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Affordable High Availability eSupport for Small Organizations

Let’s face it; your organization depends on information technology (IT). Whether it’s simply for e-mail and word processing, or because you run your core business functions are completely computerized, if something goes wrong with your IT infrastructure, things grind pretty much to a halt.

However, some things never change. You have few internal resources to dedicate to IT. You can’t afford the time to manage your systems and you have no desire to be mired in the complexity of IT management. You want to focus on running your organization and making it successful, that’s enough of a challenge!

Any interruption due to a computer system problem causes considerable disruption and anxiety. You want the IT infrastructure to be as transparent and trouble-free as the telephone system.

When problems do occur, you want to know what's going on. Being left in the dark wondering what the problem is, and if and when it will be fixed is often more stressful and troublesome than the problem itself.

As important, you want the same control over IT as you do over other resources your business depends on. This means also protection against intrusion and malicious attacks.

Using external support providers has led to mixed results at best. It’s expensive, and it seems just as much of a time drain on your employees’ time.

We understand that. With the Automated Support Infrastructure (ASI), your support provider will be able to offer you affordable 24x7 support services, control, and protection that until now only the biggest vendors have been able to provide to their largest customers.

We transform system administration and support from a resource drain and a nuisance into a transparent activity enabling greater leverage of your IT resources through higher availability. Your employees’ productivity will also benefit significantly because they will not be required any longer to diagnose what’s wrong with their systems, or get actively involved in the support process.

In customer support, pro-activity is the key to minimizing problems and maximizing customer satisfaction. This means knowing about symptoms on a system as they occur, and whenever possible prevent them from occurring. This capability puts your support provider in the position to be pro-active in minimizing a symptom's impact, resolving it, and keeping you informed about the status at all times.

With ASI, your support provider will know instantly whenever any event takes place on your systems, from application launches, to file downloads and installation, from failure to access the Internet, to failure to access a shared resource on the local network. Your support provider will have all the information necessary to resolve pro-actively any symptom that occurs.

Easy Extendibility – Ideally Suited for a Changing Environment

ASI is designed to automate the resolution of your recurring problems today and over time. The process is straightforward. You simply identify your most frequently recurring problems and the manual steps you execute today to resolve them.

As part of the ASI service, HandsFree Networks translates your manual solutions into automated resolutions and ASI deploys them automatically on all servers and end-user systems.

Because the environment you operate in is constantly changing, the recurring problems that represent a significant drain on your resources also change. With ASI this is not a problem. It simply means that over time, automated resolutions to new recurring problems are added as needed.

An added benefit of this approach is that with ASI there is a direct return on investment (ROI) relationship between the investment made in the technology and the benefit to the IT support and end-user organizations. The number of support calls and productivity loss due to recurring problems are readily available statistics. Once an automated resolution is implemented and deployed, the reduction in the number of calls and the productivity increase can be measured just as readily giving you a tangible measure of the return on your investment.

 

Breakthrough Technology

ASI is based on patent-pending technology developed by HandsFree Networks. It consists of a client, running on every Microsoft Windows device on a TCP/IP network, that detects symptoms as they take place, recognizes those symptoms that indicate that there is a problem, diagnoses them and, if a solution is available, resolves them automatically.

The ASI client is lightweight. It occupies approximately 500 Kbytes of a system’s memory and because it is event driven, it performs little or no polling.

ASI also performs automatically a broad range of system administration and management activities, and symptom prevention procedures.

ASI is a networked system. The instances of the client running on each device on your network are aware of each other and communicate with each other to provide detection and repair of multi-machine failures. This leads to an increase in overall availability, and significantly better diagnostic and resolution capability for the more complex and critical network-related symptoms.

The building blocks of the ASI are:

	A unique problem resolution sub-system that automates the resolution of most recurring technical support problems
	An exceptionally powerful event detection and diagnosis mechanism that enables:
	Feedback at an increasing level of granularity
	Assessment of usability, performance and compatibility for each application used

The first release of ASI supports all Microsoft Win32 platforms including all versions of Microsoft Windows 95 and 98, Microsoft Windows Me, Microsoft Windows NT4, Microsoft Windows 2000, and Windows XP.

 

Automated Problem Resolution

One of the breakthrough capabilities of the HandsFree Networks technology is the automated resolution of recurring problems. Here is how it works. The ASI client is installed on every supported system. As it detects a symptom, it locates the corresponding automated solution, stored as executable code in a solutions database also located on each supported system. It then executes the solution automatically, in the background, with no user intervention. Automated solutions are called Scrips.

The first time a symptom is detected, it may not have an automated solution. If this is the case, once a manual solution is identified, the corresponding Scrip can be coded and added to the Scrip database, if the problem’s frequency of occurrence warrants it. From then on, whenever that symptom is detected, it will be resolved automatically.

One of the key attributes of the ASI approach to problem resolution is that it prevents problem propagation. This happens in two ways:

1. ASI resolves problems that, if left unresolved, lead to other problems that may end up affecting many users
2. As soon as a new problem occurs, its solution is coded as a Scrip and distributed to all users thus minimizing the problem's impact

Even when an automated resolution is not available, ASI enables faster symptom resolution. It features a support query facility (SQF) that performs automated support knowledge base searches using the information reported in the event logs. These searches cover vendor knowledge bases as well as the World Wide Web and Usenet groups.

 

Event Detection, Diagnosis, Notification and Reporting

The key to cost-effective pro-active service is for your support provider to have the information about symptoms that occur on your network and on your systems as they take place, without having to be on site.

ASI detects the vast majority of events that occur on all systems and the network. Event classes detected include window creation, file operations, faults and exceptions, and application installations and launches.

Because it is completely event-driven and does no polling, ASI has minimal impact on system or network performance. The ASI client is relatively small occupying approximately 500 Kbytes of RAM. An instance of the client runs all the time on every supported system, monitoring both systems and the network.

The ASI client is a personal IT staff person for each of your employees. It is always at work detecting and reporting symptoms, 24 hours a day seven days a week, whether the supported system is connected to the network or not. Even when system or network operation is interrupted you will be able to act pro-actively because when a system is down, the instances of the client running on the other systems on the network detect this event and notify the support provider.

When the ASI client detects a symptom, depending on its severity, it collects detailed information about all the processes running at the time, and user actions leading to the symptom. It diagnoses the symptom and immediately logs it on a secure Web-based log database accessible over the Web via a browser interface.

If the log database server is not accessible (e.g. Internet connection is down, or the end-user system is not connected to the network), event log files are saved and queued until it becomes available again, at which point they are sent immediately.

The range of events covered by ASI is very broad. The information gathered includes data on system resource capacity utilization and application usage. This makes ASI a powerful IT planning and training tool to assist your support provider in delivering to you comprehensive, one-stop IT services.

For example, application usage patterns quickly emerge that can help identify areas where better training would help you make better usage of your IT resources. System resources capacity utilization trends also emerge clearly and quickly from the detection of a number of specific classes of events. Your support provider can be pro-active in advising you of the need for system and/or application upgrades.

ASI also helps your support provider become better at diagnosing, recognizing and resolving symptoms. The information gathered and reported on each symptom occurrence makes it easier to recognize and analyze trends. It reveals patterns and provides snapshots that can be immensely useful in helping recognize potentially problematic situations before they actually cause a problem.

ASI can be a powerful ally when dealing with vendors' support organizations. The detailed data it gathers about symptoms and the built-in audit mechanism that tracks frequency of symptom occurrence minimize the frustrating cycle of finger-pointing among vendors that unfortunately is a commonplace occurrence and leads to great end-user dissatisfaction.

Clear, concise and informative reports are an important tool for communicating with end-user organizations and supporting the symptom resolution process. The ASI automated reporting facility lets you define daily, weekly, monthly or on-demand reports via a simple point-and-click interface. Typically, definition of a report takes around a minute or two.

Reports produced by ASI can document the tangible value it delivers in a way that’s easy to understand. They can also be used to support symptom resolution and uncover and analyze important symptom and support trends.

 

System Administration and Management

One of ASI technology’s main features is the versatility of Scrips. Just about any operation performed with software can be implemented as a Scrip. This means that not only resolution of a symptom but most system administration and management procedures can be automated with Scrips.

For example, activities ranging from periodic system reboot to execution of selected programs, and system maintenance (e.g. periodic folder clean up, disk defragmentation and Scandisk execution), etc., etc. can all be carried out by Scrips.

Two of the main benefits derived from using Scrips to perform system administration and management activities are:

Single-point management System administration and management activities for all systems on a network can be managed from any device on the network. There is no need to manage each device individually.

Symptom prevention. If performed periodically and consistently over time, activities such as disk defragmentation, start-up executable management, folders clean-up, and system reboot help prevent and reduce symptom occurrence. Often, however, they are not carried out because of the cost and amount of manual effort involved compared to the perceived benefit they deliver. Scrips automate system administration and management activities on a network-wide basis and make it possible to leverage their benefits to the fullest with minimum cost and effort.

Control

Because computer systems are a critical resource that any business depends on for its day-to-day operation and its ultimate success, it’s important to know their status at all times, and take problem prevention action whenever possible.

As described above, system maintenance procedures performed automatically by ASI represent an important first step enhancing system availability and increasing end-users’ productivity.

Two other important ingredients of an effective IT operation are critical and timely information, and preventive action when important events that could have a negative impact on end-user productivity occur. For example:

	Reception and screening of e-mail messages with attachments that might contain a virus
	System changes
	Silent software installation (e.g. Spyware)
	Changes in configuration (e.g. a user inadvertently changes printer configuration and can’t print anymore)
	Unauthorized software installation by an end-user
	Addition of potentially dangerous programs (e.g. viruses) to run at system start-up
	Shortage of critical resources
	Disk space
	Memory

ASI Gives You Control and Added Protection

ASI’s e-mail attachment management feature complements the protection provided by anti virus applications. It lets you screen e-mail attachments coming either through local, or remote mail servers, or through Web-based e-mail services on a system-by-system basis.

This gives you a powerful additional safeguard against new viruses not yet included in the virus database of your anti virus application.

ASI prevents the unauthorized addition of programs to run at system start-up.

It automatically gathers and delivers to your desktop critical information about:

	Software installations and removals
	Printer installations and removals
	Changes to the configuration of important applications
	Memory capacity
	Processor utilization
	Disk capacity
	Network utilization (on Microsoft Windows NT-based systems only)
	Network status

You receive only actionable information, not mountains of irrelevant data.

 

Long Term Relationships

With ASI, gone are the days of support providers who are quick to take your money but won’t give you the time of day when problems occur. And, as soon as they can, they flee to “greener pastures” aka customers with bigger pockets.

ASI is the platform that enables the delivery of timely support and information, affordably for you and profitably for your support provider. It notifies your support provider as symptoms occur and either diagnoses them automatically or provides the diagnostic information to resolve them. This means that problems can be solved quickly, without being onsite, keeping you informed about the status at all times.

 

Futures

Scrip coding is an ongoing activity. In addition to vendors' support knowledge bases, data gathered through symptom detection and logging activities of ASI, together with feedback from all end-user sites, provides a rich source of the symptoms that matter the most to end-users. End-users’ needs have top priority as the Scrip database of automated solutions is built and deployed.

Features and Benefits