End of Day 13th September

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It's the end of another hectic day at PlusNet Towers and we'll see if I manage to post the End of Day properly today! You'd think that I'd know how to use the Software powering the Community Site... Anyway, lets see what the other departments in the business have been doing! Products - Had a very productive meeting on the future of our value add services. We are keen to improve on these, but at the same time want to keep the business focussed on the most important things, like providing a great broadband offering. The last thing we want though is neglected services, so deciding on the right future for these things is essential. - Discovering we have 150,000 geographic numbers for our VOIP product which we never offered. 10,000 numbers are in Worthing. Do that many people even live there? - We met a content filtering company who have come up with a very interesting way of... content filtering. If it comes off, this is something our customers could benefit from for free. It's still early days though. Finance The finance team has been chugging away today on various tasks. The commercial finance team has been in meeting most of day dealing with multiple issues. We are down by 3 today due to the holiday season, although a massive 108 tickets have been answered by the team today!!! More BT banking integrations issues have been ironed out. And finally, Mark J has been busy keeping the domain name processing up to date. Phew! At least it’s Friday tomorrow! Development Dev EOD by Paul Mitchell This week I am working on a behind-the-scenes project intended to optimise the delivery of customer detail screens to our CSC agents. It is a small but important part of a larger project being undertaken by PlusNet over the next few months. I'm really pleased to be working on something that will be used to deliver a better, faster service experience for PlusNet's growing customer base. All very exciting! I enjoy optimising programs. It makes me feel rather like a surgeon, scalpel in hand and patient on the table, assessing what can be removed or remodelled without causing damage. The correct operation of the program being optimised must not be compromised or obscured. The ideal end result is a program that works better without being more difficult for other programmers to follow and maintain. Achieving that goal is tricky but satisfying. Optimisation is a job that is done best when the end result isn't perfect. Perfectionism when optimising can lead to the very compromises that are best avoided, such as the never-ending chase after ever-decreasing gains that no-one but a programmer would appreciate. Now... where to make my next incision...? Networks Hi, I'm Duncan, one of the senior Systems Administrators here in Network Operations. We've been busy today with a few problems raised along with a number of customer tickets. We're just beginning another drive to automate some of our workload, this is then made available to our front-line support staff so that they can fix more customer problems, this has 2 benefits, customer problems are turned around much faster and we have more time to spend maintaining our platform. Comms This morning we carried on laughing at Bob's performance on the new gaming servers, have a look at these here:- Fragtastic James has been making some video tutorials to further educate the CSC on referrals information. Bob then decided that he didn't really want his lunch and threw it across the CSC, after cleaning his mess up he carried on with helping police the mail platform by contacting customers that were sending large amounts of email from the relay servers. Mand has been dealing with problems and chasing updates on projects across the business, all this without her wireless working until 2 minutes before she left!! Then we come to me, I've been upstairs in networks again most of the day. Comms are now part of the change control process so any changes to the network come through us to decide whether a service status is required. Marketing Today's been all about gaming! Sadly we've not been wearing out our WASD keys. No, the whole team have been working on some webpages to support a new PROduct that we think will be right up the street of online gamers across the UK. Web Team The Web Team have been working on building the interface for the new product that Marketing have mentioned, and we've also been getting really annoyed with the quirks that comes from designing webpages and getting them to work in all browsers - Internet Explorer has been causing our senior designers (and me!) lots of grief thorughout the day. We've also been carrying on with our usual work and daily tasks. CSC A huge apology regarding the CSC today -- due to the work detailed above, we were unable to get the update from the CSC morning shift!