Full-service user support
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This PC support pilot fish working at an electronics factory gets a call from a user in the chemical treatment area whose 4-month-old PC isn't working. And it takes no time for fish to figure out why.
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Safend, an international provider of endpoint i
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(Source: Symantec) Join this webcast to learn how you can maximize uptime of your e-mail infrastructure, dynamically manage storage growth without impacting user performance, quickly recover from data or application failure, and protect from the worst case - a complete site disaster.
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Mozilla has been quietly offering live Web support for the Firefox Web browser since the beginning of the year. It is one of the open-source group's experiments in improving the user experience and woo more of them from Microsoft Corp.'s still-dominant Internet Explorer.True to its open-source heritage, Firefox Live Chat is a valiant, all-volunteer effort. But the service remains in beta, buggy, http://blog.mozilla.com/sumo/2008/02/11/minutes-of-weekly-meeting-211/ and only available to users several hours a day during U.S. working hours."The hours of operation are currently very conservative," acknowledged David Tenser, who runs Mozilla's support programs, in an e-mail.Rivaling Linux itself as most popular open-source project, Firefox has never had trouble attracting volunteers. More than 1,000 people freely contribute code, 20,000 test pre-beta versions of Firefox every night and another 500,000 test the actual betas.But for the unglamorous job of chat-based technical support, Tenser has only been able to recruit about 20 volunteers. And during the actual 3-4 hour sessions, only about 3-5 of them are actually available answering users' questions."What we really need is more exposure so people can both discover how powerful this service is to users, as well as how fun it is to participate," wrote Tenser.Officially introduced in late 2004, Firefox has been downloaded more than 400 million times. New Mozilla CEO John Lilly claims there are 150 million active users, including 50 million people that use Firefox every day.Firefox is used by almost a third of European Net surfers, though global surveys show Firefox used by about one-sixth of Internet users, with IE still holding three-fourths of the market.Still, Mozilla would like to improve its retention rate, which it estimated several months ago to be less than 30 percent.Mozilla already offers several other forms of user support. Those include forums and newsgroups where users can post questions, knowledge base (KB) articles they can read at their leisure, and even an Internet Relay Channel (IRC) channel aimed at developers and more advanced users needing live support.As of early February, Live Chat volunteers had answered more than 4,100 chat requests, or about 100 a day, Tenser said. Most questions have been from users who had been unable to connect to the Web, usually due to firewall issues, Tenser said, or users having problems related to Firefox extensions.This reporter tried out Live Chat. The first time, no volunteers were available during the scheduled time. The second time, a tech support volunteer offered a fairly general fix to one problem (remove extensions one at a time to see which one was causing AJAX-heavy sites to render improperly), while suggesting I wait for Firefox 3 to fix another (occasionally missing passwords).Mozilla released its third beta for Firefox 3 in early February. The Mountain View, Calif. group is expected to release a final version of Firefox 3 sometime in 2008.Testers say that beta versions of Firefox 3 are faster and use less memory, have user interface improvements, and better security.Microsoft offers similar free and paid support offerings for Internet Explorer users through its support.microsoft.com Web site.IE users who have a retail copy of Windows XP or Vista are eligible for either 2 phone calls or live chats (XP), or 90 days worth of unlimited phone and chat support (Vista), according to a spokesman. After that, tech support calls or chat sessions cost $59 per incident.Mozilla has no plans to charge for Live Chat. Nor does it plan to make it part of a formal support program, something that some large companies have said they would need before they could consider switching from IE to Firefox.Tenser said volunteers do get questions from IT pros."They tend to ask about how to make changes to more than one machine without having to go in and make the changes via the user interface, or about locking down the preferences so users can't make changes," he wrote.
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When you're having problems with your enterprise laptop or workstation, who do you call? Is your IT staff just down the hall, or are they on the other side of the globe?
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Help is on the way - from Microsoft. The software giant is readying a new help and support Web site -- scheduled for the fall -- that has promised benefits such as product-specific troubleshooting and assisted support, centralized options, personalized views, and improved search functions. Microsoft has also simplified its incident submission process, providing easier access to outstanding support requests.
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On the Dotvoid.com blog today, there's a new post that shares some handy code to parse out information from the incoming user agent string for the visitors for your site.   Recently I experimented a bit with an Apache log file analyzer written in PHP. It's not all that difficult were it not for trying to parse the browser, or user agent, string. [...] For my purposes I don't care much for the operating system details. This is the result so far. I'm still not very satisfied but I thought maybe other people might be interested and maybe help out.   He provides the code in the format of an encapsulated PHP function that returns the product they're using, the version number of the browser and other various comments.
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(Source: Inquira)  While many organizations have made huge investments in multi-channel customer service application suites, critical gaps still remain in such areas as search, knowledge management, and chat. A new report from Forrester lists the top solutions that help support organizations overcome these gaps and set the stage for significant improvements in service quality.
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A new standard aims to help users pass information between Web services without sharing full access to their identities.
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Users can now access Windows Live services through mobile accounts and a single sign-on.
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Publish and be damned So you are a small business and you buy your PCs from CDW? Need customer support? Why don't you get support from customers instead?â¦
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Based off of a previous article from Mike Willbanks, Stuart Herbert has posted some of his own thoughts on tuning and tweaking your applications for the best performance you can get out of them.   There's some good advice in there, and I thought it'd be a good idea to quickly add a bit more detail about the separate approaches that Mike raises.   He goes over the APC caching, memcache, the "gzip trick", the "Not Modified" header and optimized SQL statements.   He also mentions one thing that Mike didn't mention - a split between static files (no PHP needed) and their dynamic cousins. Having a more pure Apache (no PHP installed) can help give a minute jump in speed that, depending on the size of the site, could really add up from a user's perspective.
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Microsoft on Wednesday posted advice for enterprises relying on Software Update Services (SUS) to prevent network slowdowns and server bottlenecks as they update thousands of PCs to Windows XP Service Pack 2 ...
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0. Introduction 1. SysAdmin of the Year Contest 2. Statistics  This SF.net update brought to you by HP --------------------------------------------------------- Open source and Linux from HP From eight consecutive years of Linux market leadership to countless community outreach programs, HP has proven solutions you can value, on a next generation, highly-efficient BladeSystem platform ideal for Linux, with the approach, experience, and customer commitment you can trust. http://www.linux.com/sponsor_solutions/hpos ---------------------------------------------------------  Hello, and welcome to this month's edition.  Last month, we announced the winners of the 2007 Community Choice Awards during our party at OSCON.  There were some surprises, lots of great winners, and a good time was certainly had by all.  For information about the winning projects, visit our Community Hub at http://sourceforge.net/community and click on the CCA logo.  The beta of our Marketplace continues to go well.  Our beta participants have been creating quality listings to provide our users with access to the experts they need...and, in the process, our design decisions are being validated one-by-one.  Keep a close watch on this new tool, it promises to be a hotspot of engineering activity for us over the next few months.  We will need some help, though!  We're looking for engineering talent to make all the complex things simple around here.  If you're in the bay area and want to join us, email jobs@corp.sourceforge.com  Thanks for reading!  The SourceForge.net Crew    SysAdmin of the Year Contest ----------------------------  Do have know a SysAdmin who goes beyond the call of duty? If so, nominate them as SysAdmin of the Year 2007.  They can win great prizes (Macbook Pro, iPhone, Splunk License), including the knowledge that you care.   The first 2500 SysAdmins nominated get a free t-shirt.  http://www.sysadminoftheyear.com    Statistics and Top Projects ---------------------------  Number of Projects: 155,959 Number of Registered Users: 1,662,751   Daily Stats for 20 August, 2007:  SF.net: 4,026,722 pages served Open Source Files downloaded in 24 hour period: 2,014,157  ---------------------------------------------------------  Top 25 Projects:   1. Azureus https://sourceforge.net/projects/azureus Azureus is a powerful, full-featured, cross-platform bittorrent client.  2. phpMyAdmin https://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmyadmin phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web. Currently it can create and drop databases, create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add fields, execute any SQL statement, manage keys on fields.  3. Notepad++ https://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus Notepad++ is a generic source code editor (it tries to be anyway) and Notepad replacement written in C++ with the win32 API. The aim of Notepad++ is to offer a slim and efficient binary with a totally customizable GUI.  4. OpenProj - Project Management https://sourceforge.net/projects/openproj OpenProj by Projity is a desktop replacement of Microsoft Project. OpenProj has equivalent functionality, a familiar user interface and even opens existing MSProject files. OpenProj is interoperable with Project, with a Gantt Chart and PERT chart etc.  5. ZK - Simply Ajax and Mobile https://sourceforge.net/projects/zk1 ZK is Ajax framework enriching Web apps with little programming. With event-driven and markup languages, development is as simple as programming desktops and authoring HTML/XUL pages. ZK supports scripting lang including Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Groovy...  6. dimdim meeting server https://sourceforge.net/projects/dimdim Dimdim is an open source web meeting product with features like Application, Desktop and Presentation sharing with A/V streaming and chat. No attendee installation - all features are available through a web browser. Dimdim can be integrated with Moodle.  7. ADempiere Bazaar https://sourceforge.net/projects/adempiere Adempiere is an ERP Bazaar for Open Source Developers that contribute improvements of Compiere, CRM, Shopfloor, POS, Helpdesk, Financials Accounting, Supply Chain, Knowledge and Business apps in an open and unabated fashion. Focus is on the Community.  8. Zenoss Core - Enterprise IT Monitoring https://sourceforge.net/projects/zenoss Zenoss Core is an enterprise network and systems management application written in Python/Zope. Zenoss provides an integrated product for monitoring availability, performance, events and configuration across layers and across platforms.  9. Openbravo ERP https://sourceforge.net/projects/openbravo Web based ERP for SMEs, built on proven MVC & MDD framework that facilitate customization & maintenance of code. Already in production, it encompasses a broad range of functionalities such as finance, supply chain, project mgmt, manufacturing & much more  10. FreeCol https://sourceforge.net/projects/freecol FreeCol is an open version of Colonization. It is a Civilization-like game in which the player has to conquer the new world.  11. FileZilla https://sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla FileZilla is a fast FTP and SFTP client for Windows with a lot of features. FileZilla Server is a reliable FTP server.  12. WebCalendar https://sourceforge.net/projects/webcalendar WebCalendar is a PHP application used to maintain a calendar for a single user or an intranet group of users. It can also be configured as an event calendar.  13. PhpGedView https://sourceforge.net/projects/phpgedview PhpGedView parses GEDCOM 5.5 genealogy files and displays them on the internet in formats and charts that you are familiar with.It also allows relatives to edit their genealogy online and collaborate together on their research.  14. MediaInfo https://sourceforge.net/projects/mediainfo Get technical information and tags of a lot of multimedia files. Supported formats : - Video : AVI/OGM/MKV/MPG/VOB/MP4/3GP/... - Audio : MP3/OGG/MKA/MP4/AAC/...  15. 7-Zip https://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip 7-Zip is a file archiver with the high compression ratio. The program supports 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, LZH, CHM, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB formats. Compression ratio in the new 7z format is 30-50% better than ratio in ZIP format.  16. KeePass Password Safe https://sourceforge.net/projects/keepass KeePass Password Safe is a free, open source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager for Windows. You can store your passwords in a highly-encrypted database, which is locked with one master password or key file.  17. MinGW - Minimalist GNU for Windows https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw MinGW: A native Win32 port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), with freely distributable import libraries and header files for building native Windows applications; includes extensions to the MSVC runtime to support C99 functionality.  18. XOOPS Dynamic Web CMS https://sourceforge.net/projects/xoops XOOPS is a dynamic web content management system written in PHP for the MySQL database. Its object orientation makes it an ideal tool for developing small or large community websites, intra company and corporate portals, weblogs and much more.  19. FreeMind https://sourceforge.net/projects/freemind A mind mapper, and at the same time an easy-to-operate hierarchical editor with strong emphasis on folding. These two are not really two different things, just two different descriptions of a single application. Often used for knowledge and content mgmt.  20. Arianne RPG https://sourceforge.net/projects/arianne Arianne is a multiplayer online engine to develop turn based and real time games providing a simple way of creating the game server rules and clients like Stendhal. Marauroa, our server, uses Java and MySQL for hosting hundreds of players on a solo host.  21. OrangeHRM - Human Resource Management https://sourceforge.net/projects/orangehrm OrangeHRM developed by OrangeHRM Inc is an Open Source HR Information Systems(HRIS) that assists you in managing company's human resources. Through scalable modular architecture it covers main areas of Personnel Management/HRM such as PIM, ESS & Leave.  22. Gallery https://sourceforge.net/projects/gallery A slick, intuitive web based photo gallery. Gallery is easy to install, configure and use. Gallery photo management includes automatic thumbnails, resizing, rotation, and more. Authenticated users and privileged albums make this great for communities.  23. Pidgin https://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin Pidgin is a GTK+ instant messaging application for Windows and Unix. It supports AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE and more. See http://pidgin.im/about.php for more information.  24. XBMC (Xbox Media Center) https://sourceforge.net/projects/xbmc XBMC (Xbox Media Center) is a free multimedia player jukebox for Microsoft Xbox game console, it is capable of playing back almost all known video, audio and picture formats from the Xbox harddrive, DVD-ROM drive, a local-network, and even the internet.  25. JasperReports - Java Reporting https://sourceforge.net/projects/jasperreports JasperReports, the market leading open source business intelligence and reporting engine. This project is being moved to http://www.jasperforge.org/. This project is the home for all things Jasper, Reports, Analysis, Server, and Intelligence.
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This paper introduces some techniques for making backups without needing to stop the business applications. It also describes ways to simplify and reduce the cost of system operations.
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Get more efficient with free mail, Internet, file management and system utilitiy tools -- plus much more.
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TechWeb - Now with easy customization and process integration, will utility apps dominate?