I have been asked, when talking about how our support ticket management strategy is set up, what sort of tier structure we use.

For those of you who don’t know, ticket management usually has some sort of “tiering structure” where a ticket starts at Tier 1, and then may get escalated to Tier 2, Tier 3 and so on, depending on how complex the issue is.  Three or four tiers are typical - but I’ve heard of structures as large as ten tiers.

If a ticket comes in, and the Tier 1 agent isn’t able to address it, she will escalate it to Tier 2, and so on.

RSS can be a little confusing.  I try to remember it like this: it's a no-nonsense way to push content from a website, or pull content into a website.

There are so many ways to promote your organization online today.  Indeed, you may be returning to work with a raft of 2013 resolutions to do just that.

Social communities have exploded over the past few years.  In working with our clients in the Support Department as well as promoting my own after-work projects, I know it feels like you have to be everywhere at once.  It seems that if you aren't taking advantage of every angle, then you are missing something. But just try to keep up with Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, LinkedIn, Feedburner, the new MySpace and on and on and on... not to mention your own website... it can be exhausting.

So get smart about it.

You have a very large video file, pdf or document... or you have a large number of smaller files.  These can become too large to store on your web server, and they can quickly push your beyond your bandwidth allowance. So, what do you do?

One solution worth considering is Amazon's S3 cloud storage solution.  S3 allows you to store large amounts of data at a surprisingly low cost.  Additionally, the cost structure is scalable, so you will only ever pay for what you use.

What is Amazon S3?

S3 stands for Simple Storage Service.  Simply put in Amazon's own words, "Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It’s a simple storage service that offers software developers a highly-scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs."

All that means is that it is a service that allows you to store data in the "cloud" in a way that is fast, cheap and reliable.