Hidden Hazards: The Neglected Outlook Errors Lurking in Unmonitored Citrix Systems
At my previous employer, I would travel around the US to see, hear, and witness employee issues in our field offices that we in IT were completely unaware of. In some cases, the issues were totally off the radar and never reported, and in others, there was familiarity with the issue, but no understanding of how widespread the scope was.
In one instance, I stopped by an office that showed me issues with Outlook and an error message they received every hour or two that claimed they were disconnected from the Exchange server. They also received fatal exception errors in Outlook that caused the application to crash. Strangely enough, they chose not to call it into the Help Desk, and I soon found out why. They had been told it was a known problem and was being worked on. In this case too, Outlook was being hosted in Citrix due to integration needs with other applications in Citrix.
I noted the issue, reported it to our Citrix team, and continued on with my travels. Most of my trips were two weeks in length at a time, visiting a different office (sometimes two) every day. So, as I worked my way from East to West, I started seeing the same recurring themes and issues. This Outlook crash was one of those cases. At every office I visited that was running this configuration, I heard and saw the same problems in Outlook. Employees would get disconnected from Exchange and would see Outlook errors and crashes. And each office had previously been told the same story from the Help Desk – It’s a known issue. The result was that they suffered in silence. The “known issue” was only known to the Help Desk, and not to the team that needed to resolve the problem.
With the trend of users who don’t call issues into IT growing, we started to call it Ticket Fatigue. Ticket Fatigue is when employees get so frustrated with poor service and problems that don’t get fixed, they just give up calling and learn to live with the problem. It becomes the new normal for them. It’s kind of like lower back pain. After three or four visits to the doctor with no improvement, it becomes the “known problem” that you work around. You just live with it and stop calling.
The solution here is simple:
- Monitor your end-user environments, both Citrix servers as well as VDI and PC’s, to identify widespread issues immediately.
- Understand the scope of the issues without depending on your employees to call them in.
- Solve problems without being asked. And then ask employees with electronic campaigns how the “known issue” is impacting their workday and the business as a whole.
A side benefit is that you will also know quickly if the fix was effective because Nexthink alerts and dashboards will immediately quiet down. The only thing worse than having a widespread issue is deploying a fix and not knowing for a week if it is solved because ticket volumes came down.
Our employees shouldn’t have to ask us to fix a problem, especially those that we in IT created. We are professional IT organizations, and we should know about it. And with Nexthink Infinity, you can find everyone suffering from back pain, when and how frequently it hurts, and then deploy an effective fix without requiring them to call the doctor.
