It’s Monday and it seems that a lot of staff at PlusNet have come down with a horrible cold thing which has meant many staff have been feeling poorly all day, either in the office or at home… but still, the work goes on.

Tam for the Web Team:

“Half of the web team are away due to illness today and even those who made it in are a little worse for wear. This morning we got together to discuss how we can make the blogging side of the community site better. It was a short meeting because, for once, we were all in agreement on what needs to be done! Details & roadmap to follow soon. In the meantime Jonny’s been working on a design that makes better use of screen realestate on the community homepage. Matt’s been working on a skin for PlusNet TV which will be an interface to our video help. James Tuck joined us from Dev today and has been continuing his work on Splunk. Rupert’s been working on affiliate stuff , Duffy on the House Move tool and Colin’s been supplying the cold-stricken masses with Glacier Fruits”

(Ed: Purely medicinal, I have a sore throat :p).

Denis from Networks:

“Hello, my name is Denis Andrianov and I am Network Development Engineer. I joined PlusNet in May 2007 and I’m very much enjoying working in a wonderful team. In my time here I’ve been working on several IT projects and one of them will be released tonight. It is a solution for content management and code propagation across most of PlusNet servers. As you probably know, PlusNet has a lot of servers which appear to you, the customer, as one, for example http://www.plus.net, and the traffic to these servers is loadbalanced to provide best performance, high availability and zero downtime for our customers. This a complex infrastructure and any code improvements take a significant time to be propagated across all servers and every server must be carefully checked before they start to serve customer requests. The new solution will automatically maintain, control and monitor content of all servers and it will increase security level, improve reliability and as result will help us to reach our main target – to provide best service for you, our customers.”

Martyn from Marketing:

“Up here in marketing we’re at full strength – the dreaded lurgy doesn’t seem to have made it up to the third floor yet! We’ve been working on the latest edition of the newsletter today, and also doing some prep work for a forthcoming direct marketing campaign.

We’ve also been looking at the Broadband Your Way webpages and prototyping some improvements. On top of this we’ve had our regular start of week meeting and been investigating the success of an email campaign from last week.”

Katya Sourkova from Development:

“Hello there, my name is Katya Sourkova and I’m one of the new PHP Developers at PlusNet. Its been just over 3 weeks for me here, and all that time has been filled with learning – not just about how everything works, but about the way things are done at PlusNet, and what should be our priorities – by this I mean usability, security and awareness of customer needs.

Inspite of the large amouts of new information, those three weeks have been pretty exciting – I got an opportunity to work with some of our most dedicated developers and experience first-hand the stress of working to tight schedules, and the satisfaction you get from getting the job done.

PlusNet as a company feels different from the ones where I worked previously – inspite from always having a lot to do, everyone is friendly and helpful, and willing to interrupt what they are doing to answer any questions, however silly they may seem. In particular, thank you Simon and Seb for your outstanding support! Even being a new person here, I already feel involved in the business and feel like a valued member of the team.

Currently I’m working on a couple of problems to do with the ticketing system, updating some of the New Starter documentation and finding my way around the enormous codebase and databases. Doesn’t it frequently feel that the more you learn, the more there is to learn?”

James from CSC:

“1. Email
A few reports of not receiving email, email delays etc. A couple of tickets regarding the rDNS blocking but nothing major, most of the issues reported are down to user error/incorrect settings. Also a few queries about setting up mail clients.

2. Faults
There has been an increase of speed faults reported recently, most likely down to all the press coverage on poor broadband speed. Most of these just require education though. Also a number of no sync faults, no pattern with these though.

3. Router setup/confirming login details
Always makes it into the top 5, usually down the users forgetting @plusdsl.net on the end or just afraid of technology.

4. Provisioning updates
Quite a lot of people chasing/querying orders, doesn’t really appear to be down to delays, just down to the suers not actually being aware when the line is due to be activated due to not having reliable email access.

5. Failed Billing
Still getting a few people who have failed billing, mostly due to cards expiring and our change in billing providers.”

and finally, Darren from Products:

“Boooooooo!!!! No it’s not Halloween yet I know, though it sure has felt like it to me. We have started preparing for the big day already. This year the Halloween committee placed me in charge of decorations and I have quite a nice budget to play with too, its time to make an impact at PlusNet and show them the wonders a placement student can do.

So what have we been up to?

Shaun: Continuing work on the internal company dashboard (showing us how we are performing).

Rich: Today I have reviewed the current hardware ordering process vs e-Catalogue, reviewed ISPA response to Ofcom VoIP consultation and resolved a CISAs membership issue.

Ian: Working on our parental control strategy. Deciding on the future and positioning of community site blogs. I have also been looking at customers on some very old non connectivity products and deciding what to do with them! All this while trying to shake off my cold.

Maria: End of Q2 objective reviews. More work on the three year strat plan. I have also been reviewing some market analysis and doing general housekeeping like annual leave and booking in 1:1’s.

But the most important activity that happened in products today was the loss of a team member. Nick Silverwood has moved on to new pasture and is now Head of Sales, big congratulations to Nick, it is well deserved and I think I can speak for the entire products pod when I say you will be greatly missed within the team.”

Hope everyone else is feeling better than myself and others within the company, until tomorrow, good night.

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This entry was posted by Colin Ogilvie on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 6:25 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.