P1 M1 D1

UNIT 25 P1 M1 D1

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.