It’s time for another guest editor of the End of Day today – me. I work in the Web Portal Team along with Pete and Colin (and many others, too – two more developers, our team of designers and our content writers). Unfortunately, despite being the guest editor, it’s actually fallen on Colin’s shoulders to hit the all important button and make the post live – I’ve got to dash off for a train!

 Comms

It’s been an interesting day, for some good reasons and some bad. On the plus side, Matt has learned quite a bit about traffic management, and is set to learn quite a bit more; Mand has been training new CSC agents for most of the day; we have located the cause of the recent intermittent email issues and should have a fix rolled and two additional relay servers by tomorrow; and the day is almost over. Chris and James have been soldiering on in the various forums and Bob has spent most of his time several floors higher up than normal liaising with the networks team.

On the more negative side we’ve had more email issues return though this has allowed us to identify the issue and arrange a fix.

Marketing

After a short interruption the “one portal” emails will all be sent today, for Force9 and Free-Online customers specifically. Sneak peeks available to blog readers on the Force9 or Free-Online site.

We’re also really pleased that already more than 100 people have responded to the Home Phone improvements email on Monday by switching to PlusNet for line rental and calls – http://www.plus.net/residential/phonecalls/home/index.shtml – the more the merrier!

Development

Today’s Development EoD comes from Ben who recently joined the Development Team.

“It will be a month tomorrow since I began working at Plusnet and so far, it’s been a really good experience! I spent the first week trying to get settled in, getting my alpha box set up and trying to come to terms with the volume of php code that I need to work with (and indeed how much knowledge is shared between the guys that sit around me!).

My first task was to investigate a number of reported problems… a great way of forcing me to actually dip into the code base and figure out what is really going on. It also gave me a chance to really make a difference, undertaking productive work right from the start. I’ve since moved on to do some development work on API’s for a new application that is currently being developed.

Obviously as a new starter I have a LOT to learn in a relatively short space of time – The atmosphere here is such that I have never been made to feel annoying by just asking the questions that I need answered. My hat goes off especially to my mentor (Rowan) for putting up with being the first port of call!

So all in all, I’m excited about being here! I am looking forward to a future at Plusnet and the opportunities that have been opened up to me in just four weeks of being here.”

Customer Service Centre

This afternoon some of the trainees have made their first appearence onto the CSC floor sitting with members of the customer services team in order to get some experience of listening to our customers.

The main reasons for customers calling our support centre today have been:

(1) Provisioning Updates 25%: Customers calling for updates on migrations, order completed install diary not being updated so account does not activate.

(2) New Faults 25%: Various types, no pattern (auth, sync ect)

(3) Sales 15%: signups over the phone, customers wanting information on packages etc

(4) Router Config 15%: Mainly new customers had hardware arrive and need to go through the setup, some existing customers wanting router settings

(5) Email: 15% Missing/delayed emails (related to the current problems) and customers wanting help setting up new mailboxes.

Products

We’ve had a very productive meeting today with an external VoIP provider, further discussions are to be had as we look at improvements to our Broadband Phone service.

We had our weekly traffic management meeting this afternoon. The following are some of the key points discussed:

The gateway PTE-AG1 encountered a line card issue last Wednesday disconnecting a number of customers, this has meant the platform has been slightly out of balance with less customers connected on PTE-AG1 than the other gateways.

Packet loss has been low, the maximum drops over the last 7 days have been

Titanium – 0% (tolerance 0%)
Gold had a max of 0.0269% (tolerance 0%) which seems to have just been a single drop when the platform was out of balance
Silver 0.2506% (tolerance 2.5%)
Bronze 3.7175 % (tolerance 5%)
Best Effort 4.4197% (tolerance 5%)

The afternoon period midday to 4pm has been a busy time on the network, likely because of the school holidays, yesterday and today we’ve seen lower amounts of gaming in particular in the afternoon as the schools go back.

Roadmap items coming up, these are events that could have an effect on usage:

• Rugby World Cup starts on 7th September, ITV have video streaming, BBC radio commentary. Most games are in an evening/weekend so most people will watch on TV/at the pub rather than streaming at work.
• Windows Update – 11th September. No details on patches yet and size yet.
• Cricket – 8th September. It’s on a Saturday so likely little impact from people listening online
• US TV – The 4400’s penultimate episode of the series – 9th September, The Colbert Report and The Daily Show return – 9th September. Big kick off is the return of Prison Break on 17th September (shown on Sky on 24th September).
• End of the school holidays this week, universities towards the end of the month. Expect to see a switch of usage from afternoon to evening.
• Apple announcement – 5th September, likely new iPods possibly with wifi and Internet radio capabilities.
• Films – Shoot ‘Em Up – 9th September

We are also currently looking at the best way of publishing the calendar to the Community site

We also discussed future blog topics as well as looking into current usage drivers, such as how much usage iTunes and Facebook use and looking at the type of content delivered by Akamai.

Web Portal Team

Our Online Support Team (responsible for the support pages) have been working on rolling out the Product Change Policy today and this is now live. We’ve also been continuing to look at the Manage My Mail tool, and continued work on trying to migrate the old Portal forums in to the Community Site.

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This entry was posted by Tamlyn on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 6:23 pm and is tagged with and is posted in the category EOD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a reply below. Pinging is currently not allowed.