Work by Remote

Summary:
Remote support technology is one of the most popular service and support automation tools for high-tech companies, with a well understood and easily documented return on investment story. Though basic remote control is available from many sources, including some freeware and shareware options, companies interested in improving both the economics of support and the customer experience should understand the risks involved with lower-end tools, and learn how leveraging a best-of-breed product will accelerate operational improvements and customer satisfaction ratings. In this report, find out 10 critical selection criteria to use when evaluating remote support platforms, and identify how moving beyond homegrown or freeware tools will accelerate the achievement of business goals for your service and support operation.Click here to launch the document.

Netbooks are the in thing today. They are small and handy, and so it’s no surprise that many people are now seen carrying netbooks wherever they go.

For remote or mobile workers,  netbooks or laptops are almost a must. They are convenient, you see. Though for programmers, these small gadgets may not be an ideal one to have. But they will do if they need to go out of their bedrooms for a while and into a cafeteria or park to work.

Remote workers or mobile workers need to get some air, too, you know.

Now we all know that the bane of netbooks or any other computer device is virus. Good thing Kapersky Antivirus has come up with an anti-virus for netbooks.

PC World shares:

Kaspersky Lab has announced an anti-malware product specifically designed for netbooks, the first to fill a potentially lucrative new software niche.

According to the company, Kaspersky Internet Security Special Edition for Ultra-Portables has been “optimized” for netbooks running the Intel Atom, Intel Celeron-M, or VIA C7-M processors that power the current generation of Windows XP-based small-screen wonders.

Continue reading…

We hear about layoffs and closures left and right. The news is filled with these stories that we can’t help worrying about our job, too.

We might wake up one day and find that we’re out of job. *Knock on wood*

But not all jobs are vulnerable. As my father would always say, “There’s always room at the top. If you’re good at what you do, you will always find work in your hands.” Such reassuring words!

In any case, there’s nothing wrong if you do a little of self examination on where you are at your career. Are you in a crisis-proof industry? How would you  know which industry is crisis-proof in the first place?

PCWorld outlined the top 10 tech skills in a downturn. These are the skills that will have a slim chance of receiving the walking papers.

1. Business Process Modeling
2. Database
3. Messaging/Communications
4. IT architecture
5. IT security
6. Project management
7.  Data mining
8. Web Development
9. IT optimization
10. Networking

Read more…

So where are you now?

Photo: Stock.Xchng

Last week was hell for me. One of my website projects had been dealt with a hacker’s hand. That was our suspicion, though unfounded yet till today. I was so devastated that it took me a week later, that is today, to write about it.

One of my web researchers noticed something wrong with the site while he was updating entries one day. He called my attention to it, and we later found out that many of the already added entries were missing.

The missing files were alarming because there were many. These were content that were researched from the field for almost a year! And while we spoke, more files appeared to be deleted one by one.

Panicky, I called on my programmer and told him about what was happening. True enough, something was really really wrong with the site. Many of the parent categories were removed. Someone was relocating entries the wrong way, and so the data had been jumbled.

Worse, even the missing files could not be found in the database!

My initial reaction was to email all researchers and tell them to save their raw photos and data in CDs and mail the material to me. As Peter’s Principle would have it, one of the researchers claimed that she had deleted all the photos from her PC. Her reason: nothing! (I should investigate this further, because her last login to the site was the day before it happened. But this is over-reading of the situation already.)

What to do, but to hang in the hope that the programmer had diligently created  a backup regularly. Well, the programmer did have a back up but it was not updated. The last backup was done in January 2009. That means the latest and most recent update on the site was not saved.

Well, a two-month update of content is a lot already but it was better than nothing at all. I thought everything would go smoothly from then on. I was wrong.

As we were trying to restore the data, there was permission problem. Even the researcher could not upload new data for of the same reason. I can only cry!

Till today, the missing files are not fully restored, and we are still battling with permission issues and other weirdness.

It is really sad because the project is content-based. It takes months to build it, and it costs as much. Reworking bad entries is bad enough, how much more is restoring missing files.

Whoever did this, D*** YOU!

I started with Netscape then Internet Explorer (IE). I enjoyed using IE until Firefox came along.

I’m still using Firefox even though others has been egging me to try Chrome. I’ve tried Opera, too, at one time. But for me, nothing beats Firefox, just as nothing beats Google for the search engine category.

I know some people have all these browsers in their system. I can understand, if you’re a web developer. A web developer has to check the look and the operation of the site their developing after all.  Often, they encounter problems with IE. The design or codes somehow don’t render well in IE. You have to tweak it further to get the desired look.

With Firefox, everything just looks perfect.  So, why use another?

If you’re still deciding which browser works for you check this out.

I welcome anything that drives away spammers!

Today, I stumbled upon an article that talks about 3D-based captchas. These captchas:

• unbreakable to current computer technology, yet easier for humans to identify
• relies on the user’s ability to identify objects in 3D instead of using alphanumeric characters

I saw a screenshot of these captchas, and I felt like I was in kindergarten school again. I had to identify objects, and I must be clever about it.

I really hope this will end all our problems on spam!

Read more about it.

A common scenario today is that organizations are cutting cost left and right. Either they delay expansion or lay off employees, anything just to save up on more expenses and hold on to whatever savings that they may have.

Contact centers, by the very nature of their business, are viewed as costly—from logistics to operations, that is. However, there is a way to cut cost in this  industry, too.

Frost & Sullivan brings you this webinar where you will be given an option to use remote agent model. It is said that having remote agents will improve your contact center operations costs, reduce agent attrition while providing outstanding customer service.

Join this webinar and find out how to explore best practices in:

• Selecting the right on-demand solution
• Enabling effective performance management
• Optimizing training with distance learning
• Maximizing agent desktop security
• Aligning compensation with performance
• Creating a sense of community

Schedule: March 26, 2009, Thursday, 2pm ET / 11am PT

Register now!

In this podcast, Thompson interviews John Todor, managing partner of The Whetstone Edge, about his new book: Get With It! Practical Ways to Use Web 2.0 in Your Business.Tudor shares tips for the a more effective use of Web 2.0 and social media, including using LinkedIn to build a “networked brain trust.”And, he explains why in the down economy, it’s more important than ever to make effective use of social computing.

Listen to it now!

If your projects are dealing with content-based websites, two things:

1. you’re in a good industry because most people these days get their information from the Web,
2. but you have to invest in your database and data management.

Data management or making sense of all the data you have, and build a database for that is not easy. You have to deal with systems, software, memory, space, and bugs!

But today, I’m sharing with you a useful take on making sense of data from Sun Microsystems.

Some snippets:

• You have massive amounts of data. To interpret it, you need dedicated solutions to find the regularities and irregularities in customer behavior to correlate trends.
• Good data and metrics allow you to be more operationally efficient. The primary goal of business intelligence is to optimize resources and investments so that you can adjust your offerings, as close to real time, in reaction to market demands
• Data warehouses will often start small, but the key is to build them so that they can scale and accommodate mixed loads.

Read the Q&A now!

Yet another challenge in managing people is the different systems of PC. This is not a problem with workers in an office because all PCs and equipment in the office are usually of the same specifications. Even the ISP is not an issue.

Differing systems become a problem when your people or teammates are working somewhere else—in their homes, in a cafe, in a library, in a branch, or elsewhere.

If I remember it right, the only specs required for remote workers was a good stable, and reliable Internet connection and a good working PC. As to the details of the PC specs, it was not specified or emphasized.

I may be wrong, but because of this, remote workers use it as a ready excuse whenever they turn in a poor performance.

“My PC slowed down.”
“I have trouble accessing the site.”
“I’m having difficulty resizing the photos.”
“I can’t upload information properly.”
“The site is slow in loading.”
“My internet connection is bad.”

The reasons are endless. But how do we check if all of those are true?

I’m thinking that maybe we need to specify PC system requirements and ISP to make sure that the remote workers or telecommuters deliver the same service and quality output as those who come to the office for work (that is of course assuming that those office workers are doing good as well.)