It’s been a rather cold Tuesday here in Sheffield and was rather foggy this morning too, although I’m lead to believe from the traffic news, that this was not just reserved for us! However, it’s been a … productive day (who thought I was going to say something else? Come on… own up!).

Chris from the CSC brings us their top 5:

Afternoon! Top 5 for the CSC this morning is as follows:

1 – Router Config
As always (probably never going to get away from this one) new and existing customers calling for help setting up new equipment or existing. Top of the list.

2 – E-mail set up
New and existing customers requesting help setting up the e-mail service. Some customer calling with missing e-mails after turning off the catch all. Advised accordingly.

3 – Fault updates
Customers keeping on top of their open faults. Calling in to see the progress or for further information after voicemails left. CSC and Logged no particular type of fault in question.

4 – Sales
Had a few calls for the tech guys today on sales aspect. Every time this is in the Top 5 it is clearly promising. No real trend or set questions asked all information that can be found on the portal.

5 – FTP
Couple of guys have had some calls on FTP directory listing, advised of the problems we are experiencing at present and directed to the service status so customer can keep an eye on when it is fixed.

Cheers, any questions let us know.

From one corner of the CSC comes the Comms update via Chris:

Rightyo, it’s Chris from comms here today bringing you our update on all things PlusNet (well at least the comms things!).

We’re still Bobless on the comms desk, which is actually a bit odd as the desk has been much quieter than normal.

After mistaken for Peter Andre (no, really!), James has been placing broadband and homephone orders. He’s continued manning the forums and been raising a few problems.

Matt has finally unleashed the beast that is the Monster Faults Blog. He’s continued calling some extremely high usage customers and started writing another blog.

I’ve been bouncing between Networks and the CSC today, working my way around the forums and my task work. I’ve also been fielding Network change controls and posting some service status announcements.

After some encouragement, Mand decided to tell me that today she has been working on dev change controls, project updates, home phone processes and problems.

Catherine from QA brings us:

QA have been working on plans for Project Secret Squirrel (that’s an audit of tail fluffiness across the general Sheffield area). We’ve also been inventing new insults (Gavin to Gary “You Googlehoneybadger!”) and cracking on with the ever present test plans and yet more problems. I’ve been Mistress of the Rolls today but thankfully it’s been pretty quiet, meaning I’ve been able to get some task work done as well.

Finally, Web Team Kelly paid us a visit and proved he’s *definitely* a ninja. He has an amazing appearing/disappearing trick where you can be sure he isn’t in the room, then you blink and suddenly, somehow, he’s right in front of you! He always wears black, too – but when asked, of course he denied it. Well, he would. but I’m not convinced.

Chris from Marketing sets out to annoy the editor:

A very cold day today – inside the office as well as on the gloomy fog-ridden streets of Sheffield. We’ve been working on some updates to the homepage which should hopefully roll out today, I’ve updated the member centre poll and fielded a fair few marketing enquiries. We’ve also been marvelling at a fantastic headline in today’s Sun newspaper and wondering if the snakehead fish is the most lethal creature on this very planet.

and Finally… Darren from Products:

The Products Team is down to just 3 of us today, Maria is on holiday (though is secretly working) and poor Ian is a little under the weather so is working from the comfort of home. I’ve been working on getting to grips with the ins and outs of our internal Company Dashboard and playing with some pretty funky SQL. Dave’s been working on usage analysis, Network capacity forecasting and writing his next blog about 2008’s traffic management plans. Rich started the VoIP risk assessment and attended the Directors Operational Review.

Geoff from Networks gives us a late entry:

There has been a great push today on laying the ground work for a new Auth DNS platform. The database is being defined, with all the access methods being put into place. While the software which will make use of the database is being compiled and configured.

Several Database enhancements have been investigated and deployed today, specifically for radius and the financial system. This should result in a better user experience thanks to the hard work of our DBA’s.

Problems with FTP and a few DNS issues relating to email have been investigated, with resolutions being worked on for deployment.

Customer issues, both through tickets and the abuse mailbox have been actively worked on. The objective of this work is to always answer issues as soon as is possible to maintain the highest quality of service. This has resulted in several people being dedicated to this work.

Multiple people today worked on enhancing the service monitoring, and redundancy. This will not immediately be obvious, but because of this hard work if the worst ever happens we should be able to react, and recover much quicker than we have ever been able to do.

The corporate VPN has also been worked on today, so as to guarantee remote access to our support people. VPN access is little talked about, but is a core component of our business due to it facilitating our ability to deal with issues in a timely manor.

Work also continues on the portal server environment. Testing has been carried out against servers.

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This entry was posted by Colin Ogilvie on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 5:52 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 response, or trackback from your own site.