Of course I’ll start today’s EOD with an update about its start of day.  As has been reported in Service Status, at about 7am we had a loss of power to one of our data centres in Sheffield.  You may have experienced intermittent issues with our systems during the affected period, including website and email.  It’s never nice to see things go wrong but always heartening to see how quickly and effectively our network team can jump on and resolve such issues.

Bob tells us more about this later, and why it’s not always possible to rely on backup systems to automatically take over.

Let’s first see what’s been happening with the CSC.

Hi Chris here again from the Customer Services Team.

It has been a good productive day again today in customer services, except my beloved Sheffield Wednesday has still not been taken over, but my fingers have been kept crossed just in case, but that’s another story.  The two new starters we have in our team have settled in really well, which is a good sign.

Top 5 issues for today.

1. House Moves – We are getting increased amount of customers wanting to move their broadband to a new address.
2. Order Updates – Customers wanting updates on their new accounts or house moves.
3. General Billing – Customers who are wanting help to understand their bill a bit better.
4. Package Changes – Customers wanting to change their package which suits their usage requirements.
5. Hardware Ordering – Customers who have been with us for over 12 months, who want to order free hardware and stay with us for a further 12 months to take up on this offer.

A hop up a floor, and across the landing to Web Team.

Duffy here in the Web team. We’re all just about settled in our new desks now – though I’m missing the fish.  ‘Lots going on today.

Colin has been code reviewing, developing code and talking in code.
Wojtek has been mopping up various Design-based problems.
Dan and Tam have been working on improvements to our Workplace system.
Gary has hit the ground running and is currently involved in some CSS work for printing.
Sam and Grzegorz have been building the interface for the new My Account.
Jonny’s been looking at upgrades and there’s talk of a Plusnet screensaver.
Mark, Andy, Nick and I have been working on various support type updates, mainly involving templates.

Ok Bob, tell us how things look from Comms’ perspective:

Well, it’s been a pretty darn hectic day today, what with last night’s website problems, the maintenance work this morning and the unfortunate loss of power to one of our data centres.

Despite some complications early on, we’re quite please with how quickly we managed to restore access to all customer-facing services (within 2 hours). In an ideal world everything would automatically failover to our back up systems; as nice as this would be though some services do need the TLC of a human being to make sure they’re nurtured back to good health with no loss of customer data. So pat on the back to our networks department for pulling out all the stops.

In addition to posting Service Status updates on the above, I’ve been reviewing networks change controls and investigating the odd problem.

Matt’s been busy with the clean-up work for a particularly nasty Home Phone problem (not long left to go now Matt!), Chris has been in the forums and has done the last of the work required to close the Aladdin trial.

James has been in and out of the forums all day and done a spot of project work.

It’s an easy one for the link of the day today methinks. I heard Chris rabbitting on about it this morning and there’s been no end of people twittering the news about Chrome.

Google let slip yesterday that they’re due to announce a beta launch of their new fandangle web browser later today (it might even be available by the time you read this).

There’s some screen grabs here.

I was particularly impressed with the comic-book style of introduction they’ve given their new baby.  I think it’s an incredibly effective way to communicate. Of course I was impressed on the one hand and a bit miffed on the other – because I’d talked with our designers about this idea some time ago. We’d love to do something similar one day with the ‘welcome to Plusnet’ PDF that you get when you signup.  What do you think?  Do you like the Chrome ‘comic’?

Pete

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This entry was posted by Peter Jackson on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 6:16 pm and is tagged with EOD 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.