Way back in April 2009, I posted a piece on CIO.com titled “Office 2007 Doesn’t Really Suck; It’s Just Misunderstood.” Little did I know it would create such a fuss.

Over the past 11 months, the piece has received a smattering of comments, many of which are tinged with vitriol. Office 2007 doesn’t just suck, according to CIO’s readers; it’s reviled, despised, detested, loathed.

Taking a stand by sticking with an earlier version of Office is hardly a political move.

Here’s a sampling of the comments:

“I’m a longtime Office user (since its inception). Office 2007 is an abomination and shows just how out of touch those developers are with real world use and workflow.”

“Thought my suckage meter was just already broken or something, it being beyond the warranty period, but as the 10 or so days went by from having installed this step backwards in software development, and having not latched onto what I had assumed was some kind of groundbreaking innovation in GUI, I started to suspect that Microsoft’s product itself had gone beyond the limits of my suckage meter and broken it… and everyone here has affirmed that.” Read more…

admin Office 2007, Rants AT&T, CIO.com, FORTRAN, Help Desk, Icelandic, Office 2007, software support, Swahili

I’m an obsessive list maker. I’ve tried every list app for the Droid in an effort to become more list-efficient, but so far nothing has worked better than using a pen and scraps of paper. I am so dedicated that when I create a new list, I make sure to transfer incomplete tasks.

How many times have you avoided a problem or simply “made do” because the thought of calling the help desk was just too painful?

Unfinished business renders me uneasy, and one lingering task in particular – calling my VoIP service provider – has been giving me heartburn lately.

I do not want to call because I know I will spend too much time getting nowhere. And I’m speaking from experience.

A few weeks back, I called the company to set up the service. It was a Saturday morning, and I had about an hour to kill before I was set to begin making pumpkin pancakes for guests. Plenty of time to fit in a call. Or so I thought. Read more…

admin Customer Service, Rants Customer Service, Help Desk, language barrier, pancakes, software support, VoIP

In a recent post, blogger Seth Godin throws out an interesting statistic: If you ask 100 people to do something, expect two of them to get it wrong.

Make it OK to not know something — allow your employees to get their work done with minimal downtime and frustration.

According to Godin, managers have two choices in dealing with this errant 2 percent:

“Design systems that have the good sense and gracefulness to permit the 2% to proceed; or annoy, demonize or lose these people.”

Unfortunately, most companies today opt for the latter. In a recession, quality desktop application support usually is the first to go when budgets are cut. It’s hard to quantify its return on investment, and the demand for such support is often hidden.

Companies annoy, demonize or lose employees by making them figure out software problems on their own, but hold them accountable if their workarounds fail. Figuring it out on their own can mean fruitlessly scouring Microsoft help files for solutions, asking for assistance from colleagues who know a little more about software, finding flawed workarounds, or doing nothing at all. That’s the hidden demand, and it wastes heaps of time and money. It also creates frustrated employees.

A smarter solution is to acknowledge that the 2 percent is inevitable and take steps to minimize the effect. Offer software support and training; make it OK to not know something; allow your employees to get their work done with minimal downtime and frustration.

Read Godin’s blog here.

MORE INFO IN: Desktop Application Support | Contact PC Helps

admin Rants Seth Godin, software support, Training

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the best way to keep your top executives is to make it easier for them to leave.

When the economy rebounds, if your employees aren’t happy, they will leave.

That’s right — offer them challenges, enhance their skills, expand their networks.

Perhaps that would have made perfect sense 30 years ago, when taking a job often meant staying with a company for the duration of your career. But today, when job-hopping is standard and one-company careers are a relic, grooming employees just doesn’t seem prudent.

But it is, and even more so in an economic recession. (When the economy rebounds, if your employees aren’t happy, they will leave.) Consider the article’s points, and apply them to employees at any career stage, from entry-level to C-suite. Read more…

admin Rants, Training recession, software support, Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal never fails to address topics that seem obscure but are awfully relevant to current affairs. This time the paper turns its attention to the growing battle over keyboard layout due to the proliferation of full-keyboard smart phones.

It’s QWERTY versus Dvorak and the fight is getting ugly.

It’s QWERTY versus Dvorak and the fight is getting ugly. That is, as ugly as a keyboard layout melee can get.

A little background: The first typewriter’s keyboard was arranged in alphabetical order, which proved to be poor design when two keys near each other were pressed in succession. The keys would jam. So inventor Christopher Sholes shuffled the letters around, placing the most commonly used keys away from each other. Thus, the QWERTY keyboard was born.

But there’s another keyboard layout, the Dvorak, which is not widely used. The Dvorak has been around since the 1930s, when an efficiency-minded inventor named August Dvorak placed the most commonly used letters, like vowels, on the “home row” (on a QWERTY, the home row starts with ASDF… and ends at single and double quotes). Read more…

admin Mobile Devices, Rants ANSI, August Dvorak, Christopher Sholes, Dvorak, efficiency, jailbreak, QWERTY

Recently, I was reading our customer comments and one in particular caused me to pause: The customer stated that he didn’t know Outlook personal folders could fill up.

I thought to myself, “Where do you think all that mail goes? The great .pst in the sky?”

I thought to myself, “Where do you think all that mail goes? The great .pst in the sky?”

That was the bad-mannered former software consultant in me, and I quickly reminded myself everyone has their own areas of expertise — some technical, some not.

Case in point: I know someone who is a carpenter and general contractor. He had very little formal education; most of it has been on-the-job. If you need to know what kind of wood something is made of — whether it’s a common type like Spanish cedar or an exotic species such as Bubinga (African rosewood) — he’ll tell you in a second. That’s his specialty, and he knows it well.

But when he tries to work with document templates and database files for his business, he’s not so nimble. For that, he brings in help. Read more…

admin Rants Bubinga (African rosewood), carpentry, Outlook, software support, Spanish cedar, Training

Help desk techs are geeks who use jargon to make themselves feel superior, and delight in torturing users with basic computer skills. Customers who call help desks are governed by superstition, are unable to understand basic logic, and think that computers will take over the world some day. Read more…

admin Rants cow, hamburger, Help Desk, lingo, rebooting, superstitions, TechRepublic

I recently came across an old presentation called “The Story of the Ribbon,” by Microsoft employee Jensen Harris. Surprisingly, I found it interesting, and I gained some insight about the history of Microsoft Office and how it led to the latest version’s radical interface redesign.

Why do we settle for “good enough”?

But the history wasn’t what really left a lasting impression with me. Rather, it was these two words: good enough.

According to Jensen, “good enough” was the impetus for Office 2007’s redesign. Over the years, as more tool- and taskbars were added, the software had become bloated and confusing. But, still, users didn’t think it would ever change. It was “good enough.”

Which begs the question: Why do we settle for “good enough”? Read more…

admin Rants good enough, Jensen Harris, Microsoft Office 2007

The economy has certainly changed the nature of the service level agreement (SLA). What used to be a formality now has the capability of becoming a powerful tool for ensuring successful outsourcing partnerships. In other words, it can help you cut costs.

Today – more so than in the past – companies should not be afraid to ask their outsourcing partners for updated SLAs, and more data, both qualitative and quantitative.

It’s the data that really matters – data such as:

• Abandonment rate
• Queue times, hold times
• Call duration
• Estimated hard-dollar savings
• Customer satisfaction and feedback
• Downtime analysis
• Call complexity

Using qualitative and quantitative reporting methods can provide IT leaders with proof of ROI and show value behind dollars spent.

This should be a focal point for every IT department, when many end-users (or customers) operate under the incorrect assumption that the IT help or service desks serve just a few purposes: resetting passwords, maintaining network connectivity, or putting out computers that are on fire.

Choosing the right outsourcing partner and putting strong SLAs in place can rejuvenate the image of the help desk in no time, which, in turn, makes for a better bottom line.

MORE INFO IN: PC Helps eTraining | Desktop Application Support | Contact PC Helps

admin Rants Outsourcing, ROI, SLAs

A story in this week’s New York Post astonished me. Titled “Typewrite & Wrong,” the piece revealed how the NYPD recently spent $1 million on typewriters.

Typewriters. In the year 2009.

In the NYPD’s defense, a commenter noted the department’s prudence for not wasting money on technology its cops didn’t know how to use.

In a subsequent article on CIO.com, writer Thomas Wailgum detailed the department’s efforts to update its technology, and noted that change, especially at the NYPD, is slow — hence the embarrassingly outdated purchase. In the NYPD’s defense, a commenter noted the department’s prudence for not wasting money on technology its cops didn’t know how to use.

While I agree that investing in technology and not teaching people how to use it is a gigantic waste of money, I don’t think the NYPD should continue to shell out money for crusty old technology that is useless for modern crimefighting.

Think about it this way: If a hospital decided to buy Windows 95 instead of a newer version, because training all of its staff would be too great an undertaking, what do you think the patients would say? And how do you think using such dated technology would affect the hospital’s ability to give patients the best care?

Simply put, it wouldn’t fly. So why does it at the NYPD, an institution that is responsible for the well-being of one of the world’s largest cities? I’m baffled. Read more…

admin Rants CIO, CIO.com, New York Post, NYPD, Thomas Wailgum, typewriters, Windows 95