What day is it? I’m confused… what with Bank Holiday Monday, and me being doing two half days over Tuesday and Wednesday, and I’ve lost all track of what day it is. Thankfully, my computer tells me it’s Wednesday, so I guess that means it is… Ah well, two days til Friday

First up, is Bob from Comms:

Today has continued in a similar vein to yesterday here on the Comms Team.

James has been helping out our Provisioning Team, been in and out of the forums and cracked on with some of his project work.

Chris has been helping out the Faults Team, investigating problems and drafting up some comms messaging for the content filtering trials we’ve been running recently.

Matt has also been helping out the Faults Team and spent a considerable amount of the day on a clean-up task for a recent Home Phone problem.

I’ve been reviewing networks change controls, trying to close some of the personal tasks I have open and made a few forum/Usenet/Service Status posts.

For today’s random link I’ve settled for Link – It’s an interesting Java-based web application that lets you create, view and generally mess around with an infinite number of 2 dimensional wire-frame models. It’s kind of hard to explain so you’re probably best just checking it out for yourself.

It requires Java 1.5 or later, so you’ll need to download the latest version from here -
Link

Ben from the CSC is up next:

It’s been a busy day in the CSC today, with over 1,000 calls answered by our support agents without a single customer having to wait more than 10 minutes, so a round of applause is due all round. There have been no major exchange outages or network faults today after yesterday’s problems have been resolved so a pretty standard top five has been reported:

(1) Router setup
Once again, customers are calling in at all stages of setting up their routers, from needing advice about where to plug in each cable to needing help removing previous ISP’s connections or updating DNS servers.

(2) Fault updates
As usual, customers are calling in to get updates on outstanding fault tickets. A large number of customers are calling in after receiving a voicemail or SMS from one of our faults agents, but we’re also getting customers chasing an update before the faults team or our network providers have been able to provide an update.

(3) New faults
There has been no pattern to the faults reported by customers today, with the usual mix of no synchronisation, intermittent synchronisation and authentication issues. The majority of these can be resolved over the telephone, with a small proportion passed through to our faults team for further investigation.

(4) Email problems
We’re seeing a larger than usual number of calls coming into the Support Centre with more advanced email issues – sending email to and from domains and customers running their own email servers have been pushing up the numbers added to the usual client setup calls.

(5) Provisioning updates
At this time of year there are always a larger than average number of house moves, mainly pushed by students moving either back to, or away from home. This is pushing up the number of customers calling in for an update on their provisioning update.

Jamie from Networks brings us this update:

Busy as normal up here in networks, here is the run down of what we have all been up to:

Duncan: monitoring

Josh: been doing project documentation

Geoff: Been working on new POP/IMAP authentication system. Now working, ready for testing and build fix up

Ben: Netapp meeting, DDD (That’s an internal document detailing what we’re going to be doing on a project…) writing and testing internal services consolidation host.

Dan ‘Danger’ Payne: Tickets, RIPA

Matt: tasks, mentoring these guys (Ticket team)

Sarah and Rizwan: Problems

Neil: MAAF and ITW tickets, some of our tickets (Ticket team), hostmaster pool, IT Support – you name it. Workflow king today!

Stephen and Me: Internal IT Tasks

Ben from Development is up last today…

Today I’ve been working on plans for our new alpha environment, where we’ll develop and integrate code before it gets pushed upstream to the staging platform for testing. It’s a complex project that runs in parallel with the changes we’re making to our revision control and maintenance strategy mentioned recently, so I’ve been developing the bootstrap environment that marries the new revision control repository setup with the new alpha environment. Pretty good progress has been made, and the first scripts are doing the right thing (and the new repos now self-host the revision control for the scripts, proving that they work).

Elsewhere, a big seekrit project is now on gamma, and the team are in the middle of testing financial bits with the customer before the last bits of QA get completed. Other developers are beginning to look into 21CN, continuing to trial Test Driven Development, and providing in-life support for Brightview (probably not all at once). Finally, Team Zaki inform me that they’re positively overjoyed to have Rupert back in their ranks from the Web Team.

While it’s good news for Rupert getting promoted to Senior Developer, I’m not sure the Web Team are quite as overjoyed at his departure… oh well.

That’s all for now, over to someone else for tomorrow.

Colin

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This entry was posted by Colin Ogilvie on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 7:00 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.