The pIT stop Q&A: How can I best support home workers?

Paul Chandler asks the pIT stop panel:

With the increasing demand for home working, what technology developments can be made to help support teams to resolve issues more efficiently when there could be multiple different ways that each home user connects?

The pIT stop panel’s replies:

Increasing use of web applications is the quickest way to afford easier access for home workers. Whether you call it Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, or just “the internet”, these applications are usually designed with browser access in mind: Google Docs, Salesforce.com, and Zoho are all designed for ease of use in networked environments. Frankly, support teams should not be spending all their time configuring Windows machines to access Windows services. Microsoft’s Sharepoint may be excellent for 100 per cent Windows environments, but its poor to unusable if you want to use browsers other than Internet Explorer, let alone other operating systems.

One excellent application is Adobe Connect. At RedMonk we use it because of our mixed estate - Connect allows anyone to just click and collaborate, with no downloads required, whether they are running a Mac, Windows or a Linux PC. It is by far our favourite web conference platform, beating WebEx and Microsoft LiveMeeting hands down in terms of support for a range of access mechanisms.

Now while I would certainly not claim that cloud or software-as-a-service platforms don’t have security concerns, it’s important to note that opening up the corporate network for multi-platform access is something it was never designed for. Just as mainframes weren’t designed for client/server computing, so Windows networks were not architected with web access in mind. Organisations therefore need to be very careful to know exactly what information is being made available to home users. Just opening a hole in the firewall is a very bad idea indeed.

I would advise organisations planning to adopt home working to, at the very least, trial some of the new tools designed for web working. Google Docs works very well for collaboration, and handles Microsoft file formats surprisingly well.

By James Governor, co-founder and principal analyst, RedMonk

Home users would connect to the internet in a variety of ways from their homes, depending on the ranges of services on offer at each location. Support for this is best left with the suppliers of internet connectivity and should not hit the corporate IT helpdesk at all. Programmes should be in place to actively deflect such support demands away from the corporate IT helpdesk. The support for home broadband is by definition tied into the technology developments it serves. It should also be assumed that each company has a specific set of policies by which remote home working is enabled. This in itself brings a level of uniformity to the way home users connect to the internet.

So, supporting the corporate client can be divided into two subsections; once it is connected to the company network (across the internet), and when it is connected to the internet but unable to connect to the company network. In the former case, assuming traditional network layer connectivity is used, the same developments that are available to support on-site users are fully available. Non-traditional connectivity may initially fall into the category below.

This leaves those connected to the internet but for some reason unable to connect to the company network. Here the best approach is probably specific remediation of whatever it is stopping the connection to the company network and there are significant opportunities for technology developments to aid this.

Previously, supporting systems with no connection to the corporate network has been a challenge, but with the advent of technologies such as Intel vPro technology, out-of-band issue resolution is now a reality, and covers a wider scope of issues that are now able to be resolved remotely. Indeed, new features will be available in the third quarter of 2008 that enable issue resolution beyond the corporate firewall. If a wired connection is available (as would be the case in almost every home working scenario), client-initiated remote access enables the PC to establish a secured connection with the corporate management console, thereby enabling diagnosis and, possibly, issue resolution.

By extending client management capabilities beyond software-based agents to assisted hardware management, greater control and manageability of remotely connected clients is a reality and offers a greater capability to diagnose and heal remotely than ever before.

By Stuart Dommett, enterprise client product manager, Intel

Home working is only part of the problem. Employees also increasingly work from client locations, in hotels, on trains and in a whole variety of remote places. Users also connect to corporate IT environments using a lot of different devices, from PCs to mobile phones, using networking technologies from dial-up models through to high-speed broadband. And users can be in locations all around the world.

When looking for solutions to support this diverse environment, the first choice facing an organisation concerns whether to outsource support.

Outsourcing of desktop and connectivity support is often a very cost effective way to meet these complex support needs, while still giving good service to users. However, it's not for everyone.

Connectivity is typically the first element that needs to be established. When connectivity exists there are a whole range of remote management tools that can be used for the support staff to help fix problems, from remote desktop protocol clients for Microsoft Windows, through to solutions around virtual network computing (VNC). Here the choice of technology should be driven by the broader management technology being adopted by the organisation. All of this is quite well understood and quite mature technology.

Where there are basic connectivity problems things are harder, and I've not seen any clear solutions. I have seen a couple of innovative things done by support staff though. One is for picture of a PC screen to be taken on a mobile phone and these sent via MMS from the user to the support representative, with a new MMS sent after each instruction had been carried out by the user. Ultimately, however, a return-to-base solution can often still be needed.

By David Mitchell, senior vice president of IT research, Ovum

The growth in home working is going hand in hand with the increasing use of consumer technologies by business users, and this presents an opportunity for support teams to broaden the service they provide.

Tools such as social networking and instant messaging can help to minimise the direct involvement of the helpdesk by offering an intuitive way of communicating with support staff. Even texting or MMS provides new ways to alert or follow up on problems that don’t mean constant calls to the helpdesk to chase a resolution. Don’t forget that often, unless the home user has come across some catastrophic failure in their PC or broadband connection, they can usually continue working locally and reschedule the need to access corporate systems around their flexible rota.

As mentioned above, there are simple, low-cost web conferencing tools available to help too, not to mention services such as Skype that allow free voice over IP phone calls or simple video conferencing. Equally there are now open source remote access products that would allow helpdesk staff to take control of a home user’s PC to diagnose and resolve problems.

Of course, not everything can be solved quickly, and not everything can be solved remotely, so there needs to be an element of education for home users to understand the scope and limitations of remote support on offer, but certainly the range of tools and techniques available to help you to help them is increasing.

By Bryan Glick, editor, Computing

Read more about the pIT stop here: www.computing.co.uk/pitstop

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