How to handle End Users

I’ve been on a customer site today, working in an office where a lot of staff are first line support for end users - council users, not particularly IT savvy people. Everyone has their own story about how stupid end users are, how tickets are being opened without any information, etc. etc. Rather than being dismissive of users who raise support tickets, I much prefer to shame then into thinking before they raise a ticket again themselves.

Case in point - I look after an SBS network for a small organisation in my spare time (I use the term ’spare’ loosely). One particular user was having some problems sending emails every 2 months. After the 3rd occurrence, I decided to reply to his email thus :

Hi there,

If you cast your mind back some time ago (a week or two), when X’s email had the same problem, I think I mentioned this in technical language, so I’m going to use an analogy to help explain the concept :
 
Imagine you are sitting in your nice comfy office, and - because of a heavy workload - every day you ate your lunch at your desk. When you finish your lunch you casually toss the packaging into the bin. Every so often, you get a bit more peckish than normal and eat a bit more than normal, or have a few bevvys on a Friday afternoon to celebrate finishing a job - so you throw the empty cans in the bin too (!). Chances are you could fill the bin up pretty quickly. Eventually though, the bin would become full, so you would go out and buy a bigger bin. And then a bigger one again. And then you fill some some bin bags - you could hide them behind the sofa for a while and no-one might notice. But at some point you will be unable to get into the office because of the stench and quantity of rubbish. So what you need to do, just occassionally, is ‘Empty’ the bin.
 
In the ‘virtual world’ of computers, we have a similar concept - in Entourage it is called ‘Deleted Items’. You have 225 deleted items at the minute. To empty these, right click on deleted items in the left pane and select ‘Empty Deleted Items’. It will say ‘Are you sure you want to empty the deleted items folder?’. Click Empty.
 
If you need anything else, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Thanks,

——

Did I add enough ‘quotes’ there? This only works with customers with a sense of humour, but funnily enough he hasn’t had the same problem since.

Cutting Corners with Visual Studio 2008 and ASP.NET 3.5

I’m currently working on a project for a client for which a main part of the requirement is to produce a web application which allows the user to update a list of contact details in a database - the data having been provided in an Excel Spreadsheet. As usual, the client has absolutely no preference for how this is implemented - they are just interested in cost (keep the number of days they have to pay for to a minumum) and how quickly it can be implemented (They want it ASAP).

This would normally be written in a jsp servlet by my colleagues - that is the skillset which is most in use by them and we need to be able to support what we have delivered. In the past, I’ve written something similar in traditional ASP so the immediate temptation is to re-hash what I have done previously to fit the new requirements, so that’s another option.

Having recently recently installed Visual Studio 2008 to have a play about with it, I decided to at least do the mock-up screenshots for approval in ASP.NET 3.5. Reading a quick chapter of ASP.NET in C# 2008, I dropped in a Gridview, installed the Ajax Control Toolkit to make things look nice, and having converted the Excel spreadsheet to a SQL Server table, had a (almost) fully functioning application up and running in a couple of hours with barely a line of code written. Next stop is to have a stab at this LINQ tutorial.

It’s a Gridview!

Now, does anyone know how I can get IIS to rewrite .aspx extensions as .jsp so I can fool the non-techies and keep my paperwork in order? 

Broadband on the Road.

Was on the road again yesterday in sunny England for a day’s consultancy, so it was as good a time as any to test out my new ZTE USB Modem.

 

Generally, using a customer’s internet access has been hit and miss for me in the past. If I do get their permission (and the required paperwork signed off in time), it takes a few hours for someone to get me a socket to plug into, work out if I need a fixed or dynamic ip, and get the required proxy settings to connect. Even if I do get connected, I usually want to connect back to the office via VPN, and the chances of the required ports being open on their firewall are slim to none.

So, noting that prices have come down recently, I bought the modem direct from three on a pay as you go for one off fee of £50. 1GB per month = £10. As am on the road approx 4-5 days per month, I think it unlikely I’ll need more - I’m generally using it to VPN to pick up an RDP connection to a server back in the office.

First impressions aren’t bad. I don’t get any connection from home, so hopefully I won’t need it there. I didn’t do a speed test yesterday, but if I’m getting 512meg consistently I’d be happy. I downloaded a couple of large word documents, and didn’t see any issues with it.

The software itself is a bit clunky. The USB Modem is originally recognised as a usb drive to install the drivers and software. Vista recognised it ok first time. XP Home didn’t despite repeated attempts. I ended up copying the files over from my Vista partition so I could install on XP.

I get the feeling it might be particularly power intensive however - I had my laptop on battery at one point and it went from 90% to 10% in the minute I had the modem connected (though my battery is on it’s last legs anyhow).

Back in England tomorrow and Friday, so hopefully it will serve me well.

I Hate Gardening

Been out in my back garden in the scorching heat today, doing some pruning of plants and the like. This is the big build up - one day a year we get the whole garden looking really nice, flowers trimmed, new plants, grass cut. Then we let it go to rack and ruin until the following year.

Still, should have a nice barbeque tomorrow. (Note to self - must take a picture tomorrow to show you my handy work)…

What’s in a Job Title….?

hmmmm. I’ve been threatening to start writing a blog for a while. Not threatening anyone in particular - just myself - So I’ve finally bitten the bullet and created one. Whether it lasts or not is a different story…..

So, ‘What are your intentions?’ I hear the WordPress community say. I answer : Well Sir, my intention is to be your friend, not to write anything too politically sensitive for fear a future employer or hardened terrorist may see it, and to update this site early and often. I’m generally hoping for you to enjoy my musings in a very wholesome way.

About me then. I’ve been in various IT roles since 1999, from Programmer (no-one likes to be called that now - it’s always Software Developer/Engineer), to Technical Consultant,  Team Leader, Project Manger and IT Consultant. Which leads me on to the topic of this post.

What’s in a job title….?

Having had various offical job titles in the past decade, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s not a lot in a job title. Having a quick browse through the nijobs site, or today’s Belfast Telegraph, there are lot of job titles which - on the face of it - are the same, but a quick glance at the detail shows that when you compare some of them, they are chalk and cheese. Wouldn’t some standards be nice?

Large businesses need to standardise titles and let individual teams worry about the actual day to day roles.

Small business often need jack-of-all trades type of people, whose job title might be ‘Project Manager’, but may need to get their hands dirty when the going gets tough.

The problem is that in the IT industry, to ensure job security in the current climate, you wonder whether to specalise in one particular field and risk spreading yourself thin, or have a wide ranging knowledge on many technologies and risk getting lost in the detail or being shown up by a guru.

In the past I have been in both situations in terms of job interviews and job interiewing, but I guess it’s only now I can appreciate that the ‘detail people’ and the ‘jack-of-all-trades’ people can compliment each other.

Anyway, enough of my initial ramblings. Gonna go and see how I can improve this wordpress template. I’ve spread myself thin on photoshop skills in the past, so don’t blame me if I make a complete mess of it.