With all of the changes in office technology, I have been pondering new ways to screen qualified agents for desktop support. As we all know, "techies" speak a language all their own. The genuine article, however, doesn't need the multiple-choice crutch. They should be able to ace these essay tests WITHOUT google-ing the answer!

I would consider anyone who thoroughly and correctly answered 60% to be qualified, and an 80% score would be an ace. A wizard would get them all. Remember, NO GOOGLE-ING THE ANSWER ONLINE! (Everybody has to look up something, but a qualified support tech doesn't need to look up everything!)

Good answers to these questions indicate a good well-rounded generalist background, and I would expect that individual to pick up the particulars of this or that technology rather quickly.

Two words of caution:

A. Technical knowledge does not imply design sense or knowledge of your particular business. A "techie" may produce a web site that is technically brilliant,  but lacks aesthetic appeal, or relevance to business needs and processes.

B. This quiz is intended to identify  well-rounded generalists. The quiz for Enterprise (Fortune 500 network gurus is quite a bit tougher!

1. What is a firewall? What does a small business do with one?What is a gateway?
2. What is port forwarding, or pinholes? Why might a small business need one?
3. What is a subnet? What are the most common private subnet address ranges?
4. Why is it important that related but separate offices have separate subnets?
5. Other than a USB adapter, what is another way of communicating with legacy (old style serial and parallel) devices? What are the advantages over USB?
6. What is Vista user account control? How do you turn it off and leave it off?
7. What is an exchange server? What are its advantages over POP servers?
8. What is an SMTP server?
9. What does the windows CMD program do?
10. What is a Linux-Apache-mySQL-PHP server? What do each of these words mean?
11. What is the difference between javascript and vbscript?
12. What are VNC, RDP, terminal servers, or citrix servers?
13. What is the difference between a “cloud” backup and an image backup?
14. What is a security certificate? Where are they used?
15. What is a VPN tunnel?
16. What is an SSID? What is WPA and WEP?
17. What does IDE or SATA refer to?
18. What is a fixed versus dynamic IP? What are the advantages of each?
19. What is a DNS server? What happens if the DNS server goes down?
20. What is an RJ45? What is an 802.11B and an 802.11G? A crossover cable?
21. What is the difference between virus, spyware, and spam software?
22. What is a modal window? What does ALT-TAB in windows do?

If you find someone who can answer the majority of these questions, they are definitely "in the game."