What makes good IT Support

I was talking to a friend of mine recently and he was telling me about some problems he was having with a new client that his company was looking after. Now he’s no stranger as he has been working with this ISP for more years than I care to remember and during this time he has been supporting end users and businesses with their Internet connections.  This typically covered ADSL connections, hosting, email, ftp etc so he’s no stranger to support but this type of support was a new thing as he was providing IT support. Anyone who provides IT support will know that it is a broad spectrum of support that is provided as we are expected to support servers, workstations, scanners, printers, routers, switches, photocopiers, smartphones and the list goes on.

One of the key characteristics of IT support technicians, in my opinion, is to listen to what the client wants or needs. Once you listen then you can deliver exactly what they are looking for from you but without the very first step you are headed nowhere fast. Now IT support on the “frontline” and Internet support have some very different characteristic but on key difference the scope of products and devices that need to be supported.

It turned out that the main issue with this particular client was that the person coordinating the IT internally did not really understand it which meant that they wanted to know every single last detail about everything on the system.  The was not because of anything other than a fear of having to deal with and support (internally) something that they really didn’t understand on anything other than a desktop use level. What we do is to help the client to understand what they need to know and explain why they don’t need to know about the disk configuration on the server.  This is the core of true IT support, it is the ability to not only support the technology but to also support the clients as an individual so that they can understand and more importantly how it relates to their business.

If your business is not getting good IT support from its supplier or you want to know how your system works for your business then contact us

Outlook 2007: PST and OST files may be up to 20% larger after the February 24, 2009 Cumulative Update

As per: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=968413

The February 24, 2009 cumulative update for Outlook 2007 includes changes related to the general reading and writing characteristics of the .pst/.ost file so that less is demanded from your hard drive to perform the same general operations in Outlook. For instance, the file flushing process was optimized so that it interacts more efficiently with operating system and disk-write caches. There is also a change in the way new data is written to the .pst/.ost so that the data is saved much closer together on the physical disk. As a result, there is less physical work required from the drive, thereby speeding up the time it takes to write the same amount of data to the drive. However, a side-effect of this data writing algorithm is that .pst/.ost files will be about 20% larger than before the February 24, 2009 cumulative update.

Most people will not have noticed the difference as many corporate clients use Exchange & Outlook so never see the OST files but those with PST files may have. For what it’s worth with the cost of storage being so low I would put up with the storage increase for the performance gain.

Pay it forward

You may remember a film called Pay it forward in which a young boy was given an assignment by his teacher to think of something that would change the world and put it into action.  The boy came up with the idea to “pay it forward”, the idea was simple in that he would do a good deeds to three people on the proviso that they would “pay it forward” to three other people and so on.  The films tracks back from a reporter who was a benefactor of one of these good deeds back to the child that created it.

This film, while I only half watched it first time round, has left a very lasting memory for myself.  The reason for this is that the concept is so simple, so powerful and more importantly it is completely against what seems to have become normal behaviour in society today.  There are still a massive majority of businesses and individuals that will not do anything unless they know what’s in it for them, they only give to receive.  A couple of weeks ago I had a call at the office from a guy that was looking for a job.  He told me that he had been made redundant from his current job and was looking for work.  He asked if we had any positions, I explained that there was nothing at present but I asked him to send his CV through and I would forward it on to some of the other IT partners that I work with.  I said thank you for doing it and almost off the cuff said “if only other companies were so helpful” then hung up.  The amount of gratitude from this guy was enough, there was no promises made as I didn’t know what others had to offer and in reality there really was much effort (2 minutes) involved in forwarding this to some of our partners.  It was just a very simple act that absolutely any one of the companies he had spoke to previously could have done without any real effort but it was clear that none had.

So do something special today, tomorrow, everyday or whenever the opportunity comes available.  Do something for somebody without asking “what’s in it for me” or expecting something in return.

If you have any thoughts then I’d love to hear them.

- Rob

Growing pains

When I was a kid growing up I used to get all sorts of aches and pains, when I asked what they were more often I was told these were ‘growing pains’. With the sharp departure of my teenage years meant I saw the last of these ‘growing pains’ but I didn’t realise that they would again come back to haunt me.

Recently business has been good, I mean very good.  The last couple of weeks has seen my week more than full of work which has been absolutely great as more work means more money of course.  The difficult thing with this type of influx of work is trying to manage this influx of work with the existing work as well as fulfilling the expectations of new clients.  This in itself is not an easy task as predominantly most new clients have a major or a significantly challenging issue which requires urgent attention.  For example, I had a customer call through to the “on-call” support phone at 8pm last Friday night asking for someone to go out straight away as he’d had no email for 2 days because the broadband had been changed over. This meant that despite being on a Exchange installation over the weekend it needed sorting out, 3 hrs later I was back home again. Going out at that time was not an issue, after all I love what I do, the trick is managing all of the expectations that come with this. This type of work also throws the entire work schedule into disarray and some tough decisions need to be made as to how to organise the week. 

Our clients have always understood that if ever there is a high priority job because of an emergency that we pull out all the stops to sort it out. Which essentially means that if the scheduled work is non-critical, ie. routine visit, then we would ask to rearrange the work if an emergency comes up. They agree with this policy as this is the type of service that they would expect so when it is their stuff that needs rearranging, once we explain the situation they will work with us to rearrange.  This policy has been a tremendous help both in the past as well as in the present but sadly there is not always enough hours in the day to get things done. As it stands we are getting close to the point where we will have to consider bringing another body on board to cover the new work but we need to ensure that the work coming in is of a consistent level before making the leap.  So how do I decide what’s not so important? Here’s some simple guidelines:

• Is this job a fault/failure?
  Some site visits may not be as a result of a fault or failure they may be in-fact a scheduled site visit.
• How many people does this situation affect?
  If the issue that you are responding is affecting more than one person then it will be difficult to “bump” it but if it is only affecting one user then it may be possible.
• Can the client wait until tomorrow/the next day etc?
  If it looks to you like the job can wait, them ask your client. We always explain to the client why we need to change the appointment and explain to them that in case of emergency we always endeavour to pull out the stops and would do the same for them. This usually sways things.
• How important is it really?
  This is a tough one as you may not see a signature in Outlook as being critical but to the user you can be sure that it is.
• Can it really be done remotely? 
  This should be a no-brainer as it should have already been tried but sometimes the client will ask for a site visit and you just agree.

The most important thing is to engage your client and explain why, at then end of the day no matter how much preventative maintenance we perform, no matter how much proactive management we do there will always be something that breaks/goes wrong. We always make a point of explaining to clients that we have the “bump” policy that says that if an emergency arises then we will attempt to reschedule any non-critical site visits so that we can get the maximum man-power on to an emergency situation.

Hope you all have a great weekend and better week.

- Rob

The best laid plans

Things have been a little quiet on the blog recently.  This was mainly down to a project that was being planned for a client.  The project consisted of a transition from a Windows 2000 Active Directory running Exchange 2000 over to a new Exchange 2007 server running on Windows 2008 server and to make things a little more fun there was a 110 mailboxes to move.  Not really a major job as the process is more about step-by-step processing but none the less it still needs to be fully planned to ensure that all the bases are covered.  The reason for the work being done in the first place is mainly due to the current server being 8 years old, the HP LC2000 had really served them well, but more importantly one of the drives in the RAID5 had failed.  So while the hardware was ordered from Dell and awaiting deliver we put together a full plan to handle the transition from the old server on to the new one. As you may know, the transition can not be done directly as there needs to be a Windows 2003 domain controller in the active directory so the plan would be to make the new 2008 server a directory controller on the domain to overcome this issue.

The first job when we got onsite was to get a full backup of Exchange as the client had not done this for sometime due to technical issues they had faced with the tape drive but had not dealt with previously. While the backup job was running and copying the data to a USB drive I set about configuring the new server for use. Unfortunately Dell had seen fit to pre-install the server with the 32bit version of Server 2008 despite knowing it would be installed with Exchange 2007 so I had to get the server re-installed with the correct version.  Then we had to prepare the directory for the insertion of the new 2008 directory controller as the forest needed to be prepped in order to accept the server. Once the server was finally running as an active directory controller for the 2000 Active directory it was time to get Exchange 2007 server installed on the new server and integrated into the existing Exchange Organisation. Sadly during the backup of the old server another drive in the RAID5 failed and that was the end of the Exchange 2000 server. In most businesses this would have been a complete disaster however due to the way that they have worked for some time, most mail is saved to PST files on the server, this was a real pain and caused a little hassle but it was not a massive disaster. It was a case of removing the legacy mailboxes from the new Exchange 2007, which were non-existent, and replacing them with new Exchange 2007 mailboxes with the same details using the PowerShell.

Now while the failed drive was always a consideration with this process but unfortunately they did not want any action done on the issue. The fact is that regardless of how much planning is put in to a job, no matter how detailed the project checklist is and more important how much effort you put in; sometimes shit happens! The important thing is not what happens but how you cope with the event and ultimately how you recover from it.

The outcome of this is that the client is now looking to put in our latest BDR solution that gives near-seamless fail over in the event of a server failure for up to 5 servers.

The lesson of the day is do NOT neglect your backups, if they fail or if you fail to do them you are screwed. No two ways about it; ask yourself how long could you business survive without its computers or its client information? Does £100 for an external USB drive to backup your data real sound so expensive now? Contact JPT Solutions to discuss backup and business continuity solutions in more details.

- Rob