Hi Community. It’s been another busy busy day today which is par for the course here at PlusNet Towers…

It’s my pleasure to pass on our EOD details for you today. My name is James Nelson and I’m currently covering as manager for one of our CSC shift teams. I normally work within the business team in CSC so working back on the shift presents some new and old challenges for me – namely getting into work for 7am, which reminds me I must get to bed early tonight.

Within the CSC our top 5 issues for the day are as follows:

Router Setups
Customers have been calling about general router setups and wireless installations. Customers not putting @plusdsl.net etc on the end of their username.

Email
Customer have called up about email client configuration and general sending and receiving of emails.

Provisioning updates
Customer have been called up about updates on their orders and their failed orders.

Max upgrades
Customer still on 2Mbps calling to inquire on how to get MAX upgrades.

Faults
Customers calling back after receiving updates on their fault.

Karol Hosiawa reports for Development:
Hi. I’m Karol and I’m a web developer, I’ve been at PlusNet for almost 2 years. As many of you may have noticed our sister brands Force9/FreeOnline/PlusNetUK are now redirecting to PlusNet portal and let you service your account there. That was the project I just finished off today. The project took a couple of months to complete, we approached it in phases – first letting you all know about what’s going to happen, then allowing you to use both portals. Finally last week we switched these portals off.

Most of my work involved making sure that all sister brands’ services are also available on the PlusNet portal. Switching off the portals may sound scary to some people but in reality it isn’t. We made sure all your account data including router settings/email addresses/question etc. doesn’t change and just allowed you to log-in and use the PlusNet portal.

The day of Finance, in the words of Magdalena Hosiawa:
Month end process is finally over. That means the Finance team can finally take a deep breath of relief. On the top of month end 150 tickets were closed! Commercial finance held meetings that officially opened the strat planning process. Therefore chocolates would be still welcome. Finally… Claire & Niki have a confession…the finance team yesterday were wondering why they left the office together, well the secret is out, as true x-factor fans its because they went to see Ray Quinn at the Apollo – see Finance really do have a sense of humour – rather that or we have 2 thirty something’s having a midlife crisis…

Comms, by Matt Taylor:
Another day of Change Controls today, with brief smatterings of forum visits and an occasional shower of faults. Gusts of Training have been flowing from a Mand-erly direction and an area of high James has been spotted moving over personal tickets and meetings (He’s also had an engineer visit this morning that hopefully he won’t be charged for… did you know moving house can cause spontaneous router breakage?). Bob has been picking up on yet more problems and has also spent a frightening amount of money on new computer parts and I have been up and about gathering helpers for the mapping of PlusNet Towers for Counter Strike: Source, along with spending a fair amount of time on the Sheffield Forum among others.

Ben Brown has the Networks Mic today:
Hello there!

I’m Ben Brown, and I’m an Operations Engineer here in the Networks department, where I have been for the last 20 months or so. Prior to that some of you may remeber me from my time in the comms team and before that the CSC. Here in Ops I do most of the Perl scripting we need, as well as fixing all sorts of problems and the occasional ticket or two.

Today I’ve been working on a problem with our CGI platform which was causing sites to not be archived if they had removed their CGI space or canceled their account. I actually got the problem sorted yesterday, but had a fair bit of tidying up to do as a result of it.

I’ve also proposed a change to our mail server configuration on the mxcore servers to defer any connections that have come from addresses with no rDNS. This has been passed to be checked over by a more senior engineer, then it can be rolled out to our mail platform. This is something that’s causing some concern at the moment, and should cut down on the amount of SPAM they handle considerably.

I’ve also been playing with a Xen guest on our staging platform, so some new mail platform management scripts can be fully tested. I’ve not used Xen a lot but I’m really impressed so far, very easy to use (well it is for a linux geek like me ).

All in all a fairly quiet day, no nasty surprises, and nothing too difficult.

P.S. Apologies for the lack of buzzwords. (I should think so too – Ed.)

Chris Cotterill will be representing Marketing this fine day:
As usual the marketing department have had a busy day – we’re about to hit send on an email about the new referrals promotion and we’ve been working on some prototypes for upcoming product improvements – watch this space

I’ve been organising yet more free games for our new BBYW Pro customers and penning the next newsletter (due out next week).

We’ve finished a new print ad to promote our BBYW products and the most important news of the day – I struck lucky when I bought a Twirl and got 2 for the price of one – good old vending machine Top Banana!

That’s all from me.

And finally, Products end of day, from the self-titled hands of Darren ‘The Placement Student’ Hurst:

Oh what a day in products it has been…… Yet another busy day in the life of a placement student in the PlusNet Product team and we have been a man down, poor Ian has the dreaded man flu and we all know how bad that can be.

Today like every Wednesday we had the business Key Performance Indicator review, making sure we know how the business is performing. We also continued the review of our existing VOIP platform. Maria has been working her socks off with communication between external suppliers as well as OFCOM and Shaun has been supporting finance in their forecasting. As for myself, well I have been informing customers on dial-up of the wonders of our broadband packages, I have raised my first task to a DBA and also raised my first problem! (But it was only a little one.)

Thanks to everyone for passing on their daily reports on what has been keeping their teams and departments busy today, and a big thank you for everyone in the Community for reading through this and getting to The End…

I realise this is posted under my name, but I can’t take the credit. Thanks go to Mr James Nelson, as above.

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This entry was posted by Matt Taylor on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 5:49 pm and is tagged with and is posted in the category EOD, Tech News. 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.