12/07/99 - Ingram Micro Technicians Gear Up for Windows 2000 Trouble-Shooting
Dec. 6 (The Buffalo News/KRTBN)--Software trouble-shooter Tom Mann has his eye on W2K.
Windows 2000, Microsoft Corp.'s new operating system for workstations and network computers, launches early in the new millennium. On Feb. 17 -- maybe sooner, published reports say -- W2K will hit store shelves.
Mann, leader of the Windows 2000 technical support team at Ingram Micro in Williamsville, is the company's last line of defense against bugs. As a support technician with advanced Microsoft training, he gets calls that stump other technicians.
"If you're an end user, you'd call the guy you bought it (Windows 2000) from, and that guy would call me," he said.
Ingram Micro, a major wholesaler of Microsoft products, will funnel calls for help from the eastern half of the country into its Williamsville call center. A smaller support group at headquarters in Santa Ana, Calif., handles the West Coast.
To demonstrate its readiness, Ingram Micro gave a tour of the support group's hive of blue cubicles last week.
"We love trouble-shooting -- we do a lot of it," said Bob Shaw, senior vice president of technical support. Shaw is a veteran of Microsoft product launches going back to the pre-Pentium operating systems. He lists them on a scratch pad like a countdown -- Windows 98, 95, 3.1, 3.0 ...
Microsoft isn't sure Ingram Micro will be the biggest distributor of its newest operating system -- Ingram bills itself as Microsoft's biggest customer. But biggest or not, it will play a major role in the product launch.
"Clearly Ingram Micro is a very important strategic partner of ours,", Microsoft lead product manager Craig Beilinson said.
Although it sounds like a successor to the consumer-oriented Windows 98, Windows 2000 actually replaces Microsoft's business-oriented Windows NT operating system. Advanced server versions of Windows 2000 run high-end machines that deliver e-mail in big companies or host Web sites. One version, Windows 2000 Professional, runs on high-end desktops.
Still, if you want the latest thing running your home PC, no one's going to stop you from buying a $219 upgrade package from Windows 95 or 98. That's exactly what many business desktops will be doing, Beilinson predicts.
"Windows 2000 isn't designed for consumer use," he said. "We just don't want my grandmother buying it by mistake and having a bad experience."
Handling bad experiences is the job of the 140 technicians at Ingram Micro's complex on Wherle Drive. They and another group of 25 on the West Coast handled 1.9 million calls last year.
By the time W2K hits the shelves, Mann's 28-person team of W2K experts will have completed 3,500 hours of training -- three weeks per person, on average. Mann's education included a 2 1/2-day stint at Microsoft headquarters near Seattle. He first started learning about Windows 2000 at a conference in Orlando back in 1997, when Windows 98 was still in development.
Ninety-five percent of calls are what are termed "pre-sales," Shaw says. They're the easy ones.
"What's the right video board, sound player, DVD an scanner -- not just what works, but the best solutions," Shaw says. The more calls like that from computer stores and installation consultants, the fewer problems will crop up down the line.
After the launch date, the post-sales calls start coming in, from buyers with problems. Pre-sales calls are free and take an average of 7 minutes. Post-sales calls take 15 to 20 minutes and cost $35 per "incident," meaning until the problem is solved.
"A lot of times they're desperate," Mann said. "I do feel for customers -- you try to put yourself in their shoes."
Improvements should make Mann's job easier on this launch. The "plug-and-play" features of Windows 2000 make it easier to connect devices like printers, a notorious system headache.
"It's completely seamless -- much better than Windows 98," he said.
But no amount of development and testing can eliminate product launch headaches.
Mann's most chilling support call came a few years ago, from a consultant responsible for a company's computer network.
"He did something he shouldn't have," Mann says, putting it mildly. Instead of an upgrade, the consultant installed the operating system from scratch, wiping clean an array of 50 hard disks. It was a simple misstep that erased 50 billion characters of accounting and financial data.
"He fully expected to be fired," Mann says.
When a call comes in, Mann can draw on a 40 gigabyte database of technical documents. But you can bog down searching the data for the answer -- he prefers to trouble-shoot actively.
For example, a customer might call and say, "I can't get to my server," he said. Clicking on the icon for a network connection fails. Mann would try to decipher any error message that popped up on the screen, moving in narrowing circles toward the origin of the problem. "You'd see if low-level networking is down, then eliminate other possibilities," he said. Mann might get the customer to run a diagnostic utility program to analyze the system and narrow down the problem.
Ingram Micro's glass-and-brick complex on Wherle Drive seems capable of sustaining an around-the-clock battle with software bugs. Its cafeteria, decorated with the flags of 16 nations where Ingram Micro ships, can seat 400 people in a shift. ATMs, dry cleaning, film drop-off -- even a gift shop are on site.
Technicians have tested three pre-release versions of W2K on a special network, quarantined from the main system that runs Ingram Micro.
But Shaw says there's no zero-hour tension, no plan to stay open past 8 p.m., when the last technicians usually call it a day.
Instead, when the electronic scoreboard hanging from the ceiling shows a heavy call volume, other tasks like training and writing computer code for internal use are pushed aside.
NT's reliability, said to be less crash-prone than Microsoft's consumer-oriented operating systems, should lighten the trouble-shooters' burden.
"In a room here there's a Windows NT server that's been running for 4 1/2 years without a crash," Mann said.
But some NT users think Mann will never have to worry about job security.
Joseph Graves, a network consultant in Buffalo, tells customers to delay the upgrade until Microsoft distributes the first package of bug-fixes.
"NT systems are prone to major lockups," said Graves, owner of Computer Solutions Unlimited. He arrived one recent morning to discover an NT e-mail server in his office had frozen inexplicably at 2:36 a.m.
"Trying to find out what happened to it would take too long," he said. "You just reboot it and go."
By Fred O. Williams
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(c) 1999, The Buffalo News, N.Y. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. MSFT, IM, END!A$3?BF-WINDOWS
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