Savvy support: PDFs, Google Chrome, and circumstances beyond our control

MerusCase Support is always here to help with MerusCase-related problems, but the line between a MerusCase problem and a local IT problem is sometimes quite blurry: MerusCase runs in a browser like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox and creates Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF documents, and problems with any one of these different products are difficult for users to distinguish from problems with MerusCase.

Our policy for these kinds of local IT problems has always been to inform the user when such a problem is better handled by their tech support rather than MerusCase Support, but we also frequently offer to fix the problem on the first or second occurrence. We're very concerned with making our clients happy, and we're willing to do these kinds of IT fixes once or twice as a gesture of goodwill.

Even our goodwill is taxed when these other products make unwanted changes or introduce bugs. We've had, for example, a handful of users call and email us over the last few weeks complaining of trouble opening court forms and other PDFs. All of these users have Google Chrome, and all of them also have Adobe Reader installed to view their PDFs...and an update to one of them was causing Adobe Reader in Chrome to get stuck at a black screen.

The Adobe PDF viewer plugin (disabled) and the Chrome Built-in PDF viewer plugin (enabled) in Google Chrome

There's nothing particularly unusual about the PDFs MersuCase generates, so we knew this one was probably just a result of a buggy update by either Google or Adobe, and we explained it to our users as such. We advised them to switch from the Adobe PDF viewer plugin to Chrome's built-in PDF viewer plugin, which we've found to be much more stable.

One user in particular did a bit of research on their end before contacting us, and they discovered that they were having the same difficulty with PDFs on other websites. We were pleasantly surprised when they told us "My Adobe Reader is broken," rather than "My Merus is broken." We gave this user the same plugin-switching instructions as the others, which fixed the problem right away.

                                    Written by Paul Bertucci, Migration Coordinator and Technical Support Engineer at MerusCase