By David Duer
Nashville Computer, Operations Manager
I hope you had a wonderful holiday season. Just wanted to share a few tips/FAQ with you and your company to help us keep your network nice and healthy this year.
Please leave your PCs turned on during the night (you can do this by simply logging off your PC at the end of the day). Desktop and laptop “quick” virus scans are scheduled to run every night. “Deep” virus scans, are scheduled to run during the night as well. For our managed clients automatic patching (Whitelisted Microsoft Security Patching, Microsoft Non-security updates and Third Party updates) are deployed throughout the week. Please note, some of these updates require a reboot which will occur automatically as long as the user is logged off. If the user is not logged off then the computer will not reboot and patches will not occur.
Please close any files that are open at the end of the day (whenever possible). This will improve the speed and effectiveness of your network’s nightly backups. Additionally, this will prevent the potential of lost work in case an unexpected power outage occurs.
Should I call or email? You should always use the method you are most comfortable using. For a great deal of our clients, that means calling and we have not changed any of our policies regarding calling but there are some benefits to emailing in your request, especially for non-urgent issues, specifically more details can be included.
How much information do I need to supply? Simply put, you cannot supply too much information. Unfortunately, we often just get one phrase descriptions like "can’t connect”. The more information you supply at the time a ticket is created the better we can get the appropriate resources to you. Think of it like ordering a cake. You would never tell your baker to just bake a “cake”. You would tell them this is a three layer, chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting, etc. and they would prepare accordingly. To keep you from having to work with someone that cannot efficiently help you, give us as much detail as possible.
Is it possible to have just one engineer work with me? You can always request to work with a particular engineer. If you have an ongoing issue, it would be best to do so and we would also like to keep all that information on one ticket. However, emailing or calling a particular engineer directly often causes problems. If that person is on vacation, involved in another long-term situation, or on loan to another department, your request could go unnoticed for some time. Our dispatch team triage tickets. If your request is "Have Frank call me" and Frank is busy, you could be waiting a long time for Frank to return a call that Ernest could have satisfactorily answered quickly. We can't be responsible for call back time if you email someone directly, however, we are responsible for the call-back time for tickets that come in through the approved methods as mentioned above.
Getting You the Quickest Solutions:
You can email us even if you want us to call you back. In your email, just specify that you would prefer us to call. We may still email you with some suggestions if we have a ready solution. We always want to get you a solution as fast as possible.
We may email you regardless of how you contacted us. In this incredibly busy time, we will err on the side of getting you solutions as quickly as possible regardless of your preferred contact method. If we can email you a solution within minutes versus you waiting hours for us to call you back, we are going to email you.
Logging multiple tickets does not speed things up. If you already have an open ticket, you can always add additional information to it, but creating a new ticket only slows the process down because we may end up with two people working on the same issue rather than helping more clients.
Thank you for your business and confidence in Nashville Computer. Thank you also, for your assistance in helping us keep your network healthy this year and if you have any questions regarding the above, please let me know.