Here at CSS (formerly PSS), our bread-and-butter is the support incident. One recent incident (hereafter referred to as 'the case') allowed me the rare opportunity to blog on what goes on here at CSS when an issue is raised by one of our customers, and I'll be blogging the progress of this particular case as time goes on, as will Gavin, the external party. First, the background:

Gavin, our customer, has run into a problem provisioning new SharePoint site collections based on a custom template. Gavin is one of our more active SharePoint customers, and he knows the drill - some initial troubleshooting was already done when the case was submitted, and there was a clear description of the problem. Having run into what seemed to be an impasse with his own troubleshooting, Gavin called the support line, and one of our front-end guys took the call, created the incident in our system and dispatched it to the ANZ Bizapps support queue, one of several I monitor.

We work on a callback system here in ANZ Premier - when a customer calls in with a problem, we won't immediately dive in and start troubleshooting on the same phone call. The complexity of our incidents is often high, and the callback model allows us to route to the appropriate specialists and allow those specialists to get up to speed before going live with the customer.

So when I received Gavin's case I had four lines of text to work on, describing the behaviour in a very succinct style, and the specific error message: "The specified web does not contain a reporting metadata list".

The first thing I'm likely to do with an incident like this, even bef