Survey: Macs cost notably less to support than Windows PCs

"Macs are often the black sheep in the many enterprise environments which have been dominated by Windows for nearly two decades, but the growing consumerization of IT is slowly changing that perception. Though Macs often have a higher up-front price than many business-class PCs, Macs are usually believed to have a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) due to lower support costs. A recent survey of IT professionals in large enterprise environments that have a mix of Macs and PCs overwhelmingly agree that Macs cost less than PCs to support.

The Enterprise Desktop Alliance, which seeks to make it easier to integrate Macs in Windows-centric IT deployments, surveyed IT admins from companies that made large deployments, including universities and government agencies. Responses included in EDA's analysis include those from environments with a mix of Macs and PCs that had a total of 50 servers or over 100 Macs.

A majority of respondents said that Macs cost less in terms of time spent troubleshooting, user training, help desk calls, and system configuration. Admins generally agreed that costs related to software licensing and supporting infrastructure were the same between the two platforms."

Continue reading the full story by Chris Foresman

Help at last for IT and consultants

Those of us that work in computer support have all seen our share of bad IT support policies and awful help desk software. In my years of doing technical support I have seen some of the very best help desk software to some of the worst. Bad or difficult to use help desk software is a major reason of unhappiness for not only your support staff but also for your customers.

One fantastic customer support program you may not of heard of is called Web Help Desk. The Web Help Desk is a high performance web application designed as a 100% browser-based solution. The Web Help Desk's browser-only focus guarantees a rich, powerful cross-platform application regardless of your operating system. Web Help also offers integration with LANrev Client Manager and Apple Remote Desktop.

This week MacsDesign Studio LLC makers of Web Help Desk split there product line to into three offerings:

• Web help desk Pro
  
• Web help desk Light
  
• Web help desk Free
  

A full feature Help Desk Software Comparison Checklist can be reviewed here or the full technical specifications of the software here.

In a gesture of pure generosity MacsDesign Studio offer consultants and small one support man shops a fantastic gift Web Help Desk for free and this version has very few limitations and no adversing! I hope you will enjoy using their software as much as I do!

The Chronicles of George

Recently I was introduced to a web site called the Chronicles of George. The Chronicles of George web site that contains collection of helpdesk tickets gleaned from the Remedy support database. I don't want to spoil your fun by saying too much here in this blog. However even if your not a computer person I am sure you will find this site very amusing.