Managed Services customers: Submitting a help desk ticket from the desktop

If you’re one of our Managed Services customers, there’s an easy way to submit a help desk ticket to us by using our management agent’s system tray menu. In your system tray (the lower right corner of the Windows task bar), there is an icon for our agent which looks like a little blue ball with white stripes.

If you click on this icon, a menu will pop up and one of the options will be Create Service Ticket.

Clicking on this option will open up your email client with our helpdesk email filled in. Just tell us what the issue is and hit send. We’ll take it from there.

Managed Services Customers: Capturing error messages for submitting tickets to the help desk

If you’re one of our Managed Services customers and you submit a helpdesk ticket because an error message popped up on your screen, it is generally very helpful for us to be able to see the full text of that error message. Rather than writing down the entire message which can sometimes be very lengthy, you can capture the information and send it to us using our management agent.

In your system tray (the lower right corner of the Windows task bar), there is an icon for our agent which looks like a little blue ball with white stripes.

If you click on this icon, a menu will pop up and one of the options will be Screen Capture.

Clicking on this option will send us a current capture of your screen, complete with whatever error message is on screen at the time.

Then when you submit the helpdesk ticket by calling us or emailing support@lewan.com, just mention that you sent us a screenshot. We’ll be able to find it in our management interface.

LabTech Reboot Messages

If you are one of our Managed Services customers, one of the services provided to you is scheduled patching of your computers . Microsoft releases patches on a regular basis as do some other application vendors and our remote management software (LabTech) will apply these patches to your machines as needed and as approved by our staff.

Once patches are applied to your machine, if those patches require a restart of the computer you will be prompted by LabTech to reboot your computer with the dialog box below.

If it is inconvenient for you to restart your computer at the time the reboot is requested, you can simply dismiss the dialog  by clicking the No button. The dialog box will count down from 90 seconds and if no response is given during that time the dialog box will dismiss itself and not restart the computer. This is to prevent loss of unsaved data should you be away from your computer and not able to answer the question in a timely fashion.

If the dialog box is dismissed it will pop back up hourly to remind you that a reboot is needed. Since the patches will not be effective until after the restart, it is a good idea to save any unsaved work and allow the reboot as soon as possible.

Gaining user acceptance for your desktop virtualization project

So proud of Lewan’s own Kenneth Fingerlos who will be speaking next week at Citrix Synergy. A link to his session overview is available on the Citrix Blog: Gaining user acceptance for your desktop virtualization project | Citrix Blogs. Well done, Kenneth! Read his post to the Citrix Blog below:

Gaining user acceptance for your desktop virtualization project
By Kenneth Fingerlos

With the IT press being dominated with articles on the pitfalls of BYO, MDM, MAM, mobile data and cloud-based services it’s clear that enterprise IT and end-users are thinking about different things. When we look at the OS on our compute devices it’s clear that more and more end-user concerns are driving the decisions which go into the design of the devices.

When IT takes on desktop virtualization we focus on costs, security and efficiency. We assess our users to help us determine what is needed for them to do their jobs. With that knowledge we optimize our designs to minimize costs and provide just what every user needs. We focus on single image management and questions of if MCS or PVS might be a better way to deliver our unified images. Do we need a 3rd party personalization manager or can we make due to with roaming profiles or perhaps we can drop personalization all together.

Meanwhile our users are purchasing iPads and Androids at an alarming rate.

It’s common for IT to focus on securing our borders, centralizing our data and developing the most efficient infrastructures we can. It is after all what good IT people are trained to. We read the design guides and perform our Assess Design Deploy process faithfully. We know who our user groups are and what applications they need. We’ve created pristine template images, with all of our corporate graphics and the approved list of applications pre-installed. In short, our design is textbook perfect we’ve addressed all of IT’s project goals and we’re ready to begin roll-out.

Why then do our users balk at adopting virtualized desktops? Often stalling or delaying projects indefinitely?

Often when projects reach the user testing phase we find that users are reluctant and frequently actively resistant to adopting new virtualized desktops. When presented with the new “IT Optimized” desktop paradigm our users blatantly refuse to use it. And the project stalls.

Let’s explore why users are resistant, and what we (IT) can do to help ease them into a new model. We’ll talk about easy use cases and end user wins. We’ll talk about marketing desktop virtualization to our users. We’ll talk about some not-so-easy scenarios that we may want to put off and tackle after the project has some steam and victories on the record. We’ll talk about gold images, RemotePC, personal vDisk, personalization and dedicated desktops. But most importantly we’re going to talk about what users are looking for and how we bring them on-board with the project.

Come join me Friday, May 24th in SYN216: Gaining user acceptance for your desktop virtualization project at Synergy Los Angeles to talk about these issues and learn how to not only drive user adoption but to convert your users into your project’s largest promoters.

Kenneth Fingerlos has been working in IT since 1996 in various roles including systems admin, IT manager and IT consultant with a focus on all aspects of datacenter and end-user computing. Kenneth currently holds certifications from VMware and Citrix and works as a systems architect with Citrix Platinum partner Lewan & Associates. Twitter: @Kfingerlos

A big Thank You to our customers and Citrix for supporting our Synergy of the Rockies Event