Thousands of customers are getting problems solved every day through the use of Cisco Support Communities.
While participating in the communities, Cisco TAC recognized the need for customers and partners to easily transition from an open Q&A troubleshooting session on the forums to a more formal TAC Service Request (SR) engagement. Customers can now open an SR from within the forum, and the TAC engineer can begin the Service Request process with all the context of any triage knowledge and communication that happened within the forum as context.
The functionality is simple. While participating in a discussion the originator of the post will see an "Open Service Request" link in the Actions panel on the right hand side of the page. Clicking the link will transition the user over to the TAC Service Request Tool, and include linkage information to the discussion thread. This allows the TAC engineer that accepts the SR to review it in advance.
For the initial phase, this feature is only available within the Network Infrastructure communities (e.g. LAN Switch & Routing, WAN Routing & Switching, Network Management, Getting Started With LANs, and Optical). It is targeted to be available to other communities in spring 2011. In addition, the TAC is working on additional functionality to further enhance the engagement with Cisco TAC.
Check out the FAQ at https://supportforums.cisco.com/docs/DOC-13613 to learn more and join the discussion.
Please take advantage of this new functionality that is now live in production!