CONS:
1. Infomercial is my first impression. Hyped is my second.
2. The "mother of all guides" lists only 43 sources.
3. Many critical Help Desk topics are not covered at all.
Mary Lenz is well known to many of us because of her writing and editing for Call Center magazine. I'm sad to report that much of the style of that publication made its way into this book, leaving me with the feeling I was reading an infomercial pretty much from start to finish. There is certainly some good information between the covers, but it's a bit oversold.
Two inconsistencies struck me in this book. First, exaggeration: "Mary is the world's leading expert on Help Desks." Really?! I haven't even heard Bill Rose, Ron Muns or Mikael Blaisdell make such a brazen claim. I would change the title to "Selecting a Call Tracking System" since the book clearly is much less complete than any of several recent help desk books. Even the main element of the book, it's listing of vendors, "the mother of all guides," only contains 43 companies. Microsoft's sourcebook lists over 100 solutions. This left my cynical little mind wondering if the listings had anything to do with advertising dollars. Second, the book has far too many editing errors in it. What an embarrassment given that Lenz is an editor by profession. In short, this all left me with the dissatisfied feeling that Lenz had more to offer. On to the good stuff!
The book offers some of the best material available (inexpensively) on selecting a call tracking system for your support center. This kind of information (RFP's, solution briefs, advice on buying a system) is commonly request on the HDESK-L listserv. While there are many on-line sources for this kind of information, Lenz's book is a nice contribution in this area. It also ensures rapid obsolescence as the market changes.
Lenz's book has a strong section on telecommuting for support staff--an area ignored or weakly covered in other support books. There are also a few paragraphs on internet-based support (definitely a hot topic these days). Finally, there are many nice quotations from industry leaders and (mostly) vendors. While this is a strength of the book, it exacerbates the (possibly incorrect) perception that Lenz is an editor, not an authority in her own right.
If you subscribe to Call Center Magazine or some other Call center publication, you will be able to research the various vendors yourself.
Don't spend your money on this book
For those researching help desks for the sake of a technical writing project or for managers looking for information to improve an existing help desk, this book will likely fall short of the mark.
The writer's style is encouraging and you do sense that she knows much more than the book contains. And the pages that deal with workplace ergonomics were nice, although they didn't seem alltogether pertitent to the main theme.
Not a bad book, but hardly "complete."