Tag Archives: IT support

2013 Intentions & New Service Offerings

2012 was an outstanding year for iSupportU. We added many new service offerings for our clients, launched our online store for iPhone & iPad color conversions and still had over 75 percent growth for the year. Yes, we were busy, but some of those reasons for being so busy was planning for 2013. We aim for iSupportU to be regarded as the leading technology solution provider for the known universe, and how we plan to grow is the best part.

The iSupportU crew retreat photo in December 2012, outside of Estes Park.

The biggest news for 2013 is the launch of our new Managed Services offering. It allows our technicians to remotely monitor and maintain a business IT environment 24/7, dramatically improve our service turnaround time through our powerful remote monitoring system and gives our clients improved security.

Throughout 2012, we saw many WordPress websites with malware infections. Many of these sites weren’t being kept updated and site backups were not being managed appropriately. In addition, when your website is infected with malware or hacked, your site can get blacklisted by search engines. If a site is infected, it can take several hours to clean, repair & ready for search engine indexing. In order to prevent this from happening, we’re now offering a new plan to include a 24/7 malware monitoring tool that will alert us if anything is detected on your website. We’ll perform a monthly backup of your website and review your site for any needed updates. Updates, by the way, can be a little tricky as they can potentially break older pieces of your website, so they need to be handled appropriately. Contact us now to find out more about our Website Backups & Security Plan offering.

We are very excited about 2013. Get in touch with us today to find out more about our new service offerings!

Benefits of Managed Services for Business IT

Why Managed Services Makes Sense for Your Business.

iSupportU is rolling out its new Managed Services offering to our clients starting on January 1. Here are some of the advantages of using a service like this instead of traditional ‘fix it when it breaks’ IT:

Control Costs: The systems required to run a business are more complex now than they were a few years ago. If a system is poorly managed, it can easily cost more than it’s worth in the first place. The benefits of technology should always outweigh the costs. By having a fixed fee for that baseline of support, budgeting becomes more predictable. Of course, there will always be incidents that can be considered ‘Acts of God’ in the world of IT, but most of IT support can be predicted. And it should be predicted.
Consistent Systems: It’s important for employees to know how to get help when they need it. As an example, users who are covered under the iSupportU Managed Services offering can report an issue by calling, emailing or sending a request right from the desktop agent. By having all of these options, the end user can get their problem resolved more quickly. Quickly resolved problems lead to better up-time. Better up-time leads to more productivity. More productivity leads to a happy business.
Increased Knowledge: Hiring an individual IT administrator for a company only gives you the abilities of a single person. By leveraging the knowledge and experience of an entire IT team, companies get more value for their dollar.
Service Level Agreement: By having an agreement with a company, you have a certain agreement from that company to provide a certain level of service. You do not need to worry if one of the technicians got sick this morning or needs a raise. The support company worries about those problems. Worry less.

For the past three years, iSupportU has been providing high quality IT support for businesses along the front range. We have been offering this service on either a retainer basis or pay-as-you-go. The problem with this model has been that we have been reactive with our clients’ issues. Traditionally, they have notified us when there is a problem. This means that we are usually seeing them when things are not working well. Putting out fires is not fun for anybody.

As an alternative to being reactive, we decided to invest the necessary time and money into the development of a proactive system that will allow for 24/7/365 monitoring of any computer or server. This means that we will be immediately notified if there are any problems with a client’s computer. These issues might be very small when we discover them, but it means that they will not grow into larger issues.

Managed Services is a great fit for IT administrators who do not want to deal with the support burden of the desktops in their company. By freeing up this service, they can focus on the IT strategy development of the company and the other high-level needs of the organization.

4 Hilarious TV Computer Guys We Strive To Not Be Like

Think fast: tell me one tech support guy from a TV show or movie that you like.

Can’t think of any? Neither could we; they’re all jerks. It seems our culture’s storytellers just can’t think of anything nice to say about people who fix computers.

It makes sense. IT guys usually only show up in movies when something goes wrong, and no one likes bad news. For plot reasons, the IT guy becomes representative of all the problems in lives of the primary characters.

Basically: according to TV, we’re outcasts. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn a thing or two from these guys, though. Here are a few examples.

SNL: Company Computer Guy

We know some IT guys are jerks. Lacking social skills, and feeling superior to the people they are supposed to be helping, they come across as smug. Jimmy Fallon’s character in this sketch points out the worst of that tendency.

What we learn from this: At iSupportU we try to treat people with respect, educating them when possible and respecting their workflows.

And we never, ever, order people to move.

The IT Crowd

Getting answers from an IT person can be hard, particularly if they spout off generic instructions. “The IT Crowd”, a hilarious sitcom out of the UK, takes this tendency to an extreme with this running gag about power cycling.

What we learn from this: we try to ask questions before we provide answers. Spouting off generic tips doesn’t solve problems; research solves problems.

Office Space

Strictly speaking, these guys don’t work in IT. Their printer-induced wrath will feel familiar to many, though:

(warning: music in video includes certain words you might not want to hear.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0_S_EdZ_I8

(warning: music in video includes certain words you might not want to hear.)

What we learn from this: Printers can be frustrating. Extremely frustrating. There are times every IT guy would like to take a bat to them.

It’s important not to, though, because printers are also vital to modern workplaces.

More importantly: we strive to never take our frustration out on our clients. If we’re upset you’ll never know.

The Office

Knowledge is power, and people who look at your computer gain power. This is particularly true of the corporate IT guy, who is frequently a combination of a repairman and a spy. This guy comes to mind:

What we learn from this: It should go without saying, but we never prod around your data unless it’s necessary. If we do, we keep anything we find out to ourselves. Trust is at the core of what we do, and we don’t want to risk losing yours.

We Like What We Do

We choose this work. We didn’t choose it because it’s easy; we choose it because it’s hard. We like solving problems, and we like helping people.

So let the media portray our profession negatively. We know there are reasons for that, and we strive to be the exception to the rule.

Ghost Bandwidth: A Technology Mystery Featuring Tim O’Shea

Offering technical support frequently feels like being in a detective story. The phone rings and you know someone is in trouble, and that they need your help to figure something out.

Our story begins under just these circumstances.

Tim O’Shea, our resident Systems Samurai, made a number of improvements to a business client’s setup, replacing the router and setting up a NAS device for file sharing.

Soon thereafter, the phone rang.

“Their ISP sent them graphs,” says O’Shea. “They were maxing their bandwidth.”

In simple terms: they were using up all of their Internets, quickly, and didn’t know why.

I gets weirder. Almost all of this new traffic was outgoing, which is odd because most businesses download way more than they send out. In this case 80 percent of all traffic was outgoing, meaning a tremendous amount of information was flowing from their office to somewhere else.

“Long and short: you should see more down than you see up,” says O’Shea.

Something very weird was happening.

O’Shea knew none of the changes he recently made caused this; the router and the NAS device both function inside the network, meaning neither should be accessing the Internet.

This meant the problem was almost certainly happening at one of their computers.

“This is an office of 20 desktops,” says O’Shea, “Most of them Macs.”

So it probably wasn’t malware.

Not sure what the problem could be? Neither was O’Shea. So like any good detective he searched for more clues.

Routers track traffic, leaving behind a trail for O’Shea to follow. But this led to even more confusion.

“The breakdown showed it wasn’t SMTP or HTTP traffic; it was ‘Other,’” said O’Shea.

Confounding.

Further research found the outgoing data was going to an email server: Google’s, to be precise. This meant someone was emailing out gigabytes of data every day, or something was going wrong with someone’s email set up.

Through further examination of the logs, an a bit of trial and error, the culprit was eventually found.

“It ended up being the front desk,” says O’Shea. “The receptionist had three emails in her Outlook outbox with 36 MB attachments trying to be sent via Google, which has a 20 MB limit. It kept trying to send over and over and over again.”

Sound like a simple fix? It is once you know what the problem is. Figuring this out takes time, though.

“One desktop was saturating their bandwidth,” said O’Shea. “Figuring this out took the better part of two days.”

What’s the lesson? Well, first of all, information is good. O’Shea solved the mystery because he had access to clues.

“The information allowed me to figure this out in a day and a half, versus a week without it” said O’Shea.

The other lesson? Problems aren’t always obvious.

“In many environments it’s easy for one person to, purposefully or not, have a significant impact on resources in IT,” said O’Shea.

Unravelling these problems isn’t typically easy. That’s why we do what we do.

Do you have a technology mystery that needs solving? Contact us. Chances are we’ve run into something similar before.

iSupportU Talks Tech, Computer Repair, Bikes and Boulder on CBS Denver

On Sunday, October 23, our Founder and CEO Shaun Oshman and Network Navigator Christina Savage sat down with CBS Denver to talk about technology, bicycles and why they’re a great match. Here is that visit, for your viewing pleasure:

Can’t see the video? Watch it on the CBS Denver website instead.

If you’re more inclined to reading, the Boulder County Business Report profiled our partnership with Eco-Cycle. We’re thrilled to bring e-waste recycling to downtown Boulder, and are glad to see the word being spread.