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Familiarizing Your Admins with New Hardware?
HCIGuy asks: "I'm the technical communications manager for a company that sells and implements infrastructure for data centers. We often put in equipment and software that substantially change the environment, such as high availability clusters and enterprise data management. We've known for a long time that the critical post-engagement time for admins was one to six months, after which, even without help, admins are usually comfortable with the new stuff. We're concerned with those first few months, and asking both ourselves and the universe of admins what would help during that time. We already provide system configuration manuals, and of course there are manuals and training classes provided by manufacturers. But what else would help an admin during the "break-in" period? What's been of the greatest help in the past? What would be on your wish list?"
If you can't give them an onsite loaner then get them remote access to one. (i.e. a seperate lab hanging off of a DSL line or something with secure shell access.)
Network Appliance has a "walk in" lab here in Boulder that they let us "check out".
Nothing beats hands on experience, and you will build goodwill with the admin community.
It would also be advantageous to include a *cheap* training course with the product. With a bad market no one is spending extra money on training.
A deeply discounted training course would get you brownie points with the admins too.
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Or better yet, a place where the admin can look at information/solutions posted by people that already have banged and broken the stuff.
/? or --help exist if on windows or *nix respectively)
If possible it's a good idea to keep the same "feel" for systems the likely targets have used before (like making sure
You mention that you offer training classes. For the sake of this discussion I will assume that your classes are of high quality and technical depth and not simply, a weeks worth of marketing speak.
If this is the case, then there isn't much more that the admins need, except perhaps a half dozen free tech support calls to people who actually know about the product. But that's the rub, isn't it? Most of your sales don't include training classes.
This is a very common, if not universal problem. Training is always the first thing to get cut from the budget. This is usually followed but the cutting of netwaork management equipment/software. Simply put, your training classes need to be sold of given to EVERY customer that buys from you. Furthermore, if there are 10 admins that will be managing this new equipment, you need to send all 10 to the classes. The old story of, we'll send Bob and then he can train the rest of you when he gets back just doesn't work. It never has.
The ideal scenario goes like this:
1. Vendor engineers spend a month on site learning the clients network.
2. Clients admins go to training while the vendor's engineers support the client's network and start building out the new gear.
3. Client's admins return from training and assist in the cut over to the new equipment.
4. Vendor leaves a small engineering force behind to solve technical issues that the client's admins are not yet ready to handle.
The two most important ingredients here are client training and vendor engineers that actually know WTF they are doing!