Desktop Support Resources

Description of hypothetical organization

Clean-way College is one of the best online colleges in the country. It also has 2 more centers in Canada and in Australia. In fact, the college has had 16,000 diploma graduates which were conferred in the year 2008-09. The college has 6 departments that is accounting, finance studies, marketing, information technology, human resource management studies and public relations. Oftentimes, online courses cover the same materials as campus programs. The online learning is dependant on information technology infrastructure which comprises of desktop computers and other related equipments. Therefore there is a technical support staff which handles the maintenance, upgrading, troubleshooting, and repairing of the desktop computers within the 6 departments and the 2 international centers.

Appropriate Resources to Maintain, Upgrade, Troubleshoot, and Repair Their Desktop

Because of the IT infrastructure the college information communication infrastructure needs strategies, techniques and methods to access the appropriate resources to maintain, upgrade, troubleshoot, and repair the desktop computers for the college. Technical support services aims at attempting to assist the user to solve specific problems using help resources rather than providing customization and training.

Accessing Pertinent Resources

Most companies offer technical support for the products which they have sold to their clients, either freely available or at a cost (Levine & Young, 2007). This support might be delivered over the phone or online by a website or by email. In order to cut down the operations costs for supporting the online learning, Clean-way College has located its call centers in Australia and Canada. At these two centers there are qualified personnel who do remote desktop Computer repairs. With the user's permission at any end of the continent where the college has its centers and at the main campus, the technician always are in control of the user's keyboard  and mouse. They undertake various diagnostic measures and repair applications to any user desktop at the college, they run scans and even install various program (Perkins, 2004). For this service to be initiated for any fault desktop the Information technology support staff at any center of the college, just has to call either of the two center in Canada and in Australia.

Strengths and Weaknesses of the Resources

Because of the business needs of clean way college, the management decided to use the level 3 support services. This model of support is a 3 -tiered form of technical support and it is used by the technicians at the support centers to handle the most difficult or advanced problems of the information communication infrastructure because the institute has about 120 desktop computers and 3 servers. Individuals who are experts in this model and support the college offer back-end support, & various other headings denoting expert level troubleshooting and analysis methods. These individuals are experts in their work and they even come in handy in researching and development solutions to new or unknown issues which might affect the efficiency of the college infrastructure.

When they discover a new problem this personnel always first of all determine if to solve the problem or not and they might be obliged to have the end user's contact information so as to enable them to have enough time to \undertake the troubleshooting of the issue and therefore find the solution (Kajko-Mattsson, 2004). In some instances, an issue might get out of hand and become so problematic to extent of the product being unable to be salvaged therefore prompting a replacement in such an extent the original developers are informed about the problem in order for them to do an in-depth analysis of the product. When they determine that a problem can be solved, these level 3 experts come in handy in designing and developing the courses of action, and they also evaluating the course of action in a test case environment, in order to implement the best solution to the problem (Perkins, 2004).

Although the resources used by the support center staff are not simple to use the staff have specialized in various aspects in order to make their work easier and they also undergo refresher courses before they are certified by the respective bodies. Incase they get extreme challenges of using the available resources they contact the product manufactures to offer advise.

Below is a list of some of the important resources used by the Clean-Way college support centers to maintain, upgrade, troubleshoot, and repair their desktop computers.

1.      Microsoft's new Fix It Center beta troubleshooting software

2.      Cisco - WebEx Remote Access

3.      Because all the desktop at the college are all HP machine then HP- IT Resource Center is also used.

4.      Microsoft support

5.      touch my pc remote support

6.      Mikongo Free screen sharing for people and businesses