ITIL is a set of best practices put forth by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) of the UK Government for better IT management. We (CPTTM Cyber-Lab) are implementing some of its practices and it is not hard at all. Here I'd like to share with you how we're doing it.
For example, one of the best practices in ITIL is "Talk to your users to see if they're satisfied". What does it mean to Cyber-Lab? For exmaple, we've been pushing OpenOffice to all the departments in CPTTM. To ensure that it's a success and to retain management support, we need to ensure a good user experience for the users. The problem is that users sometimes don't report the problems they found. How to apply the above ITIL practice? Simple. As a start, the users that need the most help are those in our HAT office where there is no local technical support. So I asked our technical support engineer to go right there to talk to their manager and users. Guess what? He gathered 8 problems in one visit, solved 5 of them on the spot, confirmed 1 of them as having no solution in the current version. The other 2 are still being followed up.
This is so simple to do, but it helps so much to ensure the success of our projects. If you have any question regarding ITIL or a tip to share, let me know.The last time I was talking about evaluating projectors. A reader, Mr. Colin Lai, provided some more input:
We should look for robust projector models even it would cost more during the initial purchase in order to minimize the "expensive" support afterwards. The expense came from the impact caused to the users which is hard to quantify, and the cost and time needed to trouble shoot, replace/repair the faulty unit.
We don't have experience on Dell, Acer projectors, but have some not so pleasant experience on the early models of XXX (deleted on Colin's request). So, one might wish to do some survey or ask for demo units and try it out before purchasing in large volume.I agreed. In particular, I really like the idea of looking for user
surveys. For example, I googled with "lcd projector survey" and found
this useful survey
which can more or less tell the overall product quality of the various
projector vendors.
Why is your computer hacked again and again? If you're using Internet Explorer, this may be the reason. According to a research, out of the 365 days in 2004, in 358 days (92%) Internet Explorer had known security problems for which there were no fixes from Microsoft. Fortunately, you can switch to a much safer browser: Firefox available at http://www.mozilla.org.
Firefox is a very popular open source browser that has a good
security track record. In the research above, it had unpatched security
problems for only 26 days (7%). As many power users have switched to
it, it's now the second most popular browser on the planet (just after
Internet Explorer), taking over 10% market share. For example, the French
police force will migrate its 70,000 computers to it by the end of
2006. We're also using it
at Cyber-Lab with good results.
Bristol is the 8th largest city in English. Its city council has decided to switch from MS Office to StarOffice on its 5,500 computers. StarOffice is the commercial version of OpenOffice with technical support from Sun. The main reasons for the switch are lower TCO and freedom from vendor lock-in (OpenDocument format). For more info, see http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/02/23/bristol_migration.html.
As you probably know, the whole CPTTM has been using OpenOffice since 2005. It should work fine for you too (in particular for those users working with "simple" files). If so, you may want to send your staff to join our upcoming OpenOffice course in April.
So, you'd like to learn more about RFID but are afraid to ask? No worries! Come to the Cyber-Lab library to borrow the book "RFID for Dummies".
Any questions, ideas or experiences to share? Contact me at 781313 or kent at cpttm dot org dot mo.
Until next time,
Kent Tong