Diesel

Have had installed goodies like dialling direct from an Outlook contact, shared office calendar, fax direct from Word, and you give everyone a quick brief on how simple and useful it is, yet, no one bothers! I thinkl I'm one of the few that even uses Calendar and Contacts in Outlook!!! And they all store docs on the non-backed up C: drive - arghhh!!!

Anyone else found a way 'round this without having a seminar once a month and dragging IT people in - all those enthusiastically briefed one on one just resist it!!!

D

cottonfoo

Write up an acceptable use policy which outlines the saving of company documents to the backed-up shared drive(s) and the use of the software to lower costs and increase efficiency.

I'm also strong proponent of luddite ridicule in environments where techno-savvy is expected

Scooby.Newbie

If you find out, bottle it and make a fortune. The uptake on this kind of stuff is frustrating to say the least.

We have folder redirection for users 'MyDocuments' but the amount of people that still manage to save stuff to the root of their harddrive beggers belief.

They will never learn, it is a gradual process, the rule of thumb is, IMHO, that as soon as you find something better they will start to see the benefits of the stuff you are replacing

Shark Man

You try explaining the Grandfather-Father-Son backup cycle.


I used my collegue's PC today. It has google toolbar, yahoo toolbar and msn toolbar. FFS half the screen is taken up by toolbars/helperbars.


So, I turned them all off - should keep him busy for a week trying to get them back

SwissTony

iTrader: (19)

ah the old GFS backup cycle...waste of time trying to explain that to anybody except it ppl....


everything I do on a daily basis beggers or buggers belief with my clients....


smile politely, mutter something uner your breath and then carry on

mike1210

University where I work we have training courses on several subjects which helps people who are willing to listen, our intranet site also has guides on creating mailing lists etc.

echo what Cottonfoo says as this will cover your **** basically.

maybe also give new users a handbook explaing the basics

folder re-direction is a great thing, as is a very severe group policy which hides the local drives and forces them to save to their homefolder if you have a 2K3 domain of course

I've found roaming profiles and folder redirection (makes the profiles small) can be useful in this sense

OllyK

Just regularly purge the contents of the local drives (make sure you state this will be done in you AUP) people will only need a month's work wiping out over night once for them to not do it again. Brutal but effective. Obviously worth copying the files to a network area just in case then if there was something really critical you can "recover it" after a few hours of hard work using recovery tools on their machine

SJ_Skyline

When the carrot fails, use the stick. Draw up a policy that dictates how documents will be stored and enforce it rigorously. As far as the more technical toys you have go then I would really stop and think about how appropriate it is in providing gizmos like this to non-technical staff as all you are doing is adding another level of (as they see it, unnecessary) complexity to their jobs.

Account deleted by request

Spot on comment, once people see the benefit to THEM they all of a sudden find it easy to use, I might have been telling them for months how useful something is and they take **** all notice

chop

judgejules

Make sneaky backups of their files without their knowledge then start deleting them from "unofficial" locations. When they start to see their hard work go down the drain, they'll catch on to doing it the right way.

As for the direct fax stuff, charge them for the paper they use to send a fax the "old" way, get medieval on them

Some staff don't care about the savings to your company, but when it costs them, they start to get interested.

Jules

AllanB

LIne manages should be enforcing policies and policing these in monthly 121 reviews.

You roll it out, make sure eveyone understands the reaons and needs and then set the expectation. Those not adhering to it can then be disciplined as a conduct matter. A firm discussion with someone with the head of IT there will nroamlly get the message out and onto the shop floor so people will takke notice.

Also if pay rises are done on appraisla you can use this to say sorry you've not helped us reduce costs so we have no money for pay rises


AllanB

jasey

Sack the old ***** and employ youngsters

j4ckos mate

you need a system like ours

everything is done in the server, not a sdingle logo on the screen once youve logged in.

keep everything on a shared folder in the server

Nimbus

You don't work at our place do you..?

little'un

iTrader: (9)

procedures

jasey

PMSL

DemonDave

iTrader: (13)

active directory and locked down profiles - does not allow anything you do not want to happen

T4molie

I have a user in our Irish office who has everything she's ever worked on saved on her desktop

Tried explaining things to her..... but it's like trying to tell a mentalist not jump

j4ckos mate

we have everything we need either in a shared folder or in our freighting progs.
rather than look a phone no. up or go on the internet he rings 118500.

aaarhhhhhhhhhhh
another cracker from the same bloke
we have a spreadsheet for the van mileage, it totals it all up auotmatically at the bottom so you dont have to do it.


he prints a blank one off and writes on it.
his desk looks like hes waiting for 's o c o " to turn uyp

worley

I've managed 'people' for years, tried all the nicey nicey approaches and never worked 100% of the time. I've still got a job and haven't done anything daft yet - meltdown is always around the corner tho...

From a non-PC / legal aspect I would give them a good thrashing for non-compliance , public ridicule would be my next step and then a good old human sacrifice, just to make a point.

TopBanana

The problem is obvious - you're employing thick people!

mart360

But I.T. NEVER understand the concept of keeping things, unless its to do with them!!!

they lock down inboxes to 10 or 20 mb, and wont allow .pst files to be created even though the dept i work for need to retain a lot of data.

yet they get shiny new dat drives, and super back up devices, for what ???

half the stuff we use is on them all ready, but ask for (non IT) stuff to be backed up, god forbid....



mart

Scooby.Newbie

We are too busy reading all your emails to backup the stuff you give a **** about

Jerome

I worked somewhere where we had distributed staff (coast to coast in Canada). We had a citrix environment and we prepped all PCs for the staff to make support easier. All apps were run through Citrix and were not installed on their PCs. All PCs were installed with CD writers and s/w to use make local backups. Every member of staff had a (backed up) network drive to save their work to as well. There was also company network drive for the sharing of data.

Even so, the fools still saved work locally and wondered why the Toronto based IT staff were less than sympathic when they managed to lose their locally saved data. They constantly installed all manner of dodgy toolbars and apps. Even the president's PC had tons of **** on it (some good stuff too!). One department did all its backups onto an external USB drive. Months of work was lost when that failed. Despite the network drive, accessable by all, they still emailed 30meg word documents to 150 staff regularly.

People cannot be forced to do the right thing. Staff will find a way round even the most stringent enforcement of IT policy. Just laugh hysterically when they lose data. Then, when you have composed yourself, remind them of the IT policy and wish them a nice life.

A fool and his data are soon parted...

AllanB

Or even better charge them for the recovery of the data or the deaprtment head. The message will soon sink in



AllanB

jasey

The real answer to the original question is of course to design IT properly.

Everybody uses an iPod correctly .

Except thickos

SJ_Skyline

An old one:

Shark Man

'til they plug it in to another computer with auto-sync enabled....oops, bye bye music

NotoriousREV

I can't even get end users to log support calls properly. Given the choice between e-mailing "support@..." they instead often choose the IT distribution list (150 people). This is despite the information being displayed on every user's desktop with a clickable link and me sending an All Staff e-mail reminding people on a weekly basis. The record so far between me sending a reminder e-mail and someone using the wrong address is 2 hours.

Drunken Bungle Whore

I work in Learning & Development and have lost count of the number of times I've heard people make exactly the same complaint "We installed it and showed them how it worked, so why aren't they doing it?"

People, as a whole, dislike and are resistant to, change. The initial training needs to focus not just on how it works, but explain why it's been introduced and how this will make their life easier.

This training then needs to be evaluated - have the people actually learned what they needed to learn? This can be done in seveeral ways ranging from a simple feedback form to a basic test. People may not be using it because they aren't sure how. It doesn't matter if you think it's dead simple and straight forward - you must ensure that everyone has developed the necessary skills.

The training MUST allow the learners to actually use the equipment and not just be a quick demo by someone else (we learn and understand by doing, not just watching).

Once the training has been completed and evaluated then everyone needs to be monitored to enforce the new behaviours. We all have so mnay competing demands on our working day that most of us only focus on doing what will be noticed/ monitored. So, if something's not being monitored and people aren't accountable for not doing it - why would they change their behaviours?

Just about every organisation I've worked with that implements any change to IT requirements has grossly underestimated the time required for training. But hey - that's their call - they waste far more money paying for an IT solution that no one uses properly than they would have done on making sure they were properly trained in the first place.