Hi,
I recall some discussions in the past on how may staff people employ on the ground to service day-today IT calls, but can't find the post -so apologies in advance if this is a reposting.
I'm interested to know how many IT Staff people have on the ground to do the following,
1) Handle and resolve user helpdesk queries
2) Manage Antivirus & windows patching infrastructure
3) Package and deploy software
4) Manage, develop (and troubleshoot!) the Altiris Infrastructure
Obviously, and idea of the desktop count is good. And how do you feel (if at all) using Altiris has helped? Be honest now!
I'll kick off.... we support nominally 2,500 desktops and have ....
1) 11 FTE (full time equivalent) staff to handle and resolve user helpdesk queries
2) 0.5 FTE to manage Antivirus & windows patching
3) 1.5 FTE to package and deploy software
4) 1.5 FTE to manage, develop (and troubleshoot!) the Altiris Infrastructure
This
doesn't include the network admins who keep the packets flowing, and the Novell and Windows admins who support the user authentication site, file services, web servers and citrix boxes etyc.
What Altiris did for us: intially it was quite the doom monger -it told us how terribly badly we were managing our desktop estate. We lived in a world of plausible deniability until all the inventory started flowing in. Since then we've standardised massively, and have a pretty good OS and software baseline. We used to have NT, Windows 2000 (various SP) and XP (various SP) -now we have pretty much XPSP2/3 across the board.
Contrary to our initial expectations perhaps, we haven't saved any staff in this process, we are just managing the desktops more consistently & proactively. We have rolling programs in place to update things like Adobe Reader, Flash, Java, Office, IE and Firefox -something which was inconveivable just a couple of years a go.