PortalGuard Climbs the SharePoint Summit
Come join PortalGuard by PistolStar, Inc. at the SharePointPro Virtual Conference, Climbing the Sharepoint Summit. No need to leave your office, just join us online to ask us any questions you like May 20th 9:00am-4:00pm EST. The best part is that registration is open to anyone and free!
Come see if PortalGuard is right for your company! See how you can meet or exceed your security objectives, including:
- Stronger Authentication
- Reducing Risk - both financial and security
- Enhance compliance with both security and industry standards
- Deliver effective password policies
- Implement Best Practices
And Many More…
Conference Website & Information
What does it take for world class technical support?: Tech Support gives some Insight
Filed under: General Information, Technical Support Exploration
Many Technical Support departments get a reputation for delivering sub-standard support. Many support personnel can’t wait to move out of the department and on to something they think is more rewarding and exciting. Why is this? Perhaps it’s because providing excellent technical support takes a certain kind of drive, stamina and commitment to the cause that isn’t for everyone. I’m sure all of us at one time or another have come across a support person that you knew just didn’t care or have the tools available to them to properly provide the support you so desperately needed.
When, and if, you have come across a support representative that really made a difference in your day, you probably took notice as good support is hard to find.
So what is it then, that constitutes a World Class Technical Support department? Is it knowledge of the product and its surrounding? Is it how responsive and informative the personnel are? Perhaps it is thoroughness, or a team that can provide the same excellent quality of support to any country in the world. Could it be the reinforcement from engineering that the support individual receives when they need it?
It is this support engineers opinion that all of the above mentioned qualities together, in a tight knit operation, are required to provide top notch support anywhere on this globe of ours. Let’s take each quality one at a time and expose a little more of them:
Knowledge
Someone once told me the Knowledge is King. There is no substitute for a support engineer that has excellent knowledge of the products they are supporting. Not only of their companys product, but also of other products and environments that the product will be co-existing with or running on. What a time savings it is if you find out from the support rep that the cause of the trouble is not with their product, but another product that is affecting their product. The support person has the Knowledge to walk you through the repair of the third party product and you don’t have to go through another cycle of support with the other company.
Responsiveness
An end user should not have to spend their valuable time chasing down a support team to get support. You have a problem and you need it fixed. Do you often wonder what exactly it is that the support department is doing if they are not working on your issue? How comforting it is to hear from the support person just to let you know that they are a bit tied up at the moment, but are working on the issue and explaining to you what they are doing without you having to ask or escalate the issue to get results.
Complete and educational answers
It is one thing to solve the customer’s problem, but if at the same time you can educate them on why or how the solution works, they will be that much better for it the next time the situation, or something similar, arises. If the support individual takes a little time now to give a more comprehensive and informative answer, the customer may not need the assistance the next time. This is a win/win for both parties. The support person has one less issue to deal with the next time the customer has the same or similar issue and the customer won’t have to spend time in the support process resolving the problem.
Availability
If you are going to call yourself World Class, you have to be flexible enough to work outside of your own company’s timezone and withstand/endure a language barrier. Working outside of the normal 9 to 5 grind can be trying, but being there for a customer on the other side of the world just makes it all worthwhile to the customer and to the company in the long run.
Close relationship with development. No “levels” of support
A quality that really separates great support teams from mediocre support teams is when the support team has direct and accommodating help from their development engineers. These are the employees with the most powerful knowledge and it should not be kept from or made difficult to be accessed by the person responsible for helping the customer.
Record keeping of cases
Finally, an accurate and up to date database of support issues has to be maintained to keep all the different customers and issues organized. It is comforting to receive a support case or incident number within an hour of requesting help. If multiple problems are being worked at once, having the ID of the case posted in the subject of each correspondence makes it easy for both sides to be efficient. Notification of when and why a case has been brought to resolution and a follow up on how the end user thought the support team performed is paramount in fighting these technical battles.
When considering the purchase of any equipment, software or services from a high tech company, one would be prudent to discuss these qualities with their sales representative to make sure they understand how the experience with the company will be when the payment has been made and they are then asked to earn the money.
What’s New with Password Protection?
Filed under: Authentication Security, Authentication Trends, Data Security, password security
In a recent article a common issue was being discussed, password security. It is apparent that people have a hard time remembering, and creating strong secure passwords. It also seems impossible to have users remember passwords successfully for all of the applications they use, including the websites they visit as well. In response to this constant struggle between user and password, people, like PistolStar, have come up with solutions.
One of them is creating a strong challenge question and response method for users to self-service their own passwords. This allows them to create questions specific to them, which will later be used to confirm their identitiy. This has been a successful and strong method for quite some time, but now people are wondering what else is possible.
On The Blog of Content Protection, authored by Eric Diehl, the posting “Retrieveing Passwords Through Social Interaction” brought to light a strange way to go about recovering your password. Microsoft began to think of recovering passwords, as “not what you know, but who you know”. This created the idea of using trustees to recover your password.
The user would define a list of trustees, and who would then receive recovery codes. Once the user forgot their password they would contact their trustee for the recovery code. This was an interesting concept which created a security wall made of human interaction.
With this solution does come many issues, such as forgetting who your trustees are, and the time it takes to retrieve the codes from the trustees. You can read more in Microsoft’s report:
It’s Not What You Know, But Who You Know: A Social Approach to Last-Resort Authentication
The idea of social marketing is being chased after by marketers everywhere, but what about social password recovery? Developers are you ready to jump out of your seats….or stay seated? You decide.