Proper Support Tips

Customer Service Throughout my years of doing tech support, I learned a few things about doing the job, without driving myself (or the customer) crazy. Here are a few action plans:

Always stay calm.
Be helpful to customers. Ninety-nine percent of the time, customers are nicer when they are given options to solve their problems.
Document the issues in an electronic log (such as customer service knowledge base) that are search-able, for future reference.
Stay up-to-date with the company’s products.
Stay current with technology advances and industry standards.
Get along with the other tech support peers. Hang out with them, share your stories, and vent some frustration with each other. Group therapy is good therapy. Most importantly, laugh it up together.
Don’t stay at Level 1 tech support too long. Make it a goal to move up, and handle more challenging questions to keep the job more interesting.

Finally, keep a sense of humor. At the end of the day, it’s only a job, and life goes on.

Green IT

computer_green-s2 There is a big push by every company to go “green”. The initiative started with the rising energy prices. Another reason for the effort is to reduce pollution and waste. Nowadays, it looks like the overall purpose for this push is to improve public relation and corporate image.

IT is certainly the first (and best) place to start for going green. The savings are easily measurable and the latest technology allows the reduction in expense.

Shared Services

This model works best when a company has divisions around the globe. A centralized data center, with excellent resources, needs to be chosen to handle the IT needs of the regional offices. The consolidation includes servers and experienced IT teams. With one data center, IT will save money by cutting the expenses of maintaining multiple sites.

Professional Open Source

Much of the open source products out there are excellent. The support of the community made them a valuable source of technology. The cost of open source software is free to begin with, so comparatively, building a professional version of it will be much less than a proprietary one. The value in professional open source is in the tech support, which is the main reason a company purchases an Enterprise product.

Virtualization

With increasing CPU power, and decreasing prices for memory and hard drives, building a powerful server is easy and affordable. Hardware capabilities have now outpaced the software requirements. Modern operating systems are now able to “virtualize“, or carve out sub-sections, within the same hardware, to multiple software applications. In a data center environment, the reduction in server hardware will be apparent by cutting power, rack space, and licensing requirements.

SaaS

Software as a Service (SaaS) is valuable when IT resource is severely limited. One example is outsourcing a company that does e-mail newsletters. For a company to run an in-house mail server, it will require a lot of resources. Running bulk mailing lists through it will burden the infrastructure even more, possibly running the risk of an outage. Outsourcing the software will also off-load the hardware, as well as the man power to maintain it.

The real benefits are to cut costs, reduce duplications, and streamline processes. These should be standard operating procedure for every company. Whether or not these steps are considered “green” is a matter of opinion, but everyone needs a renewed purpose to refocus on saving money. It’s especially relevant in this slumping economy. Going green is a great idea – only if it’s implemented efficiently, without much bureaucracy, paperwork, and politics.

SSL From Java Client

java_ssl I’ve described a way to install a self-signing SSL certificate using OpenSSL for testing purposes. When connecting to a web server using a web browser client, it is straight forward to add the “fake” certificate (just follow the instructions on the browser screen). However, in a Java application, it’s a little bit more work.

The procedure is the following:

Obtain the SSL certificate from the website administrator. Alternatively, use the browser:

Browse the URL, for example: https://www.testmachine.com
When the security window popup appears, just click ‘continue’.
The browser has an option to view the certificate. With Internet Explorer 7, next to the Address Bar there’s a “Certificate Error” button. Press that and view certificate. With Firefox, click on the yellow lock at the bottom of the screen.
Go to the Details tab.
Click on “Copy to File”. In Firefox, click on the “Export” button.
Save the file as “website.cert”

Copy the Cert file to where the Java client is going to be executed.
Go to the JRE (Java Run Time) library under lib/security, for example: /usr/local/jdk_1.4.3/jre/lib/security/
The certs are stored in a file called “cacerts”.
Run the keytool app to import the “website.cert” file that was exported earlier from a web browser:

keytool -import -alias websiteAlias -keystore cacerts -file website.cert

Enter the default password: changeit
Check the content of the new “cacerts” file using:

keytool -list -keystore cacerts

Test it. If it’s a web container (i.e. Tomcat), restart the JVM.

Webapper site has a short Java client test code, and a quick procedure to compile/run a client to test it.