BT is heading up a £46.9m, five-year IT services contract to revamp the infrastructure of transport company FirstGroup. The business consortium - comprised of BT, HP and US-based MegaPath Networks - will link up 700 FirstGroup sites in the UK and 300 in the US. A spokesman for FirstGroup told silicon.com: "BT's going to connect all our sites. This is the first stage of the project."

Microsoft UK's chief security advisor, Ed Gibson, has attacked the government over what he claims is a lack of effective reporting channels for internet-related crime. Speaking at the launch of a CBI report into online security for small and medium-sized businesses, Gibson said that while creating documents was all well and good, very few companies had any real notion of who they should report an electronic attack to. He said: "I bet if I asked anyone in this room, 'Who would you report an electronic crime to in the police?', no one would know. We are ignorant of the size of the problem. There is a real lack of meaningful statistics."

Lenovo has become the latest company to begin integrating high-speed mobile data into its laptops. On Tuesday, the company announced that it had signed a deal with Vodafone to allow Lenovo laptops to carry connectivity for its third-generation (3G) and GPRS wireless technologies. In the future, they will also tap HSDPA technology. HSDPA, also known as super 3G, is being introduced by network operators this year and is much faster than standard 3G services.

Nearly two-thirds of UK companies believe their outsourcing contracts are "not delivering" the benefits they had hoped for. A survey of 100 companies by law firm Denton Wilde Sapte has found nine out of 10 outsource some aspect of their business - generally IT support or call centre functions but also business process operations such as human resources or accounting.

IT helpdesk workers have a tough job - most take considerable abuse from the end users they're hired to assist. According to a recent survey, 81 per cent of IT support workers have been verbally abused by callers. And about one in five admitted to receiving calls that were so bad they considered quitting on the spot. Older male callers were found to be the most difficult to deal with. Women and younger callers were easier on the helpdesk workers, the research showed.

Mercer Human Resource Consulting is spending $58m on a new IT procurement and helpdesk support system for its workers in the UK and the US. Under the five-year contract, IBM will use its OrderNow procurement software to build an online catalogue which Mercer employees can use to order IT products such as laptops, servers and software, with the aim of reducing the number of one-off orders.

With three main offices in the UK, LexisNexis Butterworths publishes information in online, print and CD-ROM formats. The company's incumbent helpdesk software, which provided basic call logging functionality, was increasingly unable to meet the company's needs. Analysts could not easily prioritize or track the status of open calls, or share knowledge with other teams. Infra's easy integration with key systems enabled LexisNexis Butterworths to populate a single Configuration Management database quickly and easily with user information automatically imported from Active Directory and asset information from LANDesk.

There are a number of options available for helpdesk/ticketing systems, and they range in price and complexity from free and very simple to extremely expensive and involved. Some popular options include Remedy, Clarify, Quantum, and Request Tracker (RT). The author's preference leans towards RT, coming in at free and extremely flexible on the cost and complexity spectrum. RT works well in small, mid-sized, and some larger environments. RT uses a back-end database, a perl-based main engine, and front-end web and mail interfaces. The recommended database for use with RT is MySQL, but it also works with PostgreSQL. The recommended web interface is the Apache web server with mod_perl or mod_fastcgi.

The Consortium is a national procurement and fulfilment business with customers in the education, training, and social care sectors. The company previously used Lotus Notes for messaging, but found that new staff rarely had experience of this software, placing excessive demand on its helpdesk team. The Consortium needed a new server solution to align with its business objectives. Working with Microsoft partners Applicable and Anix Group, it implemented Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Active Directory, directory service, simplifying management of the network environment and users. Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 messaging and collaboration server supports Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, helping users to manage and organise their e-mail messages, schedules, tasks, notes, and contacts.

Sluis Municipality wanted to replace its StarOffice environment. Compatibility problems with Linux and its other software were having a negative effect on staff productivity and the helpdesk was being inundated with calls. So, following a comprehensive price/quality comparison, Sluis Municipality decided to migrate to Microsoft Office System to increase its staff productivity. As this comes with an eLearning solution, the authority also saved a lot of money that would otherwise have been spent on training.