J
John Hood
The big project. Migrating 29 Windows NT4 servers and 250 users to
Windows Server 2003 with Exchange 2003. The major bane of my existence
for the past two months. Today was the first day live.
Things I learned.
1: Whomever designed Microsoft Outlook to work in a corp environment
should give me his phone extension so I can forward all of the support
phones to him. We broke the single day record for number of support
calls taken. At 4:30 pm, my phone stopped working.
Geez! what a nightmare! We didn't need to build new profiles for
people, we just needed to change the name of the server on the local
machine. How hard is that? Very! Finally said "forget it" and pointed
everyone a compiled AutoHotkey script that I had recorded in about 10
minutes. Viola! End of THAT problem. I love AutoHotkey.
2: The more a user is likely to need instructions, the less likely they
are to use them. A three month project distilled down to two pages of
hand-out instructions with pictures every step of the way, with little
arrows pointing to what they should click on. We still had about 20% of
the people calling with problems or questions as a result of not reading
the instructions, not reading them all the way through, reading them but
not following them all the way through. Conclusion: The average
business user has about the attention span of a three-year-old.
John Hood
Web Site www.jhoodsoft.org
"The best home and business free software, no ads, no time limits, no
fluff."
"No kidding."
Windows Server 2003 with Exchange 2003. The major bane of my existence
for the past two months. Today was the first day live.
Things I learned.
1: Whomever designed Microsoft Outlook to work in a corp environment
should give me his phone extension so I can forward all of the support
phones to him. We broke the single day record for number of support
calls taken. At 4:30 pm, my phone stopped working.
Geez! what a nightmare! We didn't need to build new profiles for
people, we just needed to change the name of the server on the local
machine. How hard is that? Very! Finally said "forget it" and pointed
everyone a compiled AutoHotkey script that I had recorded in about 10
minutes. Viola! End of THAT problem. I love AutoHotkey.
2: The more a user is likely to need instructions, the less likely they
are to use them. A three month project distilled down to two pages of
hand-out instructions with pictures every step of the way, with little
arrows pointing to what they should click on. We still had about 20% of
the people calling with problems or questions as a result of not reading
the instructions, not reading them all the way through, reading them but
not following them all the way through. Conclusion: The average
business user has about the attention span of a three-year-old.
John Hood
Web Site www.jhoodsoft.org
"The best home and business free software, no ads, no time limits, no
fluff."
"No kidding."