Two new things we’re excited about arriving . . .

Ubuntu 8.04

[A couple of guys on our support team were especially excited about the Wubi Installer]

And

Fedora 9

You’re invited to a free webinar today on “Reducing Customer Support Costs and Improving Service Quality with Remote Support“. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is sponsoring the event. Joining EMA is Bomgar and Pomeroy IT Solutions, a Bomgar customer.

Pomeroy’s presentation: Screenshot from the webinar
Reducing Customer Support Costs and Improving Service Quality with Remote Support

Summary of Remote Support Webcast

IT service and support leaders are under more pressure than ever before to tighten expenses, budgets and people. At the same time, service quality commitments are becoming the norm. A secret weapon that many organizations have today, but are not using to its fullest potential, is remote support. With the right remote support solution in place, you should reduce support costs by:

1. Improving the efficiency of your support team by eliminating costly on-site dispatches and reducing Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
2. Gain respect for the IT support team by delivering on committed service level agreements (SLAs)
3. Consolidating the myriad of tools within your enterprise to one solution that can reach any both attended and unattended systems

Hear how remote support has a direct impact on support cost structure and perceptions around IT service quality in the enterprise. This presentation will focus on results achieved by customers in their environments and illustrate the relationship between service quality, cost control, and the customer experience.

• Lisa Erickson-Harris, EMA analyst
• Clay Guinn, GSD Operations Manager, Pomeroy IT Solutions
• Chris Watson, VP Strategic Alliances, Bomgar

This presentation began on April 03, 2008 at 01:00 PM Central Daylight Time.

You may join the live event or watch it on-demand later.

Novell’s new Volume License Agreement (VLA) maintenance program offers technical assistance and product support to Novell’s customers. I’m interested in the program because of the thoughtfulness behind their integration of virtual support for customers.

Novell has posted an online demo of the support request process at http://support.novell.com/online/demo.html. The demo is only a few minutes long. It’s definitely worth taking the time to view, especially if you’re wonder how best to to funnel support requests and move customers through the support process.

I’m repeatedly impressed by our customers. This is just another example. Thank you, Novell, for publishing such a well-planned example of integrating virtual support.

It’s April 1st, which means Google releases some new features today!Last year it was free in-home wireless broadband service - Google TiSP.

That was a nice-to-have. But most people already have internet access. Plus, since so many people have switched to broadband, dial-up speeds have gotten faster. With less bandwidth taken up by the folks who have switched to mobile phones and high-speed internet, the small segment of the population left on a land line is experiencing DSL-like speeds.

But this year’s feature release is a must-have! This year it’s a custom time stamp for Gmail. Unlike the internet, EVERYONE uses Gmail. Now mail sent through Gmail need never be late!

“The entire concept of ‘late’ no longer exists for me. That’s pretty cool. Thanks Gmail!”

Happy April First!

It’s 5:58 p.m. on a Friday, so this will not be a long post!

Windows IT Pro just published and article from an interview with Joel Bomgar and Nathan McNeill.

I find the title of the article interesting - “Virtualizing IT People”.

“Virtualizing” is a term that in most contexts only applies to hardware, so how does it apply to people? Glad you asked. I think that needs a little bit of unpacking.

So stay tuned. I plan on thinking through what virtualizing people means in my upcoming posts. Told ya this would be short!

PC to Mac/Windows/Linux remote control is already available through Bomgar. But what about remote access from Mac?

Bomgar’s upcoming release, Bomgar 10.1, will include a Mac rep client. If you don’t want to wait till Q2-08, here’s an easy work-around.