Start your day the EUEM way and keep your IT support worries away

As a product manager, I often go from meeting to meeting. I depend on a reliable notebook battery, so I don’t have to hunt for a close-enough power outlet in every room. Recently, my laptop battery performance plummeted, with urgent low-power notifications and even shutdowns before I could plug in. The sudden failures were both inexplicable and maddening. Then IT department analyzed historical data from my laptop and determined exactly when the defect first became a problem.

Of course, I'm not the only one with such device problems that lead to frustration and reduced productivity. The good news is that many common problems are either predictable or even avoidable when IT teams use tools for End User Experience Management. Let me share four typical examples.

PC start-up times are one of the first things that IT staff can proactively include in EUEM monitoring. Ideally, users should not feel like they have time to get or drink their first cup of morning tea or coffee while their systems boot up.

Generally speaking, IT admins can start by analyzing:

• What is the average start time? 
• Are individual endpoints or types or groups of endpoints especially slow?
• Are there certain periods when start-up takes an unusually long time?
• Which software and hardware components are in the affected devices?
• Do certain start-up steps or processes, e.g., software/antivirus update checks, cloud syncing, etc., hold things up?

This and other information can be captured with EUEM solutions and enable IT admins to proactively eliminate the problems through software updates, hardware replacements or other steps. Beyond the typical issues, EUEM data can also help IT teams analyze and find solutions for other idiosyncratic or transient start-up behaviors.

It is not uncommon for different program versions to cause problems. Excel is a good example. In the past, Microsoft made repeated changes to the range of functions in different versions, resulting in things like macros that no longer worked or calculations that were wrong. But it was not always obvious why an Excel file was fine in one version but not in another.

That’s why it makes sense for IT teams to use EUEM to regularly check which applications or versions of an application crash more often and which are more reliable.

High memory usage and the associated loss of speed are also a nuisance in everyday work. A frequent cause is the heavy use of browsers and/or applications which use browser technology.

When a computer runs low on available memory, it uses its hard drive as a virtual RAM swap space. This is an additional CPU and energy hog – which translates into a significant loss of performance, especially in older devices that do have an SSD.

At the same time, computers generally tend to get slower over time. This is usually due to new software with new background processes, drivers and other accessories. In addition, OS updates typically require more processor and memory resources than their predecessors.

Slowdowns sometimes can be reduced or eliminated by "cleaning up" the registry, removing old software, or similar measures. Ultimately, reinstallation often helps everything run faster until the computer requires upgrading or replacement. EUEM can alert IT admins to these factors early on so they can be addressed before performance suffers too much.