Discussion on:

Should corporate help desks support home PCs?

Given that large numbers of users use their home PCs to do work for their companies, that effectively they're providing extra time and a facility that the company does not pay for, I think it's churlish to not provide a limited level of support on an "at your own risk" basis.
You may not spend a lot of time on it, but it does help the company, creates a good impression with the users, and generally smoothes ruffled feathers.

As a local policy, we support Home PC's (for 40 local employees, not the whole corporate 4k+ user level). Webmail allows Windows, Mac and Linux users to access e-mail and work from home. Direct dial in is only supported for issued laptops. It has increased productivity, e-mail response time, and employee satisfaction.
Home PC hardware and software are the responsibilty of the employee, except Antivirus software to protect us/our contacts. A minimal expense. When hardware/software doesn't meet requirements, the employee must decide to upgrade or not. Upgrades are done if the employee brings in their machine, new hardware/software, and time is available. (means I work after hours for this on rare ocassions) We did have people changingconfigurations & settings and then blaming problems on what we had done days or weeks earlier. A little education took care of this problem. As for non-work related hardware and software upgrades, the understanding is we will do REASONABLE requests. Unreasonble expectations and home fiddling are at the owners risk. Anyone who repeatedly crashes their machines and does not respond to education attempts, has their privelage revoked. We had one employee who kept trying new video drivers not understanding that he couldn't make his old S3 card a Voodoo 3D via software. Another who thought he could get a "486 to run like a PII" through BIOS setting. After being blamed for what they were doing, I set a policy; "Don't change things if you don't know what you are doing - if you knew what you were doing, you wouldn't have brought it to me to fix in the first place - do it twice and I can't help you anymore." Works in this particular branch, but would probably not work in our large offices.

Not unless it is equipment paid for by the company.
A company's IT personnel usually have enough to do with the office equipment. Thrown in home equipment and their stress level goes up! I think that only proven operators that are productive working from home should be allowed to have 1. Hoem equipment paid for by the company, and 2. Have support at office site for home equipment (i.e. they bring the CPU to the office to be worked on.)

KevinS

If you tally up the cost of supporting non-standard environments, with software conflicts from kid's latest video drivers, hardware, various downloaded shareware, etc. - it quickly adds up to less than purchasing a basic, low end desktop PC for homeuse.

Our company has 20+ (full-time) at-home employees, and we offer full support on corporate-issued PCs we purchased for well under $1000. It gets more expensive when you have to buy two pc's for someone, and docked laptops can be pricey too, when you need Desktop power, but it's so much nicer to support environments that are known and stable.

Having said that, we do support home-pcs on an unofficial basis for those users who have the occasional business need, but that support gets done'as time permits' and is largely based on business priority, and a lot of those requests simply do not get completed.

If the Company is providing the PC, and the connectivity, whether through their company or trough an ISP, then they should provide the support, up to, and including, home visits by a technician, however, if the problem is proven to be caused by the user or a family member downloading or installing something not work related, then the user should be responsible for the technicians time and materials. If course, there are accidents, where someone spillls coffee in the keyboard, etc. that should be considered just that, an accident, that could have happened at the office, and should be covered, but most things that would typically happen at home can be clearly defined, and those incidents that are in a 'grey area' should be accepted and covered by the company. Of course, you could set up the pc to not allow the user to install anything by removing priviledges, but that could limit what they can accomplish, it would depend on what kind of work they have to do. This can be managed, with a little common sense. Just my thoughts! Jackie

I feel that because there are many factors involved when supporting home pcs, they should only be supported on a bring-in basis, ie., the user brings in his/her hardware into the helpdesk for repair. This will eliminate the need for going out to visit, which will save your helpdesk resources for more important support calls.

I believe it's best to give "limited" support to employees at home. Since they are working from home, it's generally not an overtime paid by the employer. Given employee's tech support will only help them to solve minor problems that could save them time and money long run. I don't think bring the machine in would benefit the company, but only add more headaches. Give the employee's only "suggestion" as to fix the problem if can't be solved by help desk.

Users' home PCs should be supported by the office help desk ONLY if the PC is the primary workstation AND the PC is owned by the company. If it is a secondary PC, used at home only once in awhile, it should be a low priority. If the PC is not owned by the company, NOBODY at that company should touch it. It can bring up liability issues.

I agree. I have helped many of our employees with their home PC by giving them my home phone number. If I could not easily solve their problem over the phone, I would tell them to bring it to work with them tomorrow. Only once did a dear friend callme his college son had screwed up his PC and was only home for the weekend. I had them bring it to my home on Friday night. I had it ready
for them Sunday noon.

Corporate companies that sell there own products have a support team that offers help to home users PC's as well as there Corporate accounts if this were to happen the small home base business like myself would lose valuable efforts to succeed as a prive organization who main target is home users in need of Consultation and Tecnical support with out the corporate overhead cost to pay for their employees time on the phone or actual Technical home visits. we need to make todays Tech support affordable to home users who can't afford the high cost in while teaching those who are computer illiterate the basic computer skills needed to succeed in our future of the 22nd century.

I can't believe anyone's legal department would let this happen. The liability issues are just too great. What happens when a tech has to drive out to someone's home to fix their home machine, and they get in an accident? Well, guess what, eitherthe company gets slammed in the lawsuit, or, if there wasn't an official policy about fixing home machines, it was only "winked" at, I'd really hate to be that technician, since that effectively means you left work without permission, you'll have tobe fired so the company won't face liability from the old lady you hit. Most of all, in every IT dept. I've worked at, I've never had time to finish all I'm supposed to do anyways...

I'm currently supporting 4 Home PC's, however I will only provide support if the user has a broadband connection otherwise they are working @ their own discretion. It's a good way to keep track of what they are doing as well, for those curious bosses that are shelling out for these home PC's.

In general, I tell users that we will not support their home machines. But, as I'm sure everyone knows, I can't always adhere to that policy. If, for instance, a member of upper management asks me to fix his home computer, the policy no longer matters unless I want to find myself a new job. There are some other times when the general user population will get this courtesy as well, but rarely. You're just asking for trouble.

I think only if they are going to pay me out of their own pocket which isn't going to happen. So the answer is no. They can call the vendor.

cee

The level of support provided must be defined as part of the telecommuting package.

Typically user specific problems are treated as the responsibility of the individual users. These are issues such as software versions and compatibility and hardware problems and failures.

Office side problems, however, become the responsibility of IT. These include firewall issues, modem and phone line availability, remote access software (i.e. web front ends to standard office packages), etc. I usually find this latter case to be more of a problem than the first case.

Telecommuting and remote offices in general do require additional IT support. It must be decided up front, though, what happens when something fails, who does it, and who paysfor it.

Wayne seems to have the proper business take on the matter and brings up the proper business response - additional support is required and there needs to be a formal recognition as to who is responsible, how service is paid for, and who does what work. I like his analysis of the technical connection issues as being the largest part of the problem.

Working in an educational arena, our users' tend to be a little fuzzier on technology and the administrators generally clueless on network and service matters. We are already staffed at less than the industry average for support personnel so home support is pretty sketchy, though plenty of people stop by to ask if it is bad to spill sodas on keyboards (really bad or a little bad?) and can wedo anything about it? Given a choice, we wouldn't suypport anything not provided by the college for work at home.

We have attampted to limit direct access (Nobody RASes, Nobody Gets Hurt) to the network from outside while providing Web access toe-mail. Need a file at home? E-mail it to your home address.

Microsoft has fuzzed the situation by providing a low/no cost non-supported software license that will let our staff/faculty get copies of MS software on the campus license for use at home. So, if we supply/sell the software to them, and MS doesn't support it, can we refuse troubleshooting help for it? With no extra personnel, it is going to be some problem.

I once worked for a company which allowed its IT and senior employees to bring in their home pcs to get fixed because someones' bozo of a son couldn't get Quake to work with this new video card... It was all politics...

The only problem with thiswas that it got to a point where this work actually got in the way of fixing the companys' problems! The tied had started and there was no stopping it! One of my supervisors went so far as to complain directly to the president (because the IT manager didn't have the balls to do it) and and was roundly rebuffed for doing so!!!

We have both since left this company...

After having to support a small sales force that worked from home we decided that it was cheaper/easier to buy a laptop for them that only had company software on it. There are so many software applications available today and so many of them have compatability issues that we took the approach that having a dedicated computer would pay for itself.

If the company can afford it (as a previous employer of mine could), all home workers/telecommuters are required to use a company-purchased pc with floppy and cd drive removed. This (mostly) prevented users from installing their own software, while creating an easily supported computer environment.

As much as I dislike supporting mobile computing, I've discovered in these comments that my company handles it pretty well. What they do right:
1. Limit the overall cost by buying ONE easily transported PC (a laptop) for the mobile user. The users get a dock on their to make life easier when they are physically in the building.
2. The PC is for work only. No software we didn't supply.
3. We do support remote problems but if we can't fix it over the phone, you drag your butt to the office for repairs knowing you'll be down for a little while. We don't waste time on trouble shooting anything we didn't supply and we use a custom software load; minimum reload time is four hours.
4. #3 keeps users honest. I had a remote user living in New york (our closest offices were in MD and Chicago) who loaded a game and trashed her laptop. She had to fly to MD to get it fixed and we used a reload to do it.
What they do wrong:
We should have a minimum standard for user competency verifiedby hands-on testing. Anyone who's manager will cough up the money can be a mobile employee at our company. This spring, a VP with a new laptop couldn't remember how to get it out of the dock, lost her temper, and destroyed a new dock. The physicalunit had to be replaced and her brand new laptop required repairs.

I have had some of my funniest moments supporting home pcs.
At the College lecturers used their home PCs quite a lot for lesson preparation so we allowed a certain amount of leeway with supporting equipment not owned by the college.

One incident sticks in my mind: A businessstudies lecturer asked our advice about her system that kept freezing up. WE asked her to bring it in, tested it, no problem. this went on for a while, each tike she brought the system box in, it worked perfectly. I had cause to visit her at home, after dinner she remarked that he problem was persisting so between courses I took a peep.

the case of the system had a secondary role, namely as storage for her fridge magnt collection. I removed them all and put thm on her fridge. Problem solved!

that's a tough one!