had our upgrade 2 wks ago but we haven´t performed any FLX+ yet because one of our CB+ buffer bottles arrived broken, so we had no reagents to run it. We did a Tf run using reg Titanium and it passed. We don´t know when our FLX+ reagents will arrive. Another big mistake: Roche people didn´t mention that we needed sipper tubes and prewash tubes +, even if we are still using reg tit, so we had to improvise. Over all they should not have upgraded our machine till all the reagents and correct plastics were here. We got some prewash tubes + yesterday and should start running this week.

After all that we are really hoping for a better tech support but we shall see...

[HMorrison]

We have no customer FTP account. Hmm.

You can get v2.6 via your customer FTP account with them.

Roche support has always been lacking, so I don't think things are much different now than anytime last year. At least that's how things are here.

[Adam Witney]

We got it without any customer account:

http://my454.com/products/analysis-software/index.asp

We have no customer FTP account. Hmm.

[kmcarr]

We got it without any customer account:

http://my454.com/products/analysis-software/index.asp

True, that will get you v 2.6 of the analysis software but not the new versions of the instrument software; those you can only get directly your Roche/454 contacts. HMorrison will should to contact his/her FAS or product rep and rattle their cages, but I understand this is easier said than done. Both our FAS and sales rep have recently left Roche for other companies and we can't get in touch with the supposed new ones. I'll have to politely disagree with RCJK and MissDNA, getting support from Roche as gotten noticeably worse over the past year.

[HMorrison]

True, that will get you v 2.6 of the analysis software but not the new versions of the instrument software; those you can only get directly your Roche/454 contacts. HMorrison will should to contact his/her FAS or product rep and rattle their cages, but I understand this is easier said than done. Both our FAS and sales rep have recently left Roche for other companies and we can't get in touch with the supposed new ones. I'll have to politely disagree with RCJK and MissDNA, getting support from Roche as gotten noticeably worse over the past year.

Our sales rep is long on assurances and short on follow through...blamed problems on my academic email and we communicate through gmail these days which is insane. Not even sure if we have an FAS anymore. Misery loves company; glad it isn't just my imagination. Oh for the old days of Janna Lanza.

Working on debugging the series of extremely poor runs on my own. Eventually hope to get back to my Illumina and PGM datasets!! My new sig file says "One and only one sequencing platform can be productive at any point in time." Morrison's Law.

Right now, it's the PGM.

Hilary

[kmcarr]

Oh for the old days of Janna Lanza.

Hilary

We LOVED Janna!

[MissDNA]

Well you guys have better lucky in the US. Our FAS has been the same since 09, and has never done much for us. Till beginning of 2011 I had direct contact with Penzberg but they transfered our tech support to Latin America. I hope things improve here because we had a series of meetings to discuss the issue and our FAS is willing to improve but as I said: "we shall see..."

I do like our engineers. They do their best with what they have. If things are bad in the US, is even harder over here.

We are getting a PGM soon. Hopefully tech support will be better.

[HMorrison]

Okay, Roche is now responding--FAS has gotten in touch and there are some possible reasons for our string of failures other than incompetence on our part.

[HMorrison]

Okay, Roche is now responding--FAS has gotten in touch and there are some possible reasons for our string of failures other than incompetence on our part.

Update--problems not resolved and sales rep has once again dropped the ball on FLX+ upgrade.

[HMorrison]

Still no change. I think Roche has decided to stop supporting true amplicon sequencing and amplicon processing pipeline; it isn't cost effective for them.
Is anyone out there actually using the amplicon processing pipeline but us? HMP sequencing centers' pyrotag 'amplicon' sequencing SOP (shotgun library kits and shotgun processing to get amplicon data) hurt us badly...