Defining Significant Support Issues

Understanding your current support issues can help you improve client administration and configuration standards and reduce support costs. The following questions will help you to determine what administrative policies can provide the greatest value to your organization:

• What are our top 10 support issues?
  List them and develop action plans to reduce their frequency.

• How often do users "break" their configuration by attempting to change settings (such as video drivers) and other configuration options?
  If the frequency of configuration problems is unacceptably high, you might want to restrict users' ability to change their operating system configuration.

• How often do users "break" their configuration by attempting to either add or remove applications incorrectly?
  If the frequency of this problem is unacceptably high, you might want to restrict their ability to install or uninstall applications.

• Do users install unauthorized software on their computers?
  If this is a problem in your organization, institute corporate policies on whether unauthorized software is allowed. Even if you allow users to bring unauthorized software into the organization, define the types of software to allow and the licensing rules by which users must abide.

• Has the data on clients been secured? Does it need to be?
  Most organizations will want to define security measures for corporate data. The amount of security varies by the type of data involved (financial data or trade secrets require one level of security, public relations releases require another level, for example). You might also want to define who is responsible for security (users versus IT, for example) depending on the type of data.

• Are users allowed to operate their computers as the local administrator?
  If users have been allowed to serve as the local administrator in the past, the installation of a new operating system is a perfect opportunity to alter or fine tune permissions to more effectively meet your organization's administrative needs.

• How much time does your help desk spend trying to fix a broken configuration before they reinstall or reset the basic configuration?
  If you do not have time limits on support calls for broken configurations, consider instituting limits. Also, evaluate Windows 2000 features that can be used to back up user data and install or reinstall the operating system and applications. These new features can impact the length of support calls. For example, if it is easier to reinstall a desktop and data than to troubleshoot a broken configuration, you can significantly reduce the length of your average support call.

Your answers to these and other support questions will help you determine which Windows 2000 features and configuration options to implement. Many representative configuration and control options are discussed later in this chapter.

The answers to these support-related questions will also help you evaluate the effectiveness of your current administration model and standards. Gaps and shortcomings in your client support services can often be resolved with an improved administration model. The following section will help you evaluate your existing administration model.