Purpose of this FAQ: To provide a list of Frequently Asked Questions and Resources that will encourage computer support professionals across the world to learn from each other's experiences. (note see credit below)
Help Desk list on Internet
Help Desk List on Usenet news: bit.listserv.hdesk-l
Help Desk List (Mailing list): HDESK-L@wvnvm.wvnet.edu Setup by Roman Olynyk at West Virginia. Thanks, Roman.
To subscribe, send mail to LISTSERV@wvnvm.wvnet.edu with no subject and the following line in the body of the message: subscribe HDESK-L your_first_name your_last_name
To check to see if your mail got through to the list, send mail to LISTSERV@wvnvm.wvnet.edu with no subject and the following line in the body of the message: set HDESK-L repro (the default is norepro)
IMPORTANT: Be sure to add your e-mail address and contact information in the body of your message, _particularly_ if you would like a personal response to a query! Some mailers cannot capture the 'from' address and private posts to your query will have to be broadcast to thousands of readers of the list instead of to you directly.
NOTE: Almost every mail package has a method to automatically append your standard closing (such as your name, contact information etc.) to your outgoing mail messages. Please contact your local mail admin. for assistance.
To tell the listserv not to send you mail temporarily, send mail to LISTSERV@wvnvm.wvnet.edu with no subject and the following line in the body of the message: set HDESK-L nomail (the default is mail)
To get to the archives of the Help Desk List, send mail to LISTSERV@wvnvm.wvnet.edu with no subject and the following line in the body of the message: index HDESK-L
Another method to get to the archives of the Help Desk list is to use gopher to get to the West Virginia Net site. It is currently available via gopher at wvnvm.wvnet.edu. It is under the About MountainGopher, Under Construction, HDesk-L Archives gopher wvnvm.wvnet.edu
If you see a lot of 'undeliverable' mail 'bouncing' back to the list, please be patient! Roman has set up the list so that 'bounced' mail gets sent back to the owner of the list, not to the entire list. Some mail packages ignore this and occasional messages bounce back to the entire list. This will be taken care of as a priority!
Organizations
Help Desk Institute - http://www.helpdeskinst.com/ (commercial organization):
1755 Telestar Drive, Suite 101, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80920, U.S.A
Phone: (800) 248 5667 or (719) 531 5138Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGUCCS:
http://www.acm.org/ or e-mail to acmhelp@acm.orgThe American Productivity & Quality Center's (APQC) International Benchmarking Clearinghouse conducted a study with several major corporations on best practices in the area of call centers.
For more information, contact Allison Burge at allisonb@sam.neosoft.com or contact the APQC at (800) 776-9676.
Helpful Courses
The Help Desk Institute organizes a number of useful courses. Contact them at the phone number or address shown above for more information.
Data-Tech Institute offers some useful courses.
PO Box 2429, Clifton, NJ 07015. Phone: (201) 478 5400
Useful Conferences
Computer Training and Support Conference, run by the Ziff Institute.
Contact (800) 34 TRAIN.Contact the Help Desk Institute for information on their conferences.
ServiceTech, run jointly by AFSMI (Association For Service Management International) and ServiceWare Inc.
Contact AFSMI at (800) 333 9786If you are involved with computing in education, contact the Association for Computing Machinery, for information on SIGUCCS.
http://www.acm.org/Software Support Conference, run by the Institute for International Research.
Contact (800) 345 8016Systems Support Expo, run by United Publications.
Contact (207) 846 0600
Related books/magazines
Effective User Support - How to Manage the IT Helpdesk
Noel Bruton noel@bruton.win-uk.netRunning an Effective Help Desk
Barbara Czegel bczegel@terraport.net (John Wiley and Sons)First-Rate Customer Service
(The Economics Press) (800) 526 2444Effective Software Customer Support
Richard Gallagher (International Thompson Computer Press) rsgassoc@aol.comThe Computer Training Handbook, 2nd Edition
Elliott Masie. (Lakewood Publications)Microsoft Sourcebook for the Help Desk
(Microsoft Press) http://www.microsoft.comVirtual Help Desk
Andy Thomas (International Thompson Computer Press) regency@ixl.netThe Customer Driven Company - Moving from Talk to Action
Richard C. Whiteley, the Forum Corporation (Addison-Wesley)Help! The Art of Computer Technical Support
Ralph Wilson. (Peachpit Press)Call Center Magazine
(215) 355 2886 or (800) 677 3435Service News
(207) 846 0600 or http://www.servicenews.comService and Support Management (Publications & Communications, Inc.)
fax: (512) 331 3900
Related Newsgroups/FAQs
An University-specific Help Desk list has surfaced. To subscribe, send the following message in the body of a mail message to listserv@vma.cc.nd.edu.
subscribe hdi-edu your_first_name your_last_name
Steve Harvey has started the Call Center Institute of Quality to provide an informal networking forum for exchange of best practices in measuring quality in the call center. For more information, contact steveharvey@msn.com
Paul Winer has put together a web site for information about quality, software quality assurance, software testing and software engineering. http://www.digitalcity.com/users/p/paulw
There is a moderated news digest of messages and news about the computer training field. To get more information on this service and how to use it, send the following request in the body of a mail message to listproc@bilbo.isu.edu
subscribe Computer-Training your_first_name your_last_name
Richard Boren has put together the Training Registry - an online catalog of training courses, vendors and training media.
http://www.tregistry.com/ttr
Dave Eaton has put together a FAQ dedicated to Problem Management, at http://www.iac.honeywell.com/Pub/Tech/CM/PMTools.html
Academic Research on
Help Desks
Iain Middleton (i.middleton@rgu.ac.uk) from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland has been researching Help Desks. Contact him directly for information on this project.
Avron Barr (barr@cs.stanford.edu) at Stanford University's Stanford Computer industry Project is involved in a research project on Help Desks
Resources compiled by contributors to Hdesk-L
lil, from North Carolina State University has compiled a World Wide Web (WWW) page dedicated to Help Desk Problem Management software systems. NOTE from lil - please be gentle, it is just a Mac II. http://ccmc17.cc.ncsu.edu/Tracking/Public.html
lil also has a WWW interface to their solutions database. http://www2.ncsu.edu/cc-consult/CustomerQ/cqsearch.html
Kathlee Tomlinson from Kenyon College has a gopher site with names and addresses of different software vendors and price ranges. In KCINFO menu, choose 5,3,5 to get to the information. gopher.kenyon.edu
NOTE: If you use any of these resources, please take a moment or two to provide feedback!
Geoff Selig from Concordia University has placed two help desk proposal files available via anonymous ftp. NOTE from Geoff - If you make use of any part of our proposal, we would appreciate your acknowledging its origin. The files are helpdesk.w51 in WordPerfect 5.1 format, and final.prn in Postscript format, in the /pub/geoff directory. ftp.ece.concordia.ca
Dennis McWhirter from Indiana University has a knowledge base available via WWW. http://scwww.ucs.indiana.edu/
Frank Poduska from Iowa State University has their stored answers database available via WWW. Look under OLC Stock Answers http://www.cc.iastate.edu/welcome.html
Brian Lincoln from the University of Pittsburgh has made their knowledge base available via WWW. http://www.pitt.edu/~helpline
Kathy Lawter at Oklahoma State University has been putting together web pages for their help desk. http://www.okstate.edu/cis_info/helpdesk/helpdesk.html
Trey (Joe Villiner III) from the University of Missouri at Rolla has their Help Desk page available via WWW. http://www.umr.edu/~hdhtml
Robert Gowans from Manchester Metropolitan University (UK) has their Help Desk page available via WWW. http://nimbus.csc.stu.mmu.ac.uk
Duane Whitmire from Bowling Green State University has made their Help Desk page available via WWW. http://www.bgsu.edu/docs/HelpCenter/
Sherri Johnson from Swarthmore College has some Help Desk documentation available via WWW. http://www.cc.swarthmore.edu/cc/cc-docs/Helpdesk
Bryan Askew, from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro has provided a pointer to some services from their department. http://www.uncg.edu/~askewb/About_CSV.html
Jeanne Spellman from Boston College has their Help Desk page available via WWW. http://infoeagle.bc.edu/bc_org/tvp/helpcenter/hc.html
Chris Lundin from Stanford University has made their Help Desk page available via WWW. http://www-leland.stanford.edu/group/itss/
Marianne Aldridge at the University of Alberta (Canada) has made their Help Desk page available via WWW.
http://www.ualberta.ca/HELP/ Scott Crittenden from the University of Virginia has made their Help Desk page available via WWW. http://holmes.acc.virginia.edu/itc/helpDesk
Richard Cole from the University of Texas at Austin has developed dynamic WWW based Help Desk consulting support tools. You can view an overview of the system at:
http://www.utexas.edu/cc/helpdesk/html/visit/QC1.htmlRandall Pearson has made some resources available via anonymous ftp. The files are in the pub/support_sig directory. rdibm.rdsystem.com
Mikael Blaisdell handles the Customer Support Technology Forum on Compuserve which is an interactive resource for enabling customer support and help-desk managers to share their experiences and expertise via the on-line community of Compuserve.
To access this, Compuserve membership is required. To access, enter: GO CSTECH. The current forum membership is over 3500 professionals at all levels.
Feel free to distribute this list for non-commercial purposes. If you include a link to this FAQ from a commercial site, please inform the compiler of the FAQ at the address shown below.
Phil Verghis
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Copyright © 1996 Repository Technologies, Inc.
Last modified: April 21, 1997