Hello Jeff,
It was my understanding that you were mainly talking about the WinForms product, which does not seem to be the case, given the links provided. Although I would not argue with you, you can still see our point of view further in my reply.
In regards to the support ticketing system and the 24-hour turnaround time, you are correct that you may be prevented from continuing working on a specific task at this time. Therefore, we are striving to cover not only articles covering the features and API of the components, but also scenarios that can be achieved with these features. Not every single scenario may be covered and we are updating the documentation with the input that we get from our customers. Note also, that you may ask questions while prototyping your application checking if Telerik products would serve your application needs even during your Trial period of 30 days.
As to the WinForms documentation improvements in particular that you regarded in your support threads, they are scheduled, still there are other tasks to be implemented in the documentation beforehand.
In regards to the links that you provided, I would point out that they are old threads and for a great range of products. While we do our best to make all our customers happy, there could be single cases like these where for some reason one may not be satisfied with a particular product/documentation for a particular purpose. Moreover, in most of the cases things have progressed in a positive direction.
http://www.telerik.com/forums/telerik-advanced-search -2009 Fixing the Forum
Search – Still not done, I made the same suggestions before finding this post.
We have already improved our search capability of the website with the latest release of the website (mid-January). While we have implemented improvements on the back end, we continue to take in feedback around our search to see what we can do to make it better. Directly concerning the answer of Atanas, the fact that something is logged in our bug tracking system, and despite our good will, does not necessarily mean that it will be implemented in the next release. We are trying to consolidate the customer requests and pick those that are voted most, which would bring value to the largest group of users. At the same time, it is not only the number of voters, but the exact feature specifics wanted that would serve all, so that we can shape the feature best.
http://www.telerik.com/forums/poor-documentation - 2011 Documentation concerns from
multiple people. No answers, someone else derailed the thread.
Here, you are correct that the thread was derailed. Regarding the documentation itself, in 2011 Kendo UI was pretty new product in the Telerik portfolio and its documentation has been highly improved since then. Even then, however, despite the lack of documentation there were video tutorials on the topics asked by Krzysztof. To support my words about the improved documentation, you can find a sample DataSource Model definition in
this section of the API reference documentation. As to Column formats - you can refer to
this topic from the API documentation which illustrates what formats are applicable for grid columns, including a short example. We do not offer offline version of the documentation, and we update it frequently online to be able to reference the latest version at any point in time at
docs.telerik.com/kendo-ui.
http://www.gitshah.com/2011/03/telerik-controls-perfect-example-of-how.html - 2011 Look at the multitude of comments on this article.
While it does pain us to see that a few of the comments mention the Telerik products in a negative way, we are aware that sometimes the approach we take to building our controls does not always fit the schema to what other developers are used to, or expect. As you can imagine, one scenario that might be the most apparent to one developer and requires a certain amount of features to be implemented may make sense to him or her, but when it comes to another developer they might have completely different requirements. Given the same requirements two developers would most likely take two different routes to reach the same goal, and might not agree with the other developer’s approach upon checking each other’s code. What we’ve tried to do with our controls is make them as extensible as possible to try to ensure that we can cover all of our clients scenarios. This has led to success in most for most of our clients, but sometimes people cannot see past that the controls do something in a way that they think is illogical since it is not the way they would have implemented it.
Most of the time our online resources (demos, documentation, code libraries, etc.) alongside with support solves all the issues that our clients run in to. The times it does not we’ve actually implemented fixes or features in our controls for a future release.
That being said, there are times when this does not work out or someone had one bad experience that left them with a sour taste in their mouth. Finding a blog post and commenting on it may be their source to vent these frustrations. However, any feedback that we find, even if it is negative, we use as a way to push our resources further. If we find any piece of information that we can use in comments like these we will be sure to add it to our backlog of issues to resolve for upcoming releases.
http://www.telerik.com/forums/documentation-usage - 2012 Same complaints about
documentation. Same promises. Nothing has changed.
The article from the chart documentation has been updated to reflect the format options and references the kendo.format method as well. We appreciate the feedback we incrementally include updates and expand the existing documentation.
http://markfreedman.com/index.php/2011/08/09/wrestling-with-the-telerik-mvc-grid-control-part-1/ - 2014 See the last comment. The author was a fan, but it seems he’s also been burned by the poor documentation.
This info relates to our MVC grid from the discontinued Telerik MVC Extensions product. A Telerik member responded in the comments of the blog, that guy should check our Kendo UI MVC grid counterpart and provide feedback.
Regards,
Nikolay
Telerik
Consider using RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX (built on top of the ASP.NET AJAX framework) as a replacement for the Telerik ASP.NET Classic controls, See the product support lifecycle here.