HOW IS THE ENTERPRISE PLAN DIFFERENT FROM THE PRO PLAN?

We integrate our software with your Windows environment such that:

  • Snowflake credentials are placed behind Windows Authentication or Okta. This prevents plaintext user names and passwords from being embedded in Excel models. (The Pro plan also makes this easy to avoid, but the Enterprise plan has additional safeguards.)
  • Excel-based queries are tagged to make it easy for CTO/CDO's to assess how specific Excel models are utilizing Snowflake resources.
  • CTO/CDO's have centralized control over who can use the optimal(xl) Excel add-in.
  • Individual machines require zero configuration (i.e., no environment variables to set). Simply give optimalxl.xlam to your permissioned Data Analysts and they'll be able to connect to Snowflake out-of-the-box.

ENTERPRISE SUPPORT

Because we have found front-line support across the industry to often be an unhelpful waste of customers' time, we make a different tradeoff in our own support offering. We may be slower to respond to your request, but when we respond you'll be interacting with a real person who can, themself, fix your problem or answer your question.

A challenge when supporting Excel-based software is that there is often a blurry line between product support and general Excel support.

For example, because named ranges and/or structured references are integral to parameterizing in-cell SQL, we often receive help requests from customers having trouble with these underlying mechanisms.

Another common support request arises when customers use a large number of lookup formulas to rearrange rectangular Snowflake datasets into a more presentation-oriented format.

This is fine as long as the formulas are carefully crafted, i.e., using INDEX+MATCH or XLOOKUP rather than VLOOKUP; sorting Snowflake data such that lookup functions can employ binary searches; ensuring that volatile functions, like INDIRECT and OFFSET, are not used.

If these best practices are not known or ignored, the post-Snowflake-refresh workbook recalculation can easily take minutes rather than milliseconds — and this slowness is often confused with query refresh speed.

We love helping our customers but we've found that becoming on-call Excel experts invites an unmanageable volume of requests. Particularly because most of our customers are using Excel as a secondary tool and don't have deep expertise.

It is in this spirit that we have now reorganized our stock Enterprise support into three triage levels:

  1. Email support requests which include an optimal(xl) error code (or a screenshot) go to the front of the line and will typically get a response within 6 business hours.
  2. Email support requests that involve installation problems but don't present a specific error code/message (e.g., the optimal(xl) menu is missing from Excel's main menu bar) will typically get a response within 12 business hours.
  3. All other email support requests — including requests involving optimal(xl)'s VBA API — will typically get a response within 24 business hours.

A 'business hour' is a New York City 9AM-5PM hour on any non-US-holiday weekday.

All support requests must be initiated with an email to support (ɑt) optimalxl.com. After this initial contact, we often switch to telephone/Zoom as we find that to be more effective for troubleshooting.

If you need higher-touch support, reach out at info (ɑt) optimalxl.com and we may be able to arrange something that works for your team.

We do not guarantee these response times nor do we offer SLAs for Enterprise customers. Our customers have — occasionally — created Excel monstrosities with our software, and we need to reserve the peremptory right to say, "Sorry, we can't help you with that," in order to preserve our time for the rest of you.

Note that optimal(xl) uses Excel add-in APIs that are also used by bad actors and therefore may trigger false positives in anti-virus products with overgeneralized virus definitions. If your firm has outsourced their Windows infrastructure to an extent that it is difficult to whitelist local machine directories, we don't have the resources to become involved in communication with your anti-virus vendor and/or your IT infrastructure provider to rectify quarantined or forcibly deleted optimal(xl) dependencies. We will, however, give you a comprehensive script to assist your own communication with these providers.


GET IN TOUCH
For questions about our Enterprise plan or to start a group trial for your team, get in touch at info (ɑt) optimalxl.com.