Howdy,

My name’s Mand, I work in the Comms team, and I’m today’s guest editor, as PJ is off to get his pirate costume ready for tomorrow!

Amongst the talk of pirates and ships and such like, we have actually done loads of work today believe it or not, and we’d like to tell you all about it.

The first update today comes from the Comms team:-

Here in Comms today we have mostly been eating doughnuts (again!) and attending project meetings.

We finished our Manage My Mail improvements (much to Chris’ delight) and put the finishing touches to our funky new product which you’ll see very soon. James has been keeping the forum community happy, Bob has been discussing our spam housekeeping tasks and the future of our VoIP platform, whilst I’ve been talking about Home Phone, a lot.

Your Web Portal update comes from Colin (on behalf of one of the Content Writers):-

Today’s main news from the web team is that the new features of the Manage My Mail tool have now been launched.

This includes a revamped summary page which will be the landing page for those wanting to administrate their email addresses.

A new wizard has been created to assist those wanting to create new addresses and we’ve tried to avoid use of technical terms where possible.

We’ve also much improved the support information provided to make setting up email software easier than ever.

Tuesday’s finance update is from Mark:-

Hello, Mark B here from Finance.

Today the team have closed 38 customer tickets – with only 7 tickets currently outstanding which we aim to clear before leaving tonight.

I have had an introductory meeting with PlusNet’s new network security manager this morning and this afternoon I have been investigating BT’s inter company charging process.

James is working on some routine reporting that we need to do to the Inland Revenue.

Nicola has been working on the team meeting agenda and also departmental budgets.

An update from Dmitry in Development:-

Hello, it’s Dmitry from Live Code Support.

Today was a relatively unexciting day for us, which means that we didn’t have to put out any major fires on the Live platform, a good thing no matter how you look at it. Dull days for us means we’re investigating and fixing problems, review the code changes that are about to go Live, and pick up the maintenance of the code that is live and stable already.

As for me, I’ve spent most of this and last week working on a new rollout system that will help us keep our code in check across the multitude of servers we’ve got.

Sounds easy, but when you stop for a moment to consider how many different kinds of servers we’ve got doing different jobs — portal servers, webmail servers, hosting servers, don’t even get me started! Some code has to be shared, some code is unique to a specific server type and shouldn’t even come near business critical services like billing, so in no time you can lose track of what change needs to be applied where. That is, unless you have an automated system that tells you what should go where and which servers are out of sync with the latest and greatest from our developers! Less room for human error means less bugs, means things just work, means everyone is happy!

Last but not least, the CSC Top 5:-

• Email problems – We have seen an increase in the amount of customers calling regarding email problems due to the email issues experienced today. We do still have customers calling for help with email client set up and also problems setting up new mailboxes.

• Router Setup – This is still a popular cause for contact, lots of customers need help with the set up of their router. The majority of the calls are still coming from customers trying to connect for the first time.

• Faults – One of the most common top five issues, customers are still calling for updates on current faults as they do not have access to check ticket updates or some do not realise that they can do this. We still have customers reporting new faults, the most common this evening seems to have been authentication faults.

• Provisioning updates – This is also still a common cause for contact, many customers are calling for updates on new orders and house move requests also. Some customers are not able to use the order tracker to monitor their order as they do not have internet access.

• Signup/Sales – We have seen an increase in the amount of customers wishing to sign up over the phone and also we seem to have more customers calling with sales queries. Often the customers have already seen the packages online however they want to confirm things before completing the sign up process.

A late addition from Mark in the Networks team…

Hi my names Mark

I’ve been working at plusnet now for over 8 years, as a network engineer for about 7 of those in varying roles. I’m mainly responsible for the operation running of the network equipment (ie mostly kit with a cisco or juniper badge on it) but do dip my hands into other areas occasionally.

Today I assisted in debugging the oldest ticket in our pool where some arcane systems that still exist from the parbin platform where not updating DNS for a customer. With a bit of luck and voodoo we managed to understand some wacky perl modules enough to work out where the updates were coming from and fix the customers issue.

My next task was a request for remote access to our internal systems that had been poorly thought out by the requester and so at the last minute they discovered they did not have the access they required. I had to come up with a solution that enabled the access. This was completed using some nice (and previously unused functionality in our VPN system).

Now back to my Firewall rules……

Bookmark to:

This entry was posted by Mand on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 7:51 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.