Software Shmoftware

[rabiakhatun785]

I often receive calls from clients needing software support or desktop support. As a web developer/designer I am very familiar with making software work and getting pcs and Macs configured, that is; my pc or my Mac. I have an intuition of what settings I need to change and where they might be so I can run through a lot of settings very quickly.

As part of our services here at Web Design Experts we set up email services. My customers; it should be noted, are intelligent and adaptive people who just happen to use computers in various ways to conduct their business. When I set up an email service, whether it is via Google Apps or a cPanel driven email system, there is usually 2 components; the mail server (our area of expertise) and the client (not really an area of expertise - just competence).

The thing about client software is that it could be anything, Outlook

So the difficulty lies in where do we draw the line?
We can configure most software packages because we are programmers at heart and know all of the standards that software writers use (as long as we are sitting in front of the machine with raster to vector conversion service access to the documentation or the internet). As far as providing a high quality service it is not the best option. A desktop support expert would complete the task in minutes where we might fudge through for 1/2 hr or so and then miss some basic requirement and have to re-visit it.

It's not exactly an uplifting experience and it makes writing an invoice equally unpleasant because one of our business missions is to be the "Expert" for our customer so they can get on with what they are "Expert" at. In feeling as though we have not provided the best possible service ends up with the whole excercise being more expensive for both our client and us.

Depressed yet?

Well there is hope.
I am a staunch advocate of Google Apps, in particular the email system. It is just like Gmail but it can be customised somewhat to provide a bit of corporate branding and a nice login address of mail.yourdomain.com.au where yourdomain is your actual domain name (ours is webdesignexperts).

The web based client is very functional, you get calendar, addressbook, word-processing, presentations, spreadsheets as well as a few other services without loading or configuring anything on your computer. This also means that you can access all of these functions anywhere you have an internet connection and a web browser.