+ - Borg Call Center Hardware Dilemma
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danerthomas
danerthomas writes "[Ask Slashdot]
My team is responsible for developing procedures, routines and knowledge management for a call center that currently supports about 20,000 users (primarily healthcare workers). Our customers are in multiple locations across the county, using equipment in three distinct environments that (thankfully) share an underlying platform. This allows us to configure each support workstation to be able to access remote clients in each of the three environments.
Our county is in the process of assimilating all healthcare-related IT functions under a single organization, and our call center is slated to take over support duties for new customer groups on a number of different platforms. There is a long-term plan to standardize the entire organization on a single platform, but that will take a number of years and in the meantime we need to support upcoming versions of the new platform (in XP as well as 32-bit and eventually 64-bit Windows 7 variants) as well as all currently existing ones until they can be replaced.
Adding the technological distinctiveness of other platforms and call centers to our own will eventually provide a more stable and productive work environment for up to 70,000 county employees. The challenge that we face is how to maintain a high level of support quality during the interim period, when we need simultaneous remote access to so many different platforms. Would it be better to create multiple virtual machines on each of the 15-30 support computers, or would it be better to just have one primary environment on the support computers and access all of the other environments in some other fashion?
We are building something bigger than any of us has previously been involved with, and of course we have no experience with supporting multiple mixed 32- and 64-bit environments, so I am appealing to the collective experience of the Slashdot universe for guidance. We don't expect any single individual to lead us down the one best path, but we don't want this to be an exercise in futility and would appreciate any help to avoid making obvious mistakes."
My team is responsible for developing procedures, routines and knowledge management for a call center that currently supports about 20,000 users (primarily healthcare workers). Our customers are in multiple locations across the county, using equipment in three distinct environments that (thankfully) share an underlying platform. This allows us to configure each support workstation to be able to access remote clients in each of the three environments.
Our county is in the process of assimilating all healthcare-related IT functions under a single organization, and our call center is slated to take over support duties for new customer groups on a number of different platforms. There is a long-term plan to standardize the entire organization on a single platform, but that will take a number of years and in the meantime we need to support upcoming versions of the new platform (in XP as well as 32-bit and eventually 64-bit Windows 7 variants) as well as all currently existing ones until they can be replaced.
Adding the technological distinctiveness of other platforms and call centers to our own will eventually provide a more stable and productive work environment for up to 70,000 county employees. The challenge that we face is how to maintain a high level of support quality during the interim period, when we need simultaneous remote access to so many different platforms. Would it be better to create multiple virtual machines on each of the 15-30 support computers, or would it be better to just have one primary environment on the support computers and access all of the other environments in some other fashion?
We are building something bigger than any of us has previously been involved with, and of course we have no experience with supporting multiple mixed 32- and 64-bit environments, so I am appealing to the collective experience of the Slashdot universe for guidance. We don't expect any single individual to lead us down the one best path, but we don't want this to be an exercise in futility and would appreciate any help to avoid making obvious mistakes."
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Borg Call Center Hardware Dilemma