[PB2K]

If so, what are your daily responsibilities? I am not talking about outsourced helpdesks in India, I mean a helpdesk in your office or school.

I am asking because I am trying to set up something for the following year, and need to know what kind of work there is to be done. How far do you go to help the customer? When do you say no, that's not part of my job? What do you like or don't you like about your job?

Criticism about the helpdesk you have to rely on is also welcome.

[BadKosh]

I work with a federal Agency. We have over 400 Macs. 280 or so MacBook/MacBook Pros, and the rest Mac Pros for the TV, and graphics folks.
We use mostly COTS SW. We have 4 people to support them, and 1 system engineer. We make/modify our own core loads. We keep a database of known problems and the fixes/work arounds. Standardization is the key. All the Desktop techs have areas of special expertise. 1 is a unix guy, 1 has lots of Entourage troubleshooting, 1 does high-end graphics and TV app support, 1 does printers and peripherals. All communicate w/Blackberrys so we cn pick each others brains if something weird happens. Our customer is primarily scientists and admin support staff.

The techs look at the trouble que, fix as many as they can, pend others while waiting for tech contacts or the user. We also note trends in problem types. We schedule our time so we can be involved in advanced projects like big ugly rebuilds of Entourage, or entire computers, we install and upgrade above core software, and help users to configure specialty software for the environment.

[dcmacdaddy]

At my place of work, also with the Federal government, we have a centralized Help Desk for the whole organization that doles out assignments. They are consolidating most of the new account creation procedures into the organization's central IT support group but the end-user support is still mostly localized to each individual bureau within the agency. There are also centralized server support groups, networking support groups, VoIP support groups, policy and planning groups, etc.

As far as how things get done for our Mac support, each bureau sets those policies internally based on general guidelines provided by the organization's central IT support group. (Those general guidelines include who can and cannot have a Mac. There has to be a work-related reason for having one; End user personal preference is not considered a reason to have a Mac.) There are about 400 Macs organization-wide out of 6000+ total computers so the Macs are not controlled as heavily by the centralized IT group. My bureau has three branches and I am the Technology Manager at one of them. However, I am also the resident Mac expert at my bureau so I determine Mac policy for all three branches within my bureau.

I build a master image, currently based on Tiger, with all the required COTS software. This includes Mac Office 2004, Adobe Creative Suite 2, the Adobe Font Folio, and Extensis Suitcase for font management. This master image is built in accordance to agency security policy and then beat upon by a select group of users to see what they can break. I go through one or two iterations of this testing phase before creating the "master" image. This gets copied, via Carbon Copy Cloner, to all the bureau's Macs and then any extra apps are installed by the IT staff local to the branch--The extra apps are QuarkXPress and/or VectorWorks.

The master image gets stored on an external FireWire drive in the data safe and is brought out once or twice a year to be updated. My bureau is on a 2-3 year update cycle for software so we will probably go to Leopard and Adobe CS3 in late 2008/early 2009. All the COTS software is bought centrally via multi-user licenses so individual users cannot be upgraded outside the planned schedule (other than for patches).

Our users cannot have administrator privileges on their local machines--either through their AD account or through local permissions--so once the machines are built with the master image, the local account is created via AD, the users files are moved over, and the machines runs pretty smoothly. There is no day-to-day support I provide to my local users. I take a L-O-N-G time to build the master image, about 60-80 work-hours including the testing phase, and once I have that image in place I am confident is is going to be close to bullet-proof.

My advice to you is to get your group to standardize as much as possible. Once you have a fairly high degree of uniformity among your users it is much easier to support them. You as the support person only have to face one kind of environment when you sit down in front of a wonky Mac. And they, as the end user, have a better ability to inter-operate with their colleagues knowing that everyone is on the same software versions and have their hardware configured the same way. And under NO circumstance do you give your end users administrative privileges; It is not a smart thing to do.

As far as limits go, we configure the hardware, install the software, and make sure the core functionality (OS, web, office productivity) works. Users are presumed to know how to use the specialised graphic design software so we do not provide any "How do I" support for those apps. If a user doesn't know how to do something with one of their specialty apps, it is up to them to figure it out.

I know this is lengthy but I hope it helps provide some insight into how a good help desk/IT support environment can run.

[besson3c]

Will you be using a ticketing system? Will all the employees be located in the same office?

[BadKosh]

Gee, I'm doing something like that for our graphics folks..The hard part was getting ALL the software we needed with the correct number of users for the site licenses. We too use Tiger (10.4.9) based on the intel version shipped with the 2.4 gig MBP. I have to add in the system stuff (AdmitMac etc, back-up software, and strip off fonts) They use CS3 and Suitcase fusion. Font Dr. too! All in all, They have about 25 above core apps on the Mac Pros, which are top end boxes. The std load has Office, and a few other basic apps. We use the Disk utility to make the images, and then blast one for our security folk. We use Ditto -rsrcFork to move the users data from his old machine. I get to add all the specialized printers and test those so we can put out 20-30 machines next week. After the basic graphics user has their new box, I get to build another core load with Final Cut Studio and lots of high end animation software, and start the tweaking process all over again.

[BadKosh]

We use Remedy.

[dcmacdaddy]

Yeah, I forgot to add, we use HEAT from Front Range Solutions for our Help Desk ticketing system. It is quite powerful, and perhaps overkill for a small organization, but my organization uses it institution-wide to track all sorts of metrics. There are a set of service levels we must meet in regard to acknowledging, opening, resolving trouble tickets. My organization uses it to evaluate quality of the service offerings as well as measuring support-staff performance--Problems must be resolved within 4 hours of the assignee acknowledging the ticket. I think it is quit expensive but if you check out their website they do have links for a trial version.