Beware of Hidden Costs When Purchasing Mobile Home Park Software and Remote Technical Support

These updates can include new features as well as “bug fixes.” Charging for these updates is standard practice, but you can find companies that provide these updates for free. Some companies force the user to purchase updates even if their software is running fine. They force the issue by refusing to do remote technical support for the user unless they have purchased the latest version. A more reasonable approach is to provide the remote technical support and, if it is discovered that a problem the user is experiencing has been fixed in a later version, to notify the user. The user can make their own decision whether they want to find a work-around for the problem or to go ahead with the purchase of the corrected and newest version of the mobile home park software.

Additional Feature Modules:

Many software companies have a standard price, but additional and often necessary features cost extra and can really increase the price. Look for software which includes all of the features you need, or make sure to add up the additional costs when you are making price comparisons.

Technical Support:

Technical support represents a very important ongoing relationship with the software vendor. Most companies offer a user manual included with the software but this is often not enough when you are confused about how to use the software or are experiencing an error in the software. It is important that the vendor has free or low cost options for remote technical support for those with a quick question or error to report. For example, there may be a free user forum or free email remote technical support. All software has occasional errors. A vendor that allows you to report errors without penalizing you by charging for reporting the error is a must.

It is important that the software vendor offer some type of telephone support for those who don’t want to search the manual. For those who need to get back to business quickly and want to be able to pick up the phone for quick answers, a telephone support plan is useful. Telephone support is almost always a paid option. However, the cost of this telephone support can reflect on the software program. Software vendors must maintain some sort of recurring revenue from their customers in order to stay in business, and to pay their trained technical support representatives.

However, if the telephone support is overly expensive, it may suggest that the software is full of errors and requires a lot of hours spent working with technical support.

Software Supplies:

Often a software vendor will add features into the software which require you to purchase more products from them. For example, a software program that offers a check printing feature may require that you use their printing company to purchase check forms that are compatible with the software’s banking feature. Other companies will also offer an alternative and less expensive option, such as the option to use checks compatible with QuickBooks or other software for which it is easy and inexpensive to purchase check stock.

Value Added Services:

Many software programs offer value added services embedded in their mobile home park software. For example, there may be a credit card processing service that will process payments for you. Often the software company itself receives a portion of the user’s cost for each use of the feature. You need to decide if you can get the feature less expensively elsewhere or if the added cost is worth the convenience of the feature interacting seamlessly with your software.

Source :prudentpressagency.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=4636

NetApp Pushes remote technical support Performance

NetApp unveiled new products this week with a message that could be summed up in a word: performance.

The new offerings, which include midrange unified storage systems and a storage acceleration appliance, are aimed at helping data centers and high-performance computing environments do more with less. NetApp cites as target markets software development, product lifecycle management, electronic design automation, healthcare, energy, media/entertainment and government.

"It's all about time to market with these environments, and that's where performance really helps," said Patrick Rogers, NetApp's vice president for solutions marketing.

NetApp claims its new FAS3140 and FAS3170 storage systems offer better performance and scalability than other midrange systems, and the company included a benchmark showing that the FAS3170 outperformed the EMC Celerra NS80G in a file services workload benchmark
The FAS3140 scales to 420TB and the FAS3170 to 420TB, and both support and offer eight I/O slots.

The company also unveiled the new V-Series V3140 and V3170, which it says extends virtualization to other vendors' legacy arrays and uses the same Data ONTAP operating system as other NetApp FAS systems.

The Storage Acceleration Appliances, which include the SA200, SA300 and SA600, are based on NetApp FlexCache technology. Rogers said the appliances can double throughput while reducing latency. They can be used to accelerate performance at the data center where the central data repository is located or to improve response time and enhance collaboration within Remote Technical Support offices.

NetApp is also offering a Performance Acceleration Module, an add-on intelligent read cache for optimizing performance of mainstream storage platforms and random-read intensive workloads such as file serving. One or more modules fit into PCI Express slots of an existing storage controller, where they function as a read cache to increase throughput and reduce latency without having to add additional disk drives to increase I/O rates. The module consumes 95 percent less power than a shelf of Fibre Channel disk drives.

NetApp also introduced Remote Technical Support Agent, an intelligent Remote Technical Supportdiagnostics data collector embedded in NetApp systems, which will proactively open support tickets and let NetApp support engineers remotely access system log files to diagnose and resolve issues.

List prices for the FAS3100 storage systems start at $69,780 for 7TB of storage, while the V3100 systems start at $56,365 with no storage included. The Performance Acceleration Module lists at $15,000, and the software for the module is $20,000. One software license is required for each storage controller, and between one and five modules can be installed in the controller, depending on the model. Pricing for the Storage Acceleration Appliance models varies depending on the configurations, number of disk shelves and Performance Acceleration Modules.

Source : enterpriseitplanet.com/storage/news/article.php/3752806

Changing Technical Support for the Better

Hiring is a major decision because you will be getting the technical support skills, personality quirks, emotional stability, and overall attitude of each person. The goal is also to maintain long-term staff (more on this later), so you will want to live with the consequences of your selections for a long time. Consequently, spend some time thinking about what you really need in a support person.

The first step in this process is to create a list of the minimum technical skills you want your new team to have. You can then prioritize that list and decide which skills will apply to which position. Skills may include:

• Operating system, database and specific application knowledge
• Problem-solving skills
• Phone presence
• Spelling and grammar skills

You should also think about what character traits you want your team to have. Here are some important ones for technical support staff:

1. Trainability

Some people learn faster than others and fortunately you can test a candidate for this during an interview. Find a few puzzles that build upon each other in complexity, show the first to your candidate, and then ask him/her to solve the second one. Can this person apply the information under pressure? If not, he/she is probably the wrong person for your team.

2. Responsibility

Your team members will constantly be taking care of other people’s problems, so they need to have a strong sense of responsibility. This is easy to determine—look for people who take responsibility in their personal lives. This can be gauged by asking questions about one’s connections to family, or even how they are paying back their student loans.

3. Empathy

We once hired a management consultant to help us figure out how to cut costs. She was dubious about one of my technical support people, so she chose to sit at a desk where she could hear him doing support. After a few weeks she revised her opinion, saying, “The angrier and more frustrated the customer gets, the more he communicates, ‘I understand your frustration.’” Empathy.

I usually ask a candidate’s references, “Would you describe this person as empathetic?” If you want to get candidates to take a Meyers-Briggs personality test, you will find that the ‘F’ personality types tend to be more empathetic than others. I didn’t give my people personality tests until after they were hired, but as it turns out, all of them are ‘F’s. My wife also happens to be an ‘F’. What does that say about me? In part, it says that I’m an INTJ, and I over-analyze everything.

4. Logic

Logical support people have the ability to approach a tricky system with the assumption that somehow it all makes sense. That is very important, so I test for logic during all of my interviews. All you have to do is find a few logic puzzles online and make them multiple-choice. Give them to the candidate and let them work on them for five minutes before going over it. See how they do before you consider hiring them.

5. Curiosity

Working in technical support is essentially solving a long series of rational problems. Sometimes, however, the problems aren’t so rational. A person who is naturally curious will be much more diligent in searching for solutions than someone who is not. In interviews, I ask about hobbies to find out if a person is curious. Curious people tend to have active hobbies (e.g. building things, learning how various systems work, etc.).

6. Character

Imagine that you are going on a long vacation, and the person you are interviewing is a friend of yours. Would you trust this person to take care of all of your personal business while you are gone—feed your pets, get your mail, water your plants, pay your bills? If not, don’t hire them.

Management 101

Hiring is important for getting the right people in the first place, and management is important for both keeping them and helping them be successful. Here are some key things to address in your management plan:

Proper Training

Just imagine trying to do technical support on systems that you aren’t trained on. “No ma’am, I don’t know how that is supposed to work.” This is why proper training of new staff is extremely important. In addition, your current staff are probably under-trained. As you reinvent your technical support processes, get real product training scheduled for their first few days. And make ongoing training—especially around new releases—a priority.

Note that you are going not going to be able to train people on the exact problems they will need to solve. Don’t put them into entirely unfamiliar systems and ask them to demonstrate proficiency quickly. Be reasonable and realistic when you train.

Goals and Boundaries

Goals are easy. Make them SMART. (SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely. Do a search on ‘SMART’ goals if you need help—it’s an article series by itself.)

Boundaries are a bit more complicated. People need to know what they can promise on behalf of the company and what they cannot. It frees them from guesswork and hesitation, as well as responsibility for the tough decisions. My father, who worked in the contracts department of a large company, knew exactly how much money his signature could vouch for. That is an example of a well-set boundary, in my opinion.

Communication

Someone once told me that a manager’s job is to help people do their jobs better. I take that to mean that I am the one-man technical support team enablement department. Every member of your technical support team will need help and advice, and they have to know that your door is always open. Not only that, but you should also try to be proactive in your leadership, rather than wait for them to call with problems.

Performance Reviews

Everybody needs to know how they are doing, which is why your staff will benefit from performance reviews. If you want to keep your people long-term, and you do, then you will also need to have a job growth plan in place.

Holding regular team meetings will allow you to review the performance of the team as a group. For example, each team member might be burning through cases twice as fast, but if the incoming case load has tripled, the team has a problem. Everyone needs to be aware of this dynamic and understand how the team is doing on the whole. If there is a problem, I usually approach it without assigning blame. “I was thinking about this process, and I’m not sure that we’re really following it like we should be. I’m also not sure that it’s the best process. Let’s discuss the process—why it is the way it is, why we don’t follow it when we don’t, and how we might improve it.” Letting the whole team participate in such discussions will provide you with significant insight and suggestions that will benefit your department in the long run.

Trusting Your Staff

The point will come when you just have to trust your people to do their jobs. This gives them a sense of self-confidence that will ultimately improve their performance, so go get a hobby. Do whatever it takes to allow yourself to stand back and let the magic work.

Keeping Morale Up

Your team will have plenty of reasons for morale to drop, considering the anger and frustration they will deal with day in and day out. For this reason, you need to do small things for them to keep them happy. For example, my team gets lunch more often than any other department in the company, and when a customer compliments them, I ask them to email it to the entire company.

Source : accountingsoftware411.com/Press/PressDocView.aspx?docid=9974

Market undergos huge pressure due to lack of technical support

The breach of important technical support invited more spec selling, which put the market under a lot of pressure throughout the week. After some damage was done on the daily chart over the last couple of months, the market was trying to hang on to a major uptrend line on the weekly chart, which ran through about 66.50 cents this week, but to no avail. The market clearly broke through this line of defense, which triggered a lot of spec selling that forced the market down to a low of 63.10 cents before rebounding slightly.

Speculators were clearly the driving force behind this selloff and there was again a lot of talk about the potential impact the CFTC investigation might have on spec long positions. Some prominent market commentators stated that a regulatory backlash against hedge funds could lead many of them to exit positions. However, we do not necessarily share this pessimism, because in the case of cotton these specs do not have that much of a long position left to liquidate.

According to the latest CFTC "Commitment of Traders" report, large speculators held just 45'000 contracts of outright longs, down from almost 99'000 contracts at the end of February.

Meanwhile, large outright spec shorts increased their position to almost 27'000 contracts, up by over 9'000 contracts in the week of May 20 - 27 alone and up by over 21'000 contracts since the end of February.

Source: http://www.fibre2fashion.com/news/company-news/plexuscotton/newsdetails.aspx?news_id=57691

UC launches new online library

With a new online resource that became available Tuesday, users can browse the collections of all libraries throughout the , as well as thousands of libraries worldwide.

UC officials joined with the OCLC Online Computer suppport Library Center to create what they describe as a "next-generation, shared online catalog" that allows computer users to view and find collections from each campus library, including UC-Berkeley, UC-Davis, UC-Santa Cruz and UCLA.

Founded 41 years ago, the OCLC Online Computer support Library Center of Dublin, Ohio, is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization that works to expand access to library systems worldwide. At present, more than 60,000 libraries in 112 countries and territories around the world use OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend and preserve library materials.

"OCLC's vision for seamlessly integrating discovery of locally held library resources with resources held elsewhere across the international bibliographic network is similar to ours," Karen Butter, UC-San Francisco librarian and chairwoman of the UC/OCLC executive team, said in a statement. "The partnership with OCLC offers an opportunity to present the vast UC library collection in ways that are consistent with the discovery needs of today's faculty and students..."

OCLC's WorldCat system permits users to find a selection of article citations, archival materials and UC and other universities' digitized books. Other features include a single search box, relevancy ranking of search results, result sets that bring multiple versions of a work together, easy ways to refine results, citation formatting options, reviews and cover art.

Source : http://www.bizjournals.com/eastbay/stories/2008/05/26/daily14.html