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8 tech support best practices

No product or service – or end user – is perfect. This is especially true when it comes to hardware and software. That is why companies, if they want to stay in and grow their business, need to provide help to customers when things go wrong. And while no two products or problems are exactly alike, the best tech support departments share the following eight traits.[ Related: 11 tips for improving your company's customer support ]1. Offer multi-channel tech support, including live chat. “The ubiquity of instant communication channels has meant that people want to get the support they want, whenever they want and through whatever method is most convenient,” says Amir Farhi, vice president, strategic alliances & business development, WalkMe. “Rather than relying [just] on email and phone communications, businesses should provide [tech support via] social media channels, [live chat] and messaging apps such as WhatsApp.” They should also “make sure [tech support representatives] are readily available and trained to use all channels.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows Server on ARM is for Azure only

A couple of months after announcing that Windows 10 will be available on ARM laptops based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 when the Creators Update launches this spring, Microsoft also revealed that it has been trying out ARM servers in its Azure data centers and is planning to use them for some very specific production workloads.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Windows Server on ARM is for Azure only

Adobe takes aim at customer experience, partners with Microsoft

Customer experience is the name of the game at Adobe Summit 2017 in Las Vegas this week. Today the company unveiled its new Experience Cloud offering, along with a new partnership with Microsoft aimed at creating a standard semantic data model for customer experience apps and services.For years, digital marketers have measured digital interactions to gather customer data in an effort to optimize customer interactions in real-time by doing things like personalizing landing pages and targeting display ads. The new Adobe Experience Cloud brings together Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Advertising Cloud and Adobe Analytics Cloud in an effort to take the technology Adobe has developed for digital marketers and extend it to all the areas that touch on customer experience, like optimizing and personalizing customer support or building products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Slow growth ahead for IT outsourcing

While the IT and business process services industry continued to grow through 2016, that growth slowed over the course of the year and could fall to less than 2 percent by 2019, according to a recent report from IT and business sourcing consultancy and research firm Everest Group.[ Related: Outsourcing trends to watch in 2017 ]The pace of year-on-year revenue growth fell from 4.5 percent in the first quarter of last year to below three percent by year-end. And Everest Group predicts a continued decline over the next one to three years, falling to as low as 1.9 percent by late 2019 as a result of as a result of macro uncertainties, technology disruption and intense competition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T Developed an SDN Controller for 400 GbE Trial Between D.C. and NYC

If there's a fiber cut, the SDN controller could reroute traffic.

Flaws in Moodle CMS put thousands of e-learning websites at risk

Organizations that use the popular Moodle learning management system should deploy the latest patches as soon as possible because they fix vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to take over web servers.Moodle is an open source platform used by schools, universities, and other organizations to set up websites with interactive online courses. It's used by more than 78,000 e-learning websites from 234 countries that together have more than 100 million users.A week ago the Moodle developers released updates for the still supported branches of the platform: 3.2.2, 3.1.5, 3.0.9 and 2.7.19. The release notes mentioned that "a number of security related issues were resolved," but didn't provide any additional details about their nature or impact.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flaws in Moodle CMS put thousands of e-learning websites at risk

No Dress Code? AHAHAHAHAHA

Dress codes are funny things. Everyone in Silicon Valley likes to make out they are super-relaxed, and you can wear whatever you like. “We don’t have a dress code.” But that’s not really true. There are still rules about what you can wear. People who say “we don’t care what you wear” very much do care if you wear the wrong thing.

Here’s some examples of dress codes from well-known Bay Area tech companies:

From Google:

What to wear: For most of our interviews, the dress code is casual, but your recruiter will let you know what’s most appropriate. When in doubt, be yourself and wear what makes you comfortable.

From Twitter:

What should I wear to my interview?

We have a very relaxed, welcoming, and fun environment. While we don’t have a strict dress code, we also wouldn’t recommend pajamas. Come comfortable…

At Facebook:

What is Facebook’s dress code? There isn’t one. Wear what you are comfortable in.

When I started work, I wore a suit every day. That changed over the years, based upon where I was working, and broader industry trends. These days it’s dress shirts, trousers, and nice shoes. I like to Continue reading

No Dress Code? AHAHAHAHAHA

Here’s some examples of dress codes from well-known Bay Area tech companies:

From Google:

What to wear: For most of our interviews, the dress code is casual, but your recruiter will let you know what’s most appropriate. When in doubt, be yourself and wear what makes you comfortable.

From Twitter:

What should I wear to my interview?

We have a very relaxed, welcoming, and fun environment. While we don’t have a strict dress code, we also wouldn’t recommend pajamas. Come comfortable…

At Facebook:

What is Facebook’s dress code?

There isn’t one. Wear what you are comfortable in.

IDG Contributor Network: 4 possible outcomes for Avaya

Avaya is one of the largest providers of enterprise communications products and services. It is a complex company of 158 separate entities that employ about 9,700 people worldwide. Most of its entities in North America, representing about 3,800 of its employees, filed for Chapter 11 reorganization earlier this year.Avaya reported 2016 revenue at $3.7 billion. Despite an annual adjusted EBITDA of $940 million and positive free cash flow, it has a debt problem. It owes about $6 billion due to multiple investors spread over multiple maturity dates over the next several years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Don’t Use Cloud Titans for Applications, Says Mesosphere

Mesosphere gives portability of cloud services.

IBM’s bringing Watson to a whole bunch of new developer tools

As IBM welcomes an estimated 20,000 developers, customers and partners to Las Vegas this week for its InterConnect conference, a running theme throughout the three-day show is providing application builders with cognitive and analytical tools based off the company’s Watson platform.+MORE FROM NETWORK WORLD: How IBM wants to bring blockchain from Bitcoin to your data center | IBM + Red Hat = An open source hybrid cloud +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HPE unveils a new SimpliVity appliance

Two months after acquiring SimpliVity for US$650 million, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is beginning to reshape the company's converged infrastructure offering in its own image. SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure appliance, the OmniCube, replaces storage switches, cloud gateways, high-availability shared storage, and appliances for backup and deduplication, WAN optimization, and storage caching. The company also offers OmniStack, the software powering the OmniCube, packaged for other vendors’ hardware.Now HPE has qualified that software on its workhorse ProLiant DL380 server and will sell it as the snappily titled HPE SimpliVity 380 with OmniStack, Mark Linesch, the vice president for global strategy and operations of HPE's enterprise group, said Tuesday at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HPE unveils a new SimpliVity appliance

On the ‘net: Nothing to Hide, Everything to Gain

The IETF Journal published an article by Shawn and I last week about open source, open standards, and participation by vendors and providers.

Why should a provider—particularly a content provider—care about the open standards and open source communities? There is certainly a large set of reasons why edge-focused content providers shouldn’t care about the open communities. A common objection to working in the open communities often voiced by providers runs something like this: Isn’t the entire point of building a company around data—which ultimately means around a set of processing capabilities, including the network—to hide your path to success and ultimately to prevent others from treading the same path you’ve tread? Shouldn’t providers defend their intellectual property for all the same reasons as equipment vendors?

The post On the ‘net: Nothing to Hide, Everything to Gain appeared first on 'net work.

First Look: New Apple iPad, red iPhone and iWatch gear

The least-Apple tablet update everImage by AppleLess sleek and thin? More hardware bang for your buck? The price actually dropped?! Who are you, and what have you done with Apple? The inscrutable gadget company also announced the availability of red iPhone 7s, a new video feature, extra bands for Apple Watch, and a Swift update. Check them out.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Realm ties PostgreSQL databases to mobile applications

Gartner, the analyst firm that makes squillions of dollars advising its enterprise clients on technology decisions, came up with a concept a few years ago entitled Bi-modal IT. From the expectedly wordy Gartner definition, the company defines this approach thusly: “Bimodal is the practice of managing two separate but coherent styles of work: one focused on predictability, the other on exploration. Mode 1 is optimized for areas that are more predictable and well-understood. It focuses on exploiting what is known, while renovating the legacy environment into a state that is fit for a digital world. Mode 2 is exploratory, experimenting to solve new problems and optimized for areas of uncertainty. These initiatives often begin with a hypothesis that is tested and adapted during a process involving short iterations, potentially adopting a minimum viable product (MVP) approach.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Can FPGAs Beat GPUs in Accelerating Next-Generation Deep Learning?

Continued exponential growth of digital data of images, videos, and speech from sources such as social media and the internet-of-things is driving the need for analytics to make that data understandable and actionable.

Data analytics often rely on machine learning (ML) algorithms. Among ML algorithms, deep convolutional neural networks (DNNs) offer state-of-the-art accuracies for important image classification tasks and are becoming widely adopted.

At the recent International Symposium on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (ISFPGA), Dr. Eriko Nurvitadhi from Intel Accelerator Architecture Lab (AAL), presented research on Can FPGAs beat GPUs in Accelerating Next-Generation Deep Neural Networks. Their research …

Can FPGAs Beat GPUs in Accelerating Next-Generation Deep Learning? was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Worth Reading: Why there won’t ever be a CCIE SDN

There’s a lot of work that’s been done recently to bring the CCIE up to modern network standards. Yusuf and his team are working hard to incorporate new concepts into the written exam. Candidates are broadening their horizons and picking up new ideas as they learn about industry stalwarts like OSPF and spanning tree. But the biggest challenge out there is incorporating the ideas behind software defined networking (SDN) into the exam. I don’t believe that this will ever happen. Here’s why. —The Networking Nerd

The post Worth Reading: Why there won’t ever be a CCIE SDN appeared first on 'net work.

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