Welcome one and all back to the EOD, this should hopefully give you a glimpse into the world that is PlusNet.

We’ve been getting ready for the ISPA 5-a-side competition tomorrow and making sure our players are in peak physical condition!

Well off we go with the middle of the week posts.

First up today we have Dan from Networks:

My name’s Dan Payne, I’ve been part of the Network Operations department since May 2007 and I’ve been at PlusNet nearly two years now.

Originally I joined PlusNet as part of the internal IT support team which I was in for over a year, this then lead onto being asked to join Networks team in May 07 to help with providing a more in depth network support for customer queries and issues.

Today I have been investigating customer tickets relating to email queries, business accounts and normal day to day generic questions. This means I have to delve deep into some of the core network/server infrastructure and hopefully resolve the issue the customer has. I’ve also been training the DSpam filters, this will hopefully, over time, reduce the amount of spam the customer will receive to their Inbox or at least tag it correctly.

Another side to my job is managing the mail platform which involves reporting of mailbox storage levels. This means making sure the customer is managing their mailbox efficiently and also providing assistance if needed. I have also been looking at our traffic management system and reviewing this weeks port requests for Gaming, VPN and VoIP port additions, by adding the ports to a profile this provides a better experience to the customer as traffic is prioritised accordingly.

Followed quickly by James from Comms:

Today in Comms, it’s been a pretty hectic day.

Bob’s been up in Networks keeping in touch with the latest developments.

Chris made us a cuppa earlier and then complained endlessly that it was James’ turn! I think that’s all he’s done :/

Mand and James have been in loads of meetings, working on the forums and doing lots of little bits and pieces. Mand’s also been involved in some fairly hefty project work which we’ll hear more about tomorrow.

Next up is Marc representing our Developers:

Hi, I’m Marc and I’m fairly new here at PlusNet - I’m about to complete my first month as a PHP Developer.

The thing that strikes me most about working here is, and was a bit of a culture shock at first; was the level of quality control that’s involved in putting any changes live for the world to see.

Take today - I’ve currently got 6 problems to fix; and for different problems today I’ve:
+ Made some code changes in PHP - and passed these onto a colleague to review and make sure they conform to our coding standards.
+ Made a change to an SQL statement, which will have to be reviewed by a database administrator.
+ Passed another problem onto the first stage of quality control, where the team will test that I’ve actually fixed the problem as required on a test server.
+ Inherited another problem, which will go to another level of quality control, where they will check that any changes made will not affect any other part of the system.

None of these problem fixes have been made on the live servers, they won’t be until we’re absolutely sure that the problems has been fixed and the changes won’t cause problems themselves.

We’ve got Jonathan providing the update from the Web Team:

Today has been primarily about project work.

We’re going to be offering people the chance to contribute their own support videos and the tutorial for the software we use is nearing completion.

Work has also started on rewriting the domains section of the support site, having received much valuable feedback from those rating our support pages.

We’re also looking at improving the way we track usage of the support pages on the portal, but this is still in its early stages.

Martyn has given us this from Marketing:

Today we’ve been working on a mailshot to communicate the latest phase of the One Portal project. If you’re a Force9, Free-Online or Plus.Net.Uk customer you should get your email in the next few hours.

We’ve also been prototyping some new pages for forthcoming projects, and a couple of team members have been out of the office attending various meetings.

Chris has also been preparing for tomorrow’s ISPA football tournament - we’re hoping he’ll be bringing a shiny trophy back!

Finally we have Phil from the CSC:

1. Sales call - there has been a good flow of sales calls today, with a fair few converting into signups.

2. Provisioning updates - The prov updates have been a mixture of delays, updating details and initiating new house moves.

3. Router config - Once again we have had support requests for set up of routers provided by ourselves and 3rd parties.

4. Fault updates - Even though we are hitting target for fault resolution, we have some calls for updates after a very short space of time.

5. Email - This is an overflow from recent days email filtering which has now been rolled back.

Thanks for reading,

Chris

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This entry was posted by Chris Parr on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 5:06 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.