Reliable Systems

It’s very popular to consider the internal users of IT services as customers, acting like IT is an in-house service provider that the rest of the company purchases services from. The goal behind this is usually a reaction to a real or imagined belief that IT isn’t being responsive to the needs and budget of the rest of the company. The thinking goes that by having IT think of the rest of the company like an outside organization would of its customers, you can ensure better accountability and buy-in. Typically, organizations that go down this road also adopt a charge-back model where the IT organization charges back all or nearly all of its costs directly to the other divisions within the company that are consuming those services.

While there are several positive aspects that can come from this approach, there are several problems that can easily be created that stem from the problem that in most cases the rest of the company really isn’t a customer in the classical sense. Why? Because they lack a true buying choice. Furthermore, it generally isn’t in a company’s overall best interest for their divisions to really be customers of their own organization.

The original motivation for taking these approach is usually to address several issues:

• Division buy-in on costs and priorities: If they are directly paying the bill, they are going to pay for what they want and not ask you for things they aren’t willing to pay for.
• Clear status and communication: The project reporting and communication model is simpler for everyone to get their head around if it’s based on something we’ve very familiar with. Each player can figure out their part.

If you model the relationship between the IT organization and the rest of the company as a service provider – customer relationship, it’s easy to miss the transitive qualities of this: if they are your customer, you are their vendor. The word Vendor casts things in a different light: If you’re a sufficiently large organization you probably have a vendor management office whose sole job is to ensure you pay the least you can for things and fosters competition between vendors. Their job is largely to keep the company from getting too cozy with any one vendor. Are you ready to be just another vendor, like the one that bids annually to supply fresh coffee or office supplies?

Benefits

There are several good things that this model will tend to create.

• Defensible functional requirements: Unreasonable requirements tend to be expensive relative to their value, and the division is more ready to discard them.
• Role Clarity: The Vendor/Customer relationship is relatively easy to understand, and each party can generally determine their role quickly. When there are disputes, there’s a natural framework for resolution.

Challenge One: Buying Choice

It isn’t a long road from treating your internal divisions as customers until they look at you as a vendor. Once they consider you just another vendor (like the one they selected to provide fresh coffee to the office, or office supplies) they’ll want the advantages that come along with being a customer. For example, it’ll seem clear to them that it should be optional to use your services. This will feel very reasonable to upper management – it’s all part of the transitive nature of IT being accountable.  If IT can’t deliver a service at the best price, why not go to another provider?

This will likely start with something that will be difficult to argue against – such as a large software development project, perhaps in a language that your in-house talent isn’t familiar with.  Now, what about hosting for that product?  If you are charging back true costs for your data center to each division, you are unlikely competitively priced with what a division could get from Rackspace or Peer1.  It isn’t necessarily that those companies are more efficient than you are at doing the same thing (indeed, if they are then you should broker your own contract with them) but instead that it isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison.

Challenge Two: Implied Requirements

Whenever an internal IT organization takes on a project, there are a number of implied requirements that affect cost and schedule. Some of these requirements are from the IT organization itself (like technology choices) and others are from the corporation (role of internal staff and contractors, project management and reporting standards, etc.). When a division looks to bid out work to an external source, these requirements are usually unstated because in many cases they aren’t requirements the division has on the solution.

Another way to look at it is that any constraint on the solution that the customer (the division in this case) doesn’t have or care about is an implied requirement and likely a competitive disadvantage when comparing internal IT costs with external costs. In broad strokes, the difference in requirements is that a division’s requirements are almost entirely about outcomes, not methods: They care about the results their users get, not how they are achieved. IT organizations often focus their requirements on how results are achieved (using this technology, in that enterprise architecture, developed with our RUP-based approved process, tracked by our PMO) and they defer to the division the functional requirements.

Local Maxima and Minima

When each division or cost center is free to chose what services they are willing to pay for, they will converge over time on only those services that are good for them. Establishing shared services is generally challenging because each party will want to ensure that everyone is paying their fair share. This is often tricky to define – should it be proportioned by feature usage? Capacity?  This often creates a “first mover disadvantage” scenario where no part of the company wants to be the first to get a new service such as a database server or SharePoint Portal because they’ll be hit with the entire cost of it unless someone else comes along.

Secondarily, upgrading services gets challenging because no drop of rain believes it is responsible for the flood: If you want to upgrade to Exchange 2007 from Exchange 2003, one division can easily say that they don’t believe it’s necessary and thus decline the costs. If you need a larger server to house SharePoint, who is going to get the bill? A game of chicken often gets created where multiple parties all want a service, but no one wants to be the first to ask and risk subsidizing everyone else.

With each cost center pushing to only pay for those things it perceives sufficient direct value to take on, they are making decisions only based on what gives them the best cost or maximum value. This isn’t likely to align with providing the overall lowest costs for the company. For example, three separate departments could easily decide to implement their own direct attach storage for disk because none of them feels they can justify the cost of a SAN, however together it would be less expensive to construct and maintain a central SAN environment with SAN backup.

There are some straightforward exceptions to this problem where shared services are generally easy to get consensus on and cost out. Typically these are raw infrastructure services such as email or file storage where there are clear units of measure that allow for proportional billing (mailboxes and gigabytes used, for example).

An Alternative: Clients, not Customers

If the Customer/Vendor model isn’t the overall best approach for a company, what alternative model can provide the benefits without the unintended consequences? How about a term that’s between User (which has accumulated a substantially negative connotation) and Customer – Client. A quick trip to the dictionary shows that a client is any person or group that is the party for which professional services are rendered, which fits reasonably enough.

As your clients, they still are entitled to a great deal, just like customers would be. As the client of the project, they:

• Determine success & failure: Your project isn’t successful just because it follows the corporate processes or works on the corporate approved IT infrastructure; those are the constraints on how you solve problems that are immaterial to your client. Success is determined by whether you achieved the goals the client created. That may mean you need to do some extra communication to make sure your client knows that their goals were met, even if that’s not in the standard process.
• Decide if it’s worth the price: In the end, the problem may just not be worth solving.  Many things can be done but the cost in time and distraction exceeds the value.

Unlike a customer, since you’re part of the same organization you can share with the client your insight into the costs and risks of the project in a way that no vendor ever could.  In the end this creates the best partnership that delivers long lasting results.

A final note

If you don’t treat your users as clients, odds are very good they will eventually get themselves a buying choice. When they do, they won’t chose you. Don’t let it come to that, it isn’t ultimately in their interest, your interest, or your company’s interest.

If you’ve read more than one or two articles from Reliable Systems you probably have gotten the sense that we worry a lot about how to make things just work.   It’s that quality of anything where you get what you expect and what you need every time.  It can be in an experience (like a fun drive down a country road) or a product.  As a company if you can do this over and over you create a brand people develop a strong emotional connection to:  Apple, John Deere, Starbucks…

When you want to create a product that just works, you need to get all of the details right – from packaging through to maintenance and upkeep.  It’s not one thing that’s important, it’s all the things.  We are often engaged by senior management within a client when things aren’t working, and there’s conflicting opinions on why.  Usually along the path technology is being blamed: Not enough, not the latest thing, not someone’s favorite thing, not working.  As we dig into the situation, rarely is the technology the dominant factor:  More often, it’s how the technology is being integrated with the people and processes that all have to work together.

One of the first things we have to do in these engagements is to establish the real facts on the ground:  What exactly are the problems in the system, who’s doing what with it, how many times.  It comes down to establishing metrics to make sure time and attention are paid to the parts that make the biggest difference in the outcome.  Armed with these facts in a form the business can consume it’s possible to create plans of action that deliver virtually regardless of budget.

So let’s make this easier

The biggest trick is then getting the facts you need on an ongoing basis, easily, and in a form that the business can consume.  For over a decade we’ve been building instrumentation right into the systems we’ve worked on.  We’ve created a variety of toolkits to make this easier over the years, refining them as technology and our experience has changed.

About 18 months ago we decided it was time to really invest down this path.  We believe in routinely capturing key computer metrics along with whatever logging the application can do on its own.  We won’t do a project without using a great logging system that includes a strategy for managing runtime exceptions.   Now that we’re collecting all this data, we need to have a way of managing the raw data and turning it into valuable business data.

The challenge is that businesses don’t get up in the morning and say “what our customers want us to do is have great internal tools”, so you’re nearly always doing this on the cheap:  Borrowing time from development projects internally to cobble together various free or cheap solutions.  Frankly, we got tired of having to create new solutions with each client out of the margins of each project.  So, we pooled our best thinking from all of the work we’ve done (including a previous product that we did license to our clients over the past decade called CLAS) and started creating Gibraltar.

Rock Solid from Initial Release

With Gibraltar we wanted much more than a log system.  Of course, it had to be a log system too – and a really easy to use one that could work with each of our client applications.  More than that, it had to:

• Automatically capture all of the performance metrics we wanted.
• Integrate with existing logging available on the platform, including whatever a client might already be doing (like custom in-house options)
• Be absolutely, positively, for sure safe to run in production no matter what.   That means it can’t ever use too much disk space or disk throughput or block the application.
• Not use more than 5% of the performance of the app
• Include all of the tools necessary to get data from where it was collected to the people that could get value out of it
• Include the ability to look at the detailed session data up to high level analysis:  What’s the error rate?  What’s it correlate to?  Are we doing better or worse in this version?

From this initial sketch into everything we wanted, we’ve spent 18 months including four beta periods (from 2-4 months each) to refine the vision with real customers and real scenarios.  It was essential to us that this not be just a tool for techies but be ready for use by people with a wide range of skills.  It had to be pretty and just do what you wanted, when you wanted it to.

We’ve added a lot of capabilities along the way:  It can generate print-ready reports about application reliability that can communicate with senior management, you can define all kinds of custom metrics to easily track how your application is used and by whom.  We ran a number of betas to be sure that we had hit every goal we have above.  We’re happy to report that Gibraltar is in use within large deployments of custom applications, commercial applications, and small deployments right down to our corporate web site.

This tool isn’t for everyone – Our clients are nearly all Windows shops, and if they do any custom development it’s almost invariably in .NET, so that’s what we’ve targeted.   But, if you’re interested in easily getting real data on not just infrastructure (how well the application is running) but whether or not it just works, have we got an easy path for you.  You can see a quick demo video of how it works technically at Gibraltar Software.

You also don’t have to take my word for it at all, you can hear what one of our beta users did with it, which is really a more compelling story than what we might say.

I think you’ll find that our work sweating a lot of little details, from the exact design of the API and making sure the documentation was complete to rewriting our own licensing system to be very IT Admin friendly.  If we didn’t get a detail right, we want to know.  And the great news is that we’ve just begun:  We’re obsessed with the little things, and you can bet we’ll keep listening and watching to make it better.  Of course, this is made a lot easier because we’re using Gibraltar to monitor itself, and a select group of our users is sending that information back to us so we can make sure it just works in the field for real people.

It’s easy to start your journey

If you do development for Microsoft .NET, I’d encourage you to go over and download our commercial release of Gibraltar.  You’ll get great documentation, a free agent you can use like a flight recorder “black box” in every application you create, and a trial for a tool that will make you seem wise beyond your years.  And if you pay us the ultimate honor and purchase a permanent license, I can assure you that you won’t find anyone more committed to your satisfaction than we are.

It is very tempting to be one of the herd of gazelles in technology.  Every time there’s  a sense of a shift in the wind, everyone starts to run in a new direction.  For the past year I’ve been reading about how it’s all going to be laptop computers from here on out.  In fact, not even full fledged laptops, but netbooks – computers with small screens and small keyboard who’s main distinguishing characteristic is that they’re less of a computer than anything else around.

If all this sounds a little off kilter from reality, perhaps a few hard numbers would help:

Quoting Computer World, who asked “Do Business Desktop PCs have a future?”:

While desktop PCs account for the bulk of personal computers sold to enterprises, the gap in laptop sales to enterprises is closing. Of 168 million PCs sold worldwide to professional organizations in 2008, about 95 million were desktops and 73 million were laptops. That’s compared to 94.6 million desktops and 47.3 million laptops that shipped in 2006.

Now, as with any statistics there’s two ways to look at these numbers:

1. Laptops have grown tremendously in their total percentage of the market, and that growth rate has them on track to take over the world.
2. The majority of the growth in computer sales is coming in the form of laptops.

The gazelles are taking the first road.  And why not?  People love to assume the disruptive is true, it’s a lot more interesting.  Before you charge down that road, consider what seems likely.  There are a few problems with the first conclusion:

• Two data points don’t make a pattern: If you follow the trend back farther, the sales of PC desktops has held up consistently, but laptop sales go up and down.  This would seem to indicate that the most likely interpretations of the data are that either the overall market is expanding (for example by people having two systems) or that this is a momentary, periodic surge in laptop purchases.
• Past large growth rarely projects forward: Just because there was a large growth in one year (either in absolute or percentage turns) doesn’t mean it will repeat at all.  It’s just as likely that the next year pattern will be flat or even retreat.

So before you see the first twitch and assume it signals a migration of the whole herd, step back and think through the underlying facts.  Is this really the first sign of a monumental shift?  Or just another twitch of the needle?  Then look at your own situation.

Now, we have a few laptops, but we have more hard core desktops – the laptops are used for on the road presentations or working at Starbucks for fun.  Of course, we’re developers so we’re in the category of users that are always excluded from the norm.  But what’s not to love about a desktop?  For the same money they will always be faster and more capable than a laptop because they don’t have the burden of being small or extra power efficient.  Even if you buy into the idea that everything will be run through the web so computers are just glorified terminals…  Something still has to compose all of those web pages and make it all come together, and web apps can burn a surprising amount of processor and RAM locally.

In the end, I think we’re seeing a lot of folks buying second computers or getting additional laptops for other uses that complement their primary work computer experience.  Additionally, there are folks in emerging markets that need what laptops offer (self-contained, reliable power) more than performance but this reflects an increase in the overall market, not a shift in the existing market.

Hi. My name is Kendall Miller, and I’ve been an Internet Explorer user for 12 years.

I know it’s very uncool to admit – IE is only available on Windows, isn’t the most standards compliant, it has a bad reputation for security and there aren’t 1000 cool addins for it. And oh yeah, it’s from Microsoft – aren’t they evil?

But here’s the thing: From day one, it was the practical choice. Not because it was distributed with Windows, but because it worked. Worked as in it was easy to keep upgraded (thank Windows Update for that) it could do anything we needed it to (and yes, that used ActiveX) and it supported integrated authentication – so users could just point their web browser at our company sites and not get any login prompts, just get access to all the resources they needed.

Not only that, but IE was really forgiving. The thing that many people miss is that at the end of the day it isn’t about being standards compliant per se, it’s about the web browser just working. Put another way, while you want to develop using something really strict, when it comes time to hand it over to your users do what I meant, not what I said is best. Frankly, I was amazed at how tolerant IE was of HTML errors. In the end, do you think that users would say Thank you for not doing what I meant because it would have meant breaking the rule that you can’t wrap a div with an href? Most users I know would just rather it displayed the page.

Is the pace of IE development slower than Firefox or other browsers? Well, yes – but again, so what: businesses really don’t like change, change costs money. Change means retesting applications, and for what? It has to give them something to justify that cost. It isn’t like IE won’t remain a viable tool for browsing the Internet for some time. Remember, these are the same companies that are still (justifiably) writing applications in VB6, an environment that its creator has been trying hard to kill for 8 years.

So it makes a lot of sense that when it came to IE 8, Microsoft focused on what IE users really wanted. It isn’t standards compliance for its own sake, it was:

1. Make it as fast as possible for how people browse the web today.
2. Fix as many of the quirks in standards interpretation as feasible that make it easy to develop good sites for IE.
3. Do what you can to make it hard to have a rash of new security problems.
4. Don’t break any site that works today.

If you want a good feel for just how hard this problem is, Joel Spolsky did a great (but long) writeup.

So I’m writing this in IE 8 – and it is just what Microsoft promised, it hits all of the points above and is certainly a solid improvement over IE 7. Microsoft made a great call in focusing not on Javascript performance but looking at the totality of what affects the apparent browsing performance for users and addressing that. It feels nice and fast, and I haven’t encountered anything that’s broken.

But it’s no longer my default browser. While I’ve been trying to love it, I just can’t get there. I switched over to Chrome when it went into release and haven’t looked back. On the surface of it, this is a bit crazy:

• Many sites don’t work quite right with Chrome. I’ve gotten halfway through a shopping cart with Chrome and had the buttons not work to go next. Things don’t align right… Virtually every web app we use at eSymmetrix had to be patched to work with Chrome. Even WordPress seems to work better with IE than Chrome in some ways.
• Google is getting evil. They’re doing things Microsoft never could get away with. For example, every Google thing installs its own Google Updater service. It doesn’t ask if it can, I can’t find any way to get rid of them through uninstall.. they’re just there. I have no idea if they’ve ever updated Chrome because they’ve never asked. You can be sure that if Microsoft this they’d be in court faster than you can say Slashdot.
• It’s not really stable. About every other day I get the admittedly cute Aw Snap! page where Chrome just isn’t quite happy.

But it doesn’t matter, I still dramatically prefer it to the other three browsers on my computer. Why?

• It’s fast.
• I love the automatic 9 recent site dashboard with preview. I love how it handles browsing history.
• The document inspector is great for web development, so I use it all the time when developing web pages and style sheets.
• It’s the future.

It’s the last point that’s really got my interest. It’s the future. Why? Because while it really doesn’t matter right now, the approach Chrome uses for Javascript is going to rewrite the face of the web.

That’s just Crazy Talk

Right now Chrome has around 1.5% of the total browser market share. That’s nothing – about what Opera and Netscape have put together, much less than Safari at 8%. On the other hand, IE 6 and IE 7 each have the market share of all the rest put together (more or less). So statistically, Chrome is completely irrelevant – and it’s had a lot of time to get to that point in market share. IE 8 cot to that point of market share pretty much as soon as it was released.

So what justifies it being the future? Because the V8 Javascript compiler is a game changer. Not on its own, it’s a piece of the puzzle. Four things have to come together:

1. Universal high bandwidth: Enough to move say 3mb in 5 seconds reliably.
2. A compiler that converts Javascript into machine code within 50% of the performance of compiled Java or .NET.
3. A standard Javascript library that can function as a GUI Toolkit on par with .NET WinForms or Cocoa.
4. A visual Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that can bring it all together with a good debugger for browser and server.

We already have the first one. It takes about 6 mbps throughput – cable modem speed – to move 3MB of data in 5 seconds. Chrome brings in the second one (and actually bests that by some margin). Now we need the third and fourth.

Up until now the third item has been held back by the general problem that Javascript was slow enough that the overhead of having a common API (full of things you didn’t need for any single situation) was infeasible. Writing something broadly reusable is about an order of magnitude harder than writing it to handle a specific scenario, and ends up doing a number of things you don’t need to do because someone might need it. That overhead isn’t acceptable with the historical performance of Javascript, but if it’s compiled down to native code then it becomes a small, inconsequential optimization.

So now that there’s an environment that can run it, we need a general UI toolkit and the IDE to develop with so we’re putting our time and attention into creating features for our users, not how to make a menu that dynamically expands and highlights. The IDE needs to provide an end user experience like developing for WinForms or WPF in Visual Studio – clean, easy, visual, without surprises.

Microsoft was right – today it isn’t about Javascript performance. But if we’re lucky, tomorrow will be – and we’ll be able to develop much better, stronger applications for the web without resorting to Flash, Silverlight, or very expensive development and testing cycles.

When a new hire starts with your company, what are you doing to set them up with technology to work with your organization?  You probably focus on making sure you set up their account, clean up a computer for them, and possibly set up a corporate cell phone or Blackberry.  You might also do some quick training with them so they can log in to their computer, get email, and access the Internet.  This is all pretty obvious and fits within normal tickets your IT organization handles every day.

Now step back for a minute and look at it from the employee’s perspective.  When someone needs access to IT resources within your company, there are really three interests you have:

1. Access: People need equipment, software, accounts, and access to IT support.  This is the basic block & tackling that you are handling now.
2. Effective: The tools you provide need to deliver on the business needs the user has.  Whatever’s in the way of that – defective equipment, user training, or suitability to task needs to be addressed.  The best computer with the right software in the hands of a user that doesn’t know how to use them is worthless.
3. Security: Access to your network means access to all of the data and work products within it.  You need people to understand how you approach security, what they are and aren’t allowed to do, and how you’re going to work with them to maintain security.

Setting the Stage

Employees often develop a personal and possessive feeling about the equipment provided to them by a company.  They think of it has their computer, just like they have a computer at home.  This creates a range of problems for your organization by extension:  If it’s their computer then when there’s a problem they’ll want their computer fixed, not a different computer that’s suitable.   They’ll come to regard problems personally, not objectively.

Instead, you want users to look at the equipment they’re provided to do their jobs as just that – tools that enable them to be more effective.  Stepping back into the big picture, a computer isn’t any different than a wrench or a filing cabinet.  It isn’t their computer or phone, it’s the company’s – designed to make them effective at producing whatever the company needs.   When your user community gets this, they’ll self censor their support requirements:  Watching a DVD movie on the company laptop won’t feel support-worthy.

The best time to establish this is to set the right expectations up front:  Have this conversation before the user gets their network account.  The goal is to make sure they understand that:

• You’re committed to their success.  You’re passionate about making sure they’re effective.  You have a support system designed to make sure that their issues get resolved quickly, and you have provisions for support off hours and when they’re on the road.  If they aren’t sure if you can or should help with an item, you want them to engage you anyway – You’ll let them know.
• The technology is there to make them effective at their job. Your job (IT) is to make sure that they are as effective as possible at that.
• They are responsible for their effectiveness. If they need something – training, repair, whatever – it’s their responsibility to get it, and they can get it.
• They are responsible for their user account. Anything anyone does with that account is their responsibility.   That means if someone figures out their password, or they leave their computer unlocked, or otherwise treat their user account with less than the respect it deserves then they are going to be held responsible by the company for that.

Support Your Local Sheriff!

It’s painful to hear on Monday that a user was trying to get something important done and couldn’t due to a simple issue you could have resolved.  Perhaps they knew they could have contacted you for support – but didn’t for whatever reason.  What users will remember is that they had a problem, and it kept them from getting things done.  All of the work you do to support users – special on call staff, phone numbers, email contact, whatever – didn’t work because they never got called upon.

To address this, you want to address as many of the human factors that keep people from calling on support as you can.

1. Make sure you’re always available: The cost of setting up a toll-free number for users to contact support is trivial.  If you don’t already have an on-call rotation, set one up and make sure there’s someone to answer that toll-free number at all times.  The same person can answer an email address designed for support.
2. Make sure they know all the ways: In the past, we’ve published business cards with the 800# for support and email address, and we put these cards everywhere:  In laptop bags, in a card holder at the front desk, anywhere that we could think of so that there’d be one around when a user needed to know how to contact support.
3. Talk to users about it: Be cheery.  Make sure they know that you personally are driven to make sure they’re successful, and you look at it as an honor to help them out after hours.  They need to really get that you want that phone call, because you need to conquer the very human desire not to bother or inconvenience other people.

We really recommend making up a business card that has all of the key information a user needs – the contact information for support, company fax number and main phone number, remote dial in for voice mail, common URLs for external access to email and other services, pretty much anything they need to know on the road.  I’m sure you have it all committed to memory, but if you’re an employee that doesn’t travel every day you probably don’t.  Little steps like this can dramatically affect the general user population’s opinion about IT.

Security Begins at Home

You want to make sure that each user gets how seriously your organization takes security.   People often don’t treat their user account with the same respect they’d treat a physical key or card.  Most users wouldn’t give a stranger the keys to their office or building but would give their password out over the phone to someone who claimed they need it.

People worry a lot about security threats from the Internet, but most break-ins – overwhelmingly – happen from inside.  Most of these are done either through social engineering (where the intruder convinces someone to give them access) or by a disgruntled employee.

To address these common threats, you need to address the key social aspects of security.  In addition to normal sensible security practices,  we recommend establishing a few policies:

1. IT Personnel NEVER ask for passwords: Make it clear to your IT Support organization and every user that no one in IT will ever ask them for their user ID or password.  Therefore, if anyone calls you asking for that information you know one thing – they aren’t authorized to it.  If they give their password to IT, or IT hears that they gave it to someone else, their password will be reset.
2. No one will use their account but them: If IT needs to do something logged in as you, they’ll do it in your presence – after all, you are still accountable for what happens with your account.

The second one may cause some heartburn with your desktop support staff- they’re probably used to solving a range of user problems by accessing the computer as the user, and anything that’ll get in the way of that is a problem.  While it may cause some inconvenience – you aren’t going to be able to do work that requires logging in as the user if they aren’t around – the message this sends to your users about how serious you are about security is essential.  You need to be cleaner about the rules than they are.

What about Non-Employees?

What should you do with contractors or others that need access to your network, even temporarily?  If they are getting a user account, they should go through the same procedure.  You have the same goals:  You want them to be effective and not compromise your environment.

Finally, Ditch the Input Devices

Most computers come with mice and keyboards that are dirt cheap.  If this is what you’re using and you’re recycling a computer, please – get a new mouse and keyboard.  Most computer companies do the same thing when they process returns.  The fact is that keyboards get filthy quickly, and while I may not mind the crumbs from my pop tarts, it certainly isn’t going to create the right impression if I get one that’s full of someone else’s.  You should be able to score new ones for your HP, Dell, or whatever for not more than $40 and really – with what employees cost in salary and other expenses, don’t you want them to know you care?

Have a story about how you support your new users?  Share it in the comments below or drop us a line to tell us about it.