User and virtual organisation support in EGEE

User and virtual organisation support in EGEE Providing adequate user support in a grid environment is a very challenging task due to the distributed nature of the grid. The variety of users and the variety of Virtual Organizations (VO) with a wide range of applications in use add further to the challenge. The people asking for support are of various kinds. They can be generic grid beginners, users belonging to a given Virtual Organization and dealing with a specific set of applications, site administrators operating grid services and local computing infrastructures, grid monitoring operators who check the status of the grid and need to contact the specific site to report problems; to this list can be added network specialists and others. Wherever a user is located and whatever the problem experienced is, a user expects from a support infrastructure a given set of services. A non-exhaustive list is the following: a) a single access point for support; b) a portal with a well structured sources of information and updated documentation concerning the VO or the set of services involved; c) experts knowledgeable of the particular application in use and who can even discuss with the user to better understand what he/she is trying to achieve (hot- line); help integrating user applications with the grid middleware; d) correct, complete and responsive support; e) tools to help resolve problems (search engines, monitoring applications, resources status, etc.); f) examples, templates, specific distributions for software of interest; g) integrated interface with other Grid infrastructure support systems; h) connection with the grid developers and the deployment and operation teams; i) assistance during production use of the grid infrastructure. With the Global Grid User Support (GGUS) infrastructure, EGEE attempts to meet all of these expectations. The current use of the system and the user satisfaction ratings have shown that the goal has been achieved with a certain su