Here is Ben's latest edition of "Ask Ben Anything" on the Parallels official blog site.

One of the common questions I’m asked about Parallels is “When are you guys going to offer support that’s as good as your products?” I’ve posted here before that we’ve been adding techs like crazy and tweaking some internal processes to make support better, but today, I’m really fired up to let you that some BIG changes to the way Parallels addresses customer support are in the works.

Here’s an overview of what’s happening now, and what you’ll see over the next few weeks:

More Posts from Parallels on the Forum: Parallels engineers and support techs are starting to play a much more active role in the Forum. If you frequent the Forum, you’ve probably already noticed how there are a lot more posts from our team answering questions, making suggestions, and offering advice. You can spot us on the Forum (I’m “Ben @ Parallels”) by the orange Parallels logo that accompanies our screen names.

In that vein, let me send out a huge “THANK YOU” to everyone our enthusiastic, rabidly loyal users who devote time every week to answering questions and offering guidance on the Forum. You're a big part of why the forum is so popular and so valuable.

How-to Tutorials: Our support team is building a series of short, “How-to” articles that will walk users through some of the most common tasks in Parallels products, like using the Installation Assistant, Running Compressor, Connecting USB devices and more, and offer some tips and tricks from the techs. These will be available on the site as individually downloadable PDFs and will be a great supplement to the user manual. Look for these to go live in about 2 weeks.

The Knowledge Base: Even though this is still being built, we’ve already updated the FAQ section of the website to reflect each week’s top 5 support questions. Check back often to find answers to the most common questions surrounding Parallels products.

Technical Whitepapers: My team and I have compiled a number of technical whitepapers that deep dive into a number of topics, including:

• TCO (total cost of ownership for those of you who don’t speak marketing) of virtualization
• What virtualization technology is and how it works
• Why Intel VT technology is important
• How to best deploy/manage Parallels in the enterprise

They are at editing & design now and will be ready for download (they’re free, of course) very soon.

More Techs and a New Queue System: We’ve totally overhauled both our email and phone support queues, which will help us ensure that everyone gets their question answered in about 24 hours. We’ve also added a number of new tech (everyone say hi to Craig, Tyler, Tracey, Mike, and Dave!) to make sure that we have the bandwidth to help anyone who has a question. These guys are pros and they really know their stuff.

An Even More Responsive Engineering Team: Part of getting our engineers more involved with the forum, documentation and support is so we can ensure that we’re building products that consistently exceed your expectations. Let us know what you love, what you hate, and what you want to see, and we’ll do our best to make it happen. This is one of the main reasons our development cycle is so fast...we don’t want to make you wait for anything!

As always, I can’t say "thank you" enough to everyone who’s been supporting us over the past 2 years and has borne with us as we worked through our growing pains.

Ask Ben your own question, here.