End of Day 12th September

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It's my turn to be guest editor of the EOD today, live from the good ship PlusNet. From looking at the contributions to today's End of Day from the departments around the business, it's been a very productive day. We start our tour of the ship on the top deck... Networks Hi, I am Ade, working with the Network Operations Team. Today I have being looking after our peering connections. Peering is where two networks establish a link together to exchange traffic with each other freely, and for mutual benefit. This translates to better traffic performance, gives more control and as well reduces transit costs. We currently have private peering with BBC, NDO and ClaraNet. We have a presence at the London Internet Exchange (www.linx.net) and LoNAP (www.lonap.net), which enables us to interconnect with over 300 telcos/organisations based in 35 countries. To you our customer, this provides a seamless movement of traffic, be it to a server farm in Australia or a website hosted in Canada. Marketing Oh arrrr me hearties. we're all getting ready for International Talk Like a Pirate Day next week and today's marketing update is brought to you by 'Long John Kelly', me pirate name. Damn it feels good to be a pirate. Yaaarrrrr! Us marketing types put the finishing touches to the Referrals reminder email which is winging its way to inboxes as I type. We have also been working on some modelling with our finance peeps and speaking with some prospective reseller type clients. We have been looking at how we can improve the Community site and would love to hear the thoughts and views of the community on what we can do to make it more attractive and appealing for you. That's it, me ship mates, from the scurvy marketing team. Finance What have the interesting folk in finance been up to today I hear you cry...well here goes... It's been another busy day, whilst we have we have 2 people off on holiday (Mark B and James) the rest of us are holding the fort by completing 28 tickets. Mike and Magda have had their monthly cost centre reviews with managers to track actual spend against budget - you know how us accountants like to count our beans! Fiona has completed a Debtors reconciliation and Mark J has been reviewing and tidying up the contracts. And finally....Niki has returned from a long weekend break with rather interesting coloured hair....some may even say it's pink!! Well, that's all for now folks. Working down the decks, we have Development Ben Walton - EOD "... a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match." - Bill Bryson Today I've been working on numerous items, one of which involved making changes to the data on our live system. They were simple changes, but as Bill Bryson pointed out above, you have to be careful when computers and computer programmers are in close proximity. For example, if I made a mistake with my database query, like not specifying which record in the database I wanted to update, the computer wouldn't say, "now Ben, I don't think that's what you wanted to do old chap, fancy taking another crack at that one", it would go straight ahead and update all the records for me, not just the one I wanted. Now, I like to think I'm not completely lacking in brain cells, but when you have the ability to make stupid mistakes - that's when you make them. Therefore before we make any changes to the live system we have to make sure that our changes have been reviewed, tested and we aren't going to affect anything else with the changes we are making. My peer review passed, testing was successful and the change control was approved. So I pushed on and made the changes to the live system. Thankfully my changes were successful and I could move on to the next task in my list. Web Team A team meeting this morning and we discussed the forum discussion about disability access to our support pages there's clearly a lot of work we can do to improve things in this area and your feedback is invaluable. We also discussed better categorisation for the index of our support pages and how we can make the 'latest changes' page more effective. Lots of work for us also in support of product development (more on this coming very soon). On Tuesday, I said that I hoped we would be able to put live an improvement to Manage My Mail. Unfortunately we have had to reschedule this rollout until early next week due to prioritisation of our Quality Assurance team for another project. Some last minute bugs discovered on ‘gamma' just haven't been able to be resolved in time. Products Commercial Documentation sounds really interesting. We can however assure readers that it isn't. We've been doing a fair bit of that today, mainly around a project we can't say too much about at this stage (Sorry). Alongside that, we have made some very significant process in the areas of finding a long term solution to our Voip platform instability, and also have been working on a deal with a supplier that (if it comes off) will see us bringing a new type of Broadband connection equipment to the UK Market. Finally, our resident MIS guru has been working on an automated reporting dashboard and has also been liaising with the finance team on some forecasts to (allegedly) make our lives easier. Exciting day? We think so. CSC Here are the top five for this morning. 1. Hardware Config, 2. No Sync, 3. Fault Updates, 4. Username/Password/Prov Enquiries, 5. Sales Calls. Comms Not happy with editing yesterday's EOD, I've taken on the great honour of writing the Comms EOD for the second time. Today, I've mainly been keeping an eye on our forums, as well as reading one of the longest project specs in modern history. This didn't stop me from getting my Roast Beef at lunchtime though. Always a winner. Bob's been bouncing up and down the stairs between here and Networks like a headless rabbit to ensure that our lines of communications are always at an optimal level. He's also been representing Team Comms in the Traffic Management weekly workshop, not to mention discussing the current VoIP problems at length and how we can bring stability to our Broadband Phone platform. Chris has been writing some help articles in line with the improvements to the Manage My Mail tool and he'll be giving us some more details next week! Mand, not to be outdone by Bob, has also been running up and down the stairs to speak with Development about a few problem fixes that we're hoping to get rolled shortly. She's also been doing some more work on our internal problem process and some of the projects that she's involved in. Matt's in hiding on one of his well deserved days off.