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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dPCiclRAUTMS_aVL1Wv4iDmahJeQv6DO-0T-yQXfepI/edit?usp=sharing

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Video - Face to Face Communication

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itLQdMIapH0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1sf3CJb-XY

Audio helpline

Novice

Technical

Experienced 

Email Communication

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There are many different sources to get useful information within this modern age. I will now go through a variety of sources to explain them as well as their advantages and disadvantages. 

Books

Books are one of the oldest sources of information that you can get that provide advice and guidance. They can contain a wide variety of information that will allow you to learn pretty much everything you will need to know. Advantages of books are that they can contain lots and lots of information. The second advantage to using books for advice and guidance is that they are very portable; they require no power and can be lightweight meaning they can be carried around everywhere. The third and final advantage to using books is that often books that are worth their salt are usually verified by external companies ensuring their validity. However there are some disadvantages to books, for example books can get out of date very easily causing them to become invalid and even wrong. Secondly books can get wet making them not very environment proof because the medium itself doesn't work very long.

User manuals

User manuals are small pamphlets or booklets that are provided with the product that you are purchasing. The user manuals give you useful information about the product that you have purchased. The first advantage of using user manuals to provide advice and guidance is that the user manuals are very specific to the product and are therefore very accurate when it comes to giving guidance. However a disadvantage to using user manuals are that they contain very little in regards of a variety of information, having limited info.

Forums

Forums are internet pages where users contribute to a thread in response to other people’s problems. There are many different types of forums out there all with varying levels of helpfulness. The first advantage to using forums is that they can at time be very accurate at solving issues, this is due to other users having the problem and then finding a way to repair it, then posting it on a forum, this is also very similar to a fault log, but for many people. The disadvantages to forums however is that they can also be very bias and incorrect, meaning that forums can’t be a very trustworthy source.

Chat lines

Chat lines are an online text messaging service that connects directly straight to an IT support specialist. They can help you with any problems that you may have. An advantage to using chat lines for support and guidelines is that all of the support that you will get will be likely how to fix the problem and the staff are usually trained experts. However a downside to using chat lines for advice and guidelines is that support could be limited and can also be very long winded to get done.

Teachers & Trainers

Teachers and trainers are people who already know about everything there is to know about a specific product, meaning that they can be very useful. The first advantage to using teachers and trainers as advice and guidance is that they are real people with real knowledge, not just people with a script to read, making then invaluable. The disadvantage to using teachers and trainers however is that they will often have bias of their knowledge because of their experience.

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Training

Training is very useful for explain advice and guidance, this method is useful because it will teach you everything that you need to ever know within the regards of that area, this type is usually the most reliable. On the downside however, training can take a very long time and end up being quite expensive for getting trained. Another downside is that not all the training will be what you want.

Telephone recommendations

Telephone recommendations are very useful when it comes to explaining advice and guidance. This is because a company can provide their own advice and guidance service that can work around the world meaning that they’re very versatile to have when giving advice and guidance. The downside to using this however is that there are often many communication and culture issues when it comes to phone lines, such as if someone doesn't speak good English or they have a hard to understand accent.

Manufacturers support website

The manufacturer’s website is also a useful to explain advice and guidance, this is because it will contain all of the information that you need from the product that is relevant to your needs. However on the downside a website is not the best way to get advice or guidance across as it can become just walls of text quick and lead to poor amount of information soaking in.

Repair shop recommendations

Repair shop recommendations are useful way to explain advice and guidance for IT systems. This is because repair shops are very knowledgeable in many areas of IT and could help you greatly with any of the advice or guidance you need. However on the downside following the repair shop recommendations could be quite bias, this is because the owner wishes to make money so he may give you recommendations meaning it might not be very trustworthy.

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Policies and procedures are essential for IT technical support and ensure that everything runs smoothly. I will now explain the impact of policies and procedures have on IT technical support.

The first of the policies and procedures that you have for technical support is security. An organisation will have to make sure that they have adequate security for the users and the IT technical support. This means that the organisation will have to provide many things such as password protection with password expiry’s and cycles and using their lightspeed (Web filtering and monitoring application) to block malicious advertisements, proxy servers and to restrict admin access to only trusted members of staff. One final procedure you would have to follow for security is to make sure that they have an onsite backup of all the data, and then have another backup in a centre at least 25 miles away.

The second of the policies and procedures that you will have to follow for your technical support is the data protection act. The data protection act is a law that has been put in place by the government that requires any organisation or company to adequately protect their user’s data, such as usernames, emails, passwords and all of their other information. This means that they will have to make use of multiple types of encryption within the virtual world but also physical security such as CCTV and use of locks to ensure that all of the user’s data is safe and secure.

The third policy and procedure that you will have to follow for your technical support is confidentiality. Also this is very similar to the data protection act but is more into regard of restricting the sharing of the data to third party companies. This means that your organisation will have to keep all of the user’s data confidential unless specifically given permission to the user.

The fourth of the policies and procedure that you as an organisation would have to follow is service level agreements. Service level agreements are a part of a service contract which is where a service is formally defined. This means that if you have a service level agreement with another company or customer, you must obey those terms written, for example if in the SLA states that you will have repaired the clients systems within 5 hours then you have to abide by that time limit or you may be liable to a fine if stated as a clause or give the client ground to break contract. This is why you must abide the SLA.

Another Policy and procedure that you will have to abide by is dealing with sensitive information. This is essential for letting your company get an edge in the market because the sensitive information is usually plans about your company or information that if released could damage your organisation. This is why sensitive information need to be kept quiet with things like gag orders and injunctions.

The final policy and procedure that you would have to follow is dealing with viruses. You will have to follow a certain procedure when dealing with viruses to cause as little damage as possible to the clients systems, this is especially true with things such as ransomware where an half effort and non-researched could be detrimental such as if the client was infected with CryptoLocker rendering the system useless and making everything worse.

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In today’s world there are many different ways of providing support to your customers and users. You and your organisation could do either two different things. The first thing you could do is do all of your work in house and do everything yourself. On the other hand you could outsource you work. Outsourcing your work means that you pay another company to do the work for you and on your behalf, these can be anywhere in the world by anyone in the world. I will now go through all of the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing work.

Advantages

The first advantage to outsourcing the IT support is the cheap/ cost effectiveness of the work. This is because the work can be outsourced to different countries with lower minimum/average wages, such as china or India. This enables your company to have fewer outgoings in the company, saving money since it will end up being a lot economical than doing it all in-house.

The second advantage to outsourcing technical support is making extra profit, which is a knock on effect of the previous advantage because when the cost of the outsourcing is less but the revenue is the same, it overall results in a higher profit for the company or organisation.

The third advantage to outsourcing IT support is the reduction of liability to the organisation. This means that because the company is outsourcing they will not have to follow many different policies and even laws and regulations themselves because it is all taken care of by the outsourced companies such as the data protection act or terms of device etc…

Another advantage to outsourcing IT support are time zone agreements. Time zone agreements can be a very useful thing for an organisation in being multinational as well as providing 24/7 support. This is because when you outsource your work, you can make it available to anywhere in the rest of the world, all with different time zones meaning that during late night to early morning where working hours are little and unlikely in the uk, the call centre will be located in India where it’s almost midday and there are many workers available to take calls. This is the method that a lot of multinational companies use to keep their support lines open 24/7.

The final advantage to outsourcing IT support is that the companies the organisations outsource to are specialist organisations. This means that the companies are usually very experienced with IT support and know how things work, making them more efficient and cost effective, much more so than if you were to do all of the IT support in-house. Another advantage to this is that as well as having specialist experience in the industry they also are already likely to have specialist hardware and software’s such as RDC or hardware monitoring.

Disadvantages

There are also however disadvantages to outsourcing your work and there are advantages to keeping you it support in-house instead.

The first disadvantage to outsourcing work is bankruptcy. This is a very big disadvantage to outsourcing as if the company you outsourced to have of collapsed, you are left on your own with no IT support for your users or your customers and can lead to very heavy damage to your business, whereas if you make the support in house, then if you go bust, then there is no problem.

The second disadvantage to outsourcing your IT support is that you don’t have full control over the outsourced company which means that they may not follow all the laws, regulations, DPA’s and confidentiality which will also hold you liable to pay for the damages and could give you multiple punishments by the retrospective government, whereas when it's in house you have lots more control over the it support. 

The third disadvantage to outsourcing to other companies is that if the outsourcing company does something wrong or there is any kind of drama revolving around them, this will result in a negative reputation from consumers and users leading to reduced profits and possibly damaging your company, and although there is also a risk with in house it support , but there is a lesser chance of it happening.

Another disadvantage to outsourcing you work is the language barrier, this is because where most outsourced companies are based in a company where English isn’t their first language, multiple problems arise such as difference in terminology, hard to understand accents and terrible grammar all of which could have a negative effect on customer support and therefore onto your business in turn could lose reputation and then business, nut if you were to do it in house then your call centres (which is in house) will be in the UK so this wont be a problem.

The final disadvantage to outsourcing your IT support is the lack of training. This is because a lack of training could make your IT support essentially useless because they are unable to help the users or the customers in solving any problems because they have no idea what they are talking about, giving the users a bad impression on to your business.however if you do this in house you can then set standards for all of your staff, making sure the are properly trained and prepared to do their jobs properly.Whereas when it is all done in house, you can ensure yourself that all of the staff have the correct training.

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There are many different software tools that can be used within the IT maintenance industry.

There are many software tools that you can use first of all being the fault log, this is usually a spread sheet of some kind that will allow you to store organise and fit faults and errors into certain criteria to enable efficiency and cost effectiveness of staff.

The second pieces of software that you will have are software diagnostic monitoring tool. These types of software can be programs such as CPU-Z or HW Monitor that can measure many different things about the computer’s hardware such as temperatures of the CPU, GPU and the rest of the computers temperatures, as well as measuring the RPM of the computer fans and even more statistics such as clock speeds and voltage and ampere regulations throughout the computer system. These software tools ensure that the IT Maintenance will ensure that the IT employees knows everything there is to know about the computer so that they could possibly fix it remotely, or at least get some pre-emptive idea about what the problem is, making it a very useful set of tools for IT maintenance/ support. The finals diagnostic monitoring tool that you can uses is an antivirus, this will allow the it maintenance to tell if the users systems are having issues with viruses. All of these tools are very useful for IT support.

The third piece of software that you can use is remote diagnostic connections. There are many different tools that allow you to remote desktop control the user’s computer such as chrome remote desktop, team viewer or  Microsoft’s own remote desktop program. These tools are very useful for IT maintenance within the industry as they allow the staff to remotely control the user’s computer with their own and perform tasks without actually being there. This is useful for an it support company who has many different clients that they need to look after, which then totally cuts out all transport time and costs, saving time and therefore money.

The final tools that can be used are the control panel. The control panel will enable you the IT Maintenance support staff to have advanced controls over the user’s computer and performing advanced administrator tasks. This is probably the most useful software set within the arsenal of IT Maintenance.

There are also a variety of techniques that can be used for technical support to enhance the productivity of the whole company.

The first and most obvious technique that can be used is the technique of asking the users directly. This could mean that your staff would either contact the users through e-mail, telephone or meet them in person. This ensures that the staff has a good interaction with the users and allows the problems to be solved with the most accuracy and means that staff can be dynamic with the repairs. For example if there is the original problem that is fixed but then a new problem will arise. The staffs which are directly dealing with the users should have the knowhow and the flexibility to adapt to the situation, which is what a lot of the other techniques seem to lack.

The second technique that are used for technical support is to record faults and remedies of all current and past from the users from all kinds of sources from the previous technique such as calls, emails, and in person records. These are then put down into something called a “fault log”. A fault log will allow you to store all of the faults that you get from users as well as the solutions that you used to fix the problems. The fault log will usually be kept in some kind of spread sheet such as in Microsoft Excel, this will allow the fault log to have key criteria to organise the fault log. For example you would have different columns for the different problem types like user errors, software faults and hardware faults. And you would also have other criteria such as “cost to fix” or “service time” enabling you to get the most accurate results from the fault log making it very effective for future use.

Fault logs are a relatively reliable form of logging faults and solutions and seem to have a high level of accuracy. This is how it works if procedures are done properly and faults are logged into the correct sections and are done correctly, however within a real world situation these may not be the case, they are easy to edit so it could be that staff are taking advantage of that fault report and falsifying faults or putting things in the wrong place, ruining the whole fault logs. Another accuracy problem with fault logs is that they will be very unreliable for the first few amount of time that you use it, this is because the fault logs at the early stage will have problems and solutions that may be different every time, making them essentially useless, but with that said they will have very accurate reading later on if you’re a business enabling you to not have to go thought the painstaking task of re diagnosing the same problem and having to re-research the solutions again.

A solutions database is a database which will allow you to store the fixes and solutions to previous problems that you had in the fault log. This is useful because it negates the requirement of having to find the solutions to faults all over again if they are already stored onto one convenient place. Similar to the fault log though, it will be pretty useless until there is a significant amount of solutions.

There are some futures trends within IT technical support that we can identify that have occurred over the years. The first trend is that there are now advanced and will continue to exponentially advance in RDC (Remote Desktop Control) rather than having technical support coming in person, meaning that no more, or very rarely will you have it technical support coming round to your office or house to fix problems and will instead just remote in from the comfort of their own computer. An example of this is Fareham College. This is a good trend because it allows the IT support to be more efficient in their work by totally cutting out travel time. But on the downside it means that there may be less than the staff support can do to solve the problem if it’s an issue that can’t be solved with RDC.

The second recent advance in support systems technology is the tasks of performing roll-out maintenance. Years ago an IT technician would have to go around and install all the programs one by one, floppy disk by floppy disk taking hours, perhaps even days to get <20 computers upgraded. But now everything is centralised, bandwidth speeds are incredibly fast and servers that are remote and extremely advanced, allowing you to remotely install to hundreds if not thousands of computers at the same time within ten minutes, it even getting to the point where updates and backups are seamless ensuring that computers are much more reliable and ensure the latest updates, this is also evident within Fareham college. However there are also some disadvantages to using this system. This is because when you can control so many computers at the same time it actually poses a big threat in the way of security, where if a virus infects one computer it can then spread to the rest of the computers in the network. This is a big reason as to why it is not very common and integrated into everyday life. Another disadvantage to using rollout maintenance is compatibility issues, this is because unless the company makes sure to by all the same systems, then there will be lots of different computers, with all different components, which can cause problems when coming to updating drivers because they all use different ones.

Advantages to using advanced roll-out maintenance are the following.

• Fast updates to systems

• Fast maintenance

• Easy support infrastructure

• Mass roll-outs

However there are also disadvantages to using advance roll-out maintenance which are.

•Can be costly to run and use software.

•Staff may need training to use.

•can increase networks vulnerability to attacks.

•lowered security possibly.

•Possible compatibility issues.