Sometimes the cutting remark can blunt the cutting edge. Every year firms spend millions of dollars on hardware and software, but when we asked third-, fourth- and fifth-year associates about their firm’s technology as part of our annual midlevel job satisfaction survey (August 2008), we heard a lot more about long waits and condescending IT staffers than we did about innovative products. Specifically, we found, the quality of tech support — the size and organization of the help desk, and the responsiveness and attitude of its employees — often was the make-or-break factor in respondents’ opinion of their firm’s IT efforts.

I saw this first hand a number of years ago. Not specifically with a help desk, but I saw how a crummy attitude, and an unhelpful support person can ruin a tech project. I came in to an organization that had a fairly complex, yet very useful database system. Unfortunately, hardly anyone ever used it for anything outside of it’s main membership function. It had meeting planning, and subscription modules, and no one used them. When I suggested using them to some folks, I was met with fierce resistance, and came to the realization that everyone in this small organization simply hated this database, and I couldn’t really figure out why. I made an effort to educate people on the benefits, help them learn how it worked, etc. and nothing helped. Everyone still hated it.

It was only a couple of years into this job that I learned the reason why. Apparently, when they purchased this software, the software company sent a trainer to work with all of the staff. This person was not especially helpful to new users, had no patience for questions, did not do a good job training, and just generally wasn’t very nice. Everyone hated her, ergo, everyone hated the product.

I’ve continued to see the same thing play out over and over again. If your tech support folks convey a bad attitude when it comes to questions about your IT efforts, it will influence how people view the projects thesmelves.

Have you seen this play out in your own workplaces? Share your stories!

Head over to SysInternals Live and run them from the site! How very useful!

Have you been over there and run them? Let us know what you think!

(h/t to Ed Bott, who you really should be reading too…)

As the session went along, one of the speakers recommended using a second, web-based, email account for non-essential stuff. That way you don’t have mailing lists, newsletter subscriptions, Google News alerts, or other non-essential email keeping you from finding what you need in your Outlook, or interrupting you with a new mail alert. (Although they suggested killing that too, in all fairness.)

Anyhow, that got me thinking. Lots of places block access to web based email as a matter of policy. I began to wonder if unblocking that would put a small dent in the amount of email that our users are storing, and handling? After all, I know there are mailing lists I would rather subscribe to in Gmail, but don’t because I can’t access it at work.  That means, at least in my case, there’s a significant amount of email being handled by our Exchange server, and having to be dealt with somehow, in my Outlook, as opposed to just being over in Gmail, and me looking at it occasionally.

Now, I know the common refrain is that web based email account are a security risk, but is the risk that large, and does blocking access to web mail really mitigate that risk in a significant way? For example, years ago people decided to block it because of the virus risks, but just about all major web mail services do anti-virus scans on any attachments, and even then,  your desktop AV product should scan any attachments when you try to open them. So, to my mind, blocking might decrease the chance of getting a virus attachment slightly compared to depending on these other tools, but doesn’t make that much of a difference.

Now I know that’s hardly the only concern, but it’s just an example. Anyway, what do you think? I know some of you guys block web mail, and I’m sure some of you don’t. I also know almost all of us are struggling with what to do with all that email coming into, and being stored on, our networks and mail servers, so I’m curious about what you all think? Would allowing access put a dent in that, or is it not worth the increased risk?

My question is, do you see this as a useful tool, or do you corporate security type folks see it as your worst nightmare, someone coming to work and photographing sensitive documents with their phone and being able to easily get them as PDF, completely bypassing all the measures you take to keep them from being emailed outside your organization?

In our case, the employee had saved most all of his e-mail to a local PST file keeping but about 2 weeks worth on the server. The problem was, he had password protected the PST file.

A quick google search indicated that PST file password protection really isn’t that complex. One of the first products that I located in my search was a utility called PST Password. Even better… it’s freeware!

I downloaded the utility, fired it up, opened up the protected PST file and it provided me with 3 possible passwords. The first one did not work, but the second one did. I was able to quickly hand this 800MB+ PST file back to the manager sans password and harmony was soon restored.

Technorati Tags: PST, PSTPassword, Freeware

Sometimes the excuse given is that people don’t have the time to listen to a podcast or read several blogs but they have the time to watch a couple of hours tv each night or spend 30 minutes at the coffee machine discussing the game or their drinking exploits!

Hopefully the Friends In Tech site helps with little tidbits of information that don’t take up a lot of time but do provide useful feedback – and this tip is about Microsoft’s new Technet Webcast Express – webcasts on various subjects lasting about 10-15 minutes to gain a quick overview on a product or it’s features. Currently there are 9 webcasts, 7 on Sharepoint and 2 on the Office2007 document format but keep an eye open for new Webcasts. If Sharepoint doesn’t get you excited then spend 10 minutes catching up with some product news from other bloggers in an area that you are interested in – and if you have an interview in the future – don’t forget to mention Friends In Tech as the blog you read to keep up to date!

Tags: interview, podcasts, webcast, technet, microsoft

How MySpace is Hurting Your Network

I know we’ve had some discussion about MySpace in the forums before, but I’m curious how many of you Network Admins or IT policy guys are starting to deal with this, and what you’re doing? Is the ultimate answer just blocking all social networking sites? Do you think that’s going to be sustainable as more and more tools, including productivity tools, rely on networks like this? Maybe not MySpace so much, but certainly LinkedIn, Facebook and others will become places where your salespeople, for example, are expected to have a presence and interaction.

How do you keep bandwidth usage low, while still maintaining a strong online presence? Discuss.

Tags: SocialNetworking,, MySpace,, Bandwidth

Tags: Microsoft, Steadystate, ITT