Well, Jim, "Pure Luxury" (I say in my best "I can top that" voice).

Here at Portion Pac, we have one IS manager (consumed with paper work and
meetings most of the time), one 'programmer' (me) and two network/PC people
(senior and junior level).  We support a 987, and 20 servers (Netware, NT,
and Linux) scattered at 5 plants ranging from Ohio to Florida to California.
There is no (stress NO) expertise at any plant.  Corporate wide there are
about 450 PCs.  And, all the remote salesmen have laptops (or 'rectangular
plastic things' as one was called in a Dilbert strip) and all possess a
"salesman's PC skills".  NT was forced on us by our parent corporation to
run Exchange (we call it our CORD system - Crash or Reboot Daily).

All of our business systems are on the e3000 and custom, in-house code
(about 1200 programs) written in Cobol, Powerhouse and (gasp) RPG.

Just like you, every problem comes through us.  Every new PC for any plant
comes here for configuration before being shipped to the plant.  One user
even told our senior network person that it was our job to be experts on
every aspect of MS Office to answer any remote 'how-to' question a user may
have.

The IS manager is great at supporting us (gotta say that - he's on the
list), but above that - forget it. Upper management changes direction and
priority based on who complained last.  And she held the IS mgr responsible
(on performance review) because he didn't magically stop MCI from constantly
dropping frame relay circuits to our plants (couldn't change providers -
another edict from corporate).  She also feels we are overstaffed.

Can't say I've ever driven a forklift, though, so you beat me on that.  But
I have had to drive and use a lift many times.

To answer the original question about support of PCs and HP3000 - simple.
Just cut your staff so lean that they have to learn everything about
everything!!!!  It works here.

Steve Miller
Portion Pac, Inc
[log in to unmask]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim Phillips [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>
> Donna Garverick <[log in to unmask]> writes (in reply to Al):
>
> > > Do you have separate PC an HP3000s teams.
> >
> > absolutely.  we have an nt admin group -- strictly server
> s/w oriented --
> > plus a pc support group.  the pc group handles almost
> everything related
> to
> > our pc's.  this includes hardware upgrades/repairs,
> configuration, s/w
> > installs and set-ups.
> >
> > > How do you resolve the
> > > conflicting priorities put on you by Support and
> Development issues?
> >
> > i'm not terribly sure what you mean....  by separating the groups by
> > function, there's not a problem...at least not for us....
>       - d
>
> Well, Donna, all I can say is "It must be nice"! :-)
>
> Here at ol' Therm-O-Link, we have two people in IS supporting
> two 918's; 5
> NT servers; 37 PC's in an office environment; and 18 PC's on
> the shop floor;
> plus assorted line, laser, ink jet, and bar code printers
> (about 40).  Not
> to mention that these are spread between three locations in
> Ohio and one
> location in Texas.  Oh, and did I mention that we do in house
> development in
> Cobol on the HP3000?  Plus manage the frame relay network linking the
> facilities?
>
> As to Support versus Development, if it's important to my boss, it's
> important to me! ;-)
>
> Although some people get upset when we tell them they have to wait for
> such-and-such, I've never had my boss fail to back me up when
> push came to
> shove (maybe I'm just lucky!), but we have had some sticky
> situations when
> multiple failures have occurred....But people just get used
> to waiting or
> fixing it themselves.  And we also use some outside
> contractors for the
> really intricate stuff (like most of the NT management), but
> we are the
> first contact for any and all problems.  From "I can't print
> landscape in
> Excel" to "I think the backup didn't run on my NT server" to
> "Uh-oh, the
> invoicing batch job aborted", we handle it all.
>
> Oh, and did I mention that I was running the forklift in the
> warehouse a
> weekend ago?!
>
>
>
> Jim Phillips                            Manager of Information Systems
> E-Mail: [log in to unmask]     Therm-O-Link, Inc.
> Phone: (330) 527-2124                   P. O. Box 285
>   Fax: (330) 527-2123                   Garrettsville, Ohio  44231
>