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Yeah, our open fire is going away soon. Right now we have Lync, as rolled out by our windows guys, for IM, presence, and some conferencing. It conflicts directly with our Cisco infrastructure, and polygon equipment. So for that, Lync can suck eggs. If you are all Lync, you're probably all good.
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Jun 19, 2014 00:59
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Moey posted:What kind of feature set are you requiring? OpenFire and Spark is what I'd have suggested initially. It may well not be the best, but at least if it doesn't work out, you didn't spend money on it.
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Jun 19, 2014 10:18
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While we're on the topic of hosted messaging, do you guys know if any of them meet SEC/CFTC compliance? Basically just needs an audit trail for login/logoffs + ability to archive messages for 7 years (or at least the ability to download an archive of all messages for the last X days regularly).
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Jun 19, 2014 10:32
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Ugh. I'm covering for clleague while he's getting married and I don't know a goddamn thing about the product his project uses. The project manager keeps assigning me things and I don't know what I'm supposed to do. gently caress. On top of that I'm supposed to fix this other code base at the same time since both projects have hard due dates next week! As a result I've been ignoring my support cases so the customers on that side are getting lovely, and rightfully so. Fuuuuuuck.
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Jun 19, 2014 14:03
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ijustam posted:Ugh. You are a hero for not calling your colleague and interrupting his paid time off. I'd ask the project manager if there's anybody else who can do your tasks in a timelier and more efficient manner, or if he can take a few minutes to get you up to speed.
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Jun 19, 2014 17:05
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Shared offices. I hate shared offices. "What? He's getting <literally any computer accessory>? I want <literally any computer accessory>, too." The most annoying part is when they're both there when something gets delivered, and the other person is dropping hints instead of asking me outright (which is still a waste of their time, but at least then I'll tell them who they should talk to).
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Jun 19, 2014 17:42
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Documentation! Is there a better way to document standards and scripts related to various db fields than word? This document is a behemoth.
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Jun 19, 2014 19:25
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loving AT&T. Did a huge main office number port yesterday from our old Avaya system to Lync. The port was "successful", however the Avaya users couldn't ring the ported numbers anymore - it'd just go straight to the Avaya voicemail. Did you know that AT&T was actually a bajillion little micro-monopolies that doesn't communicate internally at all? Of course you did. It appears that after the porting was done, the AT&T subsidiary's PRIs that connected to the Avaya system never had the numbers removed, as in "Hey these numbers no longer belong to me!" SO, when I tried dialing the ported numbers as if they were external, they'd just endlessly loop between the PRI and the Avaya PBX... about 30 times before the PBX gave up and just crammed the call in voicemail (that the Lync users can't access). AT&T Support Rep: "Oh... yeah, it takes at least 24 hours for our subsidiary to clear that up. Or at least they should. They might have forgotten. Do you have their number? It might be on your bill." Meanwhile anyone still on the Avaya system (which thankfully is now a minority) is stuck in this crazy call/loop/voicemail hell when they try to call the majority of Lync users. loving CHRIST. 
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Jun 19, 2014 19:25
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meanieface posted:Documentation! After running projects over the last few years that result in requirements and design documents that are hundreds of pages long, I want to try wikis. Few people read a 500-page design document, and none of my clients maintain them, so it's just an expensive CYA exercise. Wikis, however, are more easily digested: people are fine reading an article (with pictures!), and following links as necessary. They might even be more inclined to update it. I need to find a client who's willing to execute on this thought experiment, though.
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Jun 19, 2014 19:39
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ijustam posted:I'm covering for clleague while he's getting married and I don't know a goddamn thing about the product his project uses. The project manager keeps assigning me things and I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Dude, talk to the project manager and tell him you don't understand anything about the product and see if he can help you get at least a basic grasp of it. He knows you aren't your colleague, so he shouldn't be expecting the same level out of you. Then, talk to your boss and ask him which of the due dates he would like you to actually meet? Because honestly, a co-worker taking a large chunk of time off IMMEDIATELY before his project is due is NOT your loving problem. You agreed to help, not take ownership of a second project (I mean, I assume).
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Jun 19, 2014 19:41
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gently caress AT&T in the rear end. We moved over a whole block of DID's. Like 76 of them. They were all 555-9xxx, with our extensions from like 300-399. They somehow hosed up and didn't port two of them. My extension and another guy. They lost the loving numbers and couldn't get them back. How the gently caress do you do that? Ended up having to change our extensions so we could still have a DID. AT&T has also given me DNS servers that were hijacked and they never fixed in the setup instructions for T1 lines etc. They'd just give me some other DNS server after I called them 35 times. I think half of their poo poo is running on servers that either nobody knows the physical location of, or knows the password/access information to. Because it originally belonged to company x who was bought by company z then company y acquired them...
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Jun 19, 2014 19:42
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Lord Dudeguy posted:loving CHRIST. When we were switching to Telepacfic a few weeks ago TP put a port request in to the losing carriers without consulting with me first. The losing carriers (the numbers were split across two) contacted me and I freaked out and got TP to cancel the request until I could actually schedule the drat thing properly. One day I come in and half our numbers have stopped working. Apparently the losing carriers have two systems that receive the cancellation request and one system processed it and the other didn't. Result? Cancellation goes through anyway! Took a couple of hours to get that unfucked. When the real port date came everything seemed to go smoothly until I discovered that one of our largest sites had their own bizarro arrangement with the carriers and they couldn't call any of our numbers after the port. In short: gently caress telco. You can schedule, confirm, verify but they'll still do something unproductive and possibly career-ending.
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Jun 19, 2014 19:46
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Bob Morales posted:They somehow hosed up and didn't port two of them. My extension and another guy. They lost the loving numbers and couldn't get them back. How the gently caress do you do that? Ended up having to change our extensions so we could still have a DID. Porting numbers is really hard and the interfaces they are using are godawful and confusing so try not to be too mad even if they make boneheaded mistakes. Not being able to fix those mistakes after the fact isn't acceptable though.
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Jun 19, 2014 20:01
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Alereon posted:The numbers were ported to your carrier and they accidentally released them instead of porting them to the new destination, which makes them immediately "snap back" to the provider that owns the native exchange. Since those numbers are not assigned to a subscriber, AT&T would not have been able to port them back without the cooperation of the native provider, which may not have been forthcoming. I used to support the number portability application carriers used to port their numbers and the #1 thing we always reminded customers was not to release a number unless they were 100% sure they knew where it would go and that was what they wanted. It was a buy-back, we were with McLeod USA.
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Jun 19, 2014 20:09
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Bob Morales posted:It was a buy-back, we were with McLeod USA.
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Jun 19, 2014 20:28
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What I've learned from this thread is that we should ditch phone numbers as soon as possible and just use Skype or whatever service lets me call an email address. I think the only phone numbers I know by heart are my cell, my home, wife's cell, in-laws, and my conference call number.
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Jun 19, 2014 20:57
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Chuu posted:While we're on the topic of hosted messaging, do you guys know if any of them meet SEC/CFTC compliance? Basically just needs an audit trail for login/logoffs + ability to archive messages for 7 years (or at least the ability to download an archive of all messages for the last X days regularly). We're testing Hipchat Server for this. You can export and search chat room history, but not currently 1-to-1 chats, so I disabled that. 1-to-1 history export is coming, and in the meantime, you have ssh access to the server, so if you can figure out how to interface with Elasticsearch, you can pull the history. It's a bit silly, but the good features of Hipchat outweigh the need for 1-to-1 (which you can accomplish with private chat rooms anyway). Hipchat was developed by people who have seemingly never worked under regulatory requirements, so it seems like they're still trying to figure out why they should add these features to their product. They're slowly coming around. Other products that probably comply, but we didn't test: OpenFire - Not very pretty, but functional. Lacks the drag-and-drop stuff and long list of integrations supported by Hipchat. BigAnt - Took one look at their website and threw up in my mouth. Lync - Actually did test this, and it was an absolute loving nightmare to set up.
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Jun 19, 2014 22:02
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Ynglaur posted:What I've learned from this thread is that we should ditch phone numbers as soon as possible and just use Skype or whatever service lets me call an email address. Phone numbers should work like domains imho, if you own 123-456-7890 you should be able to control resolution for 0.9.8.7.6.5.4.3.2.1.e164.arpa and effectively be your own carrier, with most people picking a carrier and letting them handle DNS (like how most people pick a web host and let them handle everything). Edit: I should be clear I'm talking about telecomm in the US, it's very different in other countries and hosed up in unique and interesting ways. Alereon fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Jun 19, 2014 |
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Jun 19, 2014 23:10
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Don't quote me on it but I think BT are using ENUM or something like it. At least I've never heard of the porting horror stories you guys seem to get into where the number just disappears from a pool happening over here. Probably an advantage of never really losing the monopoly.
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Jun 19, 2014 23:47
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Ynglaur posted:What I've learned from this thread is that we should ditch phone numbers as soon as possible and just use Skype or whatever service lets me call an email address. Blew my boss' goddamned mind when I set up a Hunt Group that doesn't have a phone number attached to it. hunt_group@contoso.com Resolution: Added an arbitrary number. 
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Jun 20, 2014 00:38
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Erwin posted:Hipchat was developed by people who have seemingly never worked under regulatory requirements, so it seems like they're still trying to figure out why they should add these features to their product. They're slowly coming around. The issues we had with Hipchat were the following: a) No granularity in admin permissions; there's just 'user' and 'admin'. So if you want some junior IT tech to be able to do something like create accounts or add custom emoticons, they also now have the power to pull private room hisotry, 1-1 history, edit conversations, delete accounts, etc. b) The backend sucks, and they think that's alright because they provide an API. If I want to bulk delete users, I should be able to do it by downloading a CSV, editing it, and re-uploading; I should not have to roll my own solution. c) If you put in a feature request, they tell you to post to their community boards so other users can vote it up or down. Sorry, I don't have time (and it's not my job!) to read through all the past requests and figure out if any were similar enough to mine to vote it up instead of posting a new one.
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Jun 20, 2014 01:12
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sfwarlock posted:The issues we had with Hipchat were the following: Yeah, if we weren't small, it wouldn't work. And their support is slooooooooowwwww. Also, the dumb Reddit emoticons are loving annoying, especially the announcement that's always at the bottom of the lobby screen with a stupid Reddit face thing whatever it's called. But actually using it to communicate in groups is fantastic.
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Jun 20, 2014 01:24
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There is no way to change the primary domain on a Google Apps account - you can add the new one as an alias but this won't affect outgoing messages unless each user manually verifies the address so they can send from it, and pick it in the drop-down box each time they send a message from webmail. But good news! You can just create a new Google Apps account with your new domain (and 'waste' the billing months where they overlap) - I hope you aren't using it at the moment since a domain can't exist on two accounts at once, best be quick and make all the changes overnight so you miss as few messages as possible. Once you've brought the new account up then you can follow these ridiculous steps to move your data across with some massive caveats unless you pay a third-party $10 per user to handle things like docs and calendars. Thanks Google, yet another product that had promise that you've effectively abandoned for 3 years because something shinier came along.
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Jun 20, 2014 01:34
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Che Delilas posted:Dude, talk to the project manager and tell him you don't understand anything about the product and see if he can help you get at least a basic grasp of it. He knows you aren't your colleague, so he shouldn't be expecting the same level out of you. Luckily we had a meeting late in the day and most of my tasks involve simply delegating to existing team members ("resources") -- however I will need to come in on the weekend to field questions and task prioritization. And yeah, I had already brought up the due dates but it appeared like we weren't ready to take the "we have to tell the customer we can't deliver this part" dance yet.
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Jun 20, 2014 01:45
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Year end evaluations. Why do I bother spending several hours on each one I have to write, but the person who writes mine seems to spend 5 minutes while multitasking or whatever.
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Jun 20, 2014 04:40
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sfwarlock posted:The issues we had with Hipchat were the following: Yep, all of this is certainly true. And yet, if you've already ended up neck deep in Atlassian (Stash, Bamboo, Jira) then the integration can really make for a great product. And it's certainly better than loving Skype.
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Jun 20, 2014 08:44
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:Shared offices. I hate shared offices. We have a small handful of monitor risers, maybe about 5-10 of them (because there was a health and safety audit and monitors needed to be at a certain eye level, so a few had to be raised a bit). They have a bit of storage built into them for pens and a little tray for other stuff. *googles* These, in fact  Oh boy. Bringing one of these to someone is like... it's like walking into a prison canteen with a pizza delivery. People would KILL for this poo poo. Someone with one left the company last year, they were in their own office so we weren't spotted taking this thing out (I was shocked no one had dashed in to grab it before the retiree had finished standing up - out of sight out of mind, I suppose) but the next person to walk into the IT office spotted it and had this look in her eyes like she'd just won all the world's lottery draws at once.
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Jun 20, 2014 11:32
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Stacks of copy paper make great monitor risers.
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Jun 20, 2014 13:34
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Ynglaur posted:Year end evaluations. Why do I bother spending several hours on each one I have to write, but the person who writes mine seems to spend 5 minutes while multitasking or whatever. HR: "Your review is well-written and justified, but we think you need to justify reducing their raise by 1%." Boss: "Your review is well-written and justified, but I think you need to justify increasing their raise by 1%." And 'round and 'round it goes. Over 2 months overdue on this poor guy's review.
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Jun 20, 2014 13:38
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So my company got bought out near the beginning of the year, and we all became employees of the parent company back in April. Our IT department was small. About 5 people including myself. My boss quit, and his boss got let go. That left three of us. I work in smaller office, and they work in the old company's main office about 2.5 hours away. We were all doing desktop support due to earlier cutbacks, but I was also running our SCCM server (including software, driver, and update packages) and doing other maintenance on other servers. As for the other guys, one was a DBA who was also doing server admin work, and the other wasn't even IT before I started and got drafted into the department to help with some online database software everyone relied on. So the new company doesn't have any need for us in those capacities. They have their own DBAs and SCCM admins and whatnot. We were heavily involved in the transition of all IT assets to the new company while still supporting our old users. Our new boss promised us great things if we stuck around, but then we were taken out of his department, and moved to our new home: IT Helpdesk. Our new new bosses doesn't seem to have such lofty futures in mind for us. In fact, I'm not sure if they know what we did before. I wrote a big post a while back on how awful my last helpdesk job was. But this one is somehow worse. We got no training on the company's systems or software. When I asked if the department had any documents on common tickets they get, my new bosses pretty much told me to wing it and call somebody if I got stuck. My closest coworker is 500 miles away. Second closest is about 1000 miles away. The wait time on the call queue gets to be 60 minutes pretty often because the other helpdesk techs also have other responsibilities. And I understand that I'm no longer on the path to being a server admin like I was before the buyout, but I've had to fight for just about every bit of admin access I've gotten. But the worst thing is the time. I'm still salaried (and I still get my old pay), but I'm sure that will change. We enter time for every ticket into the ticketing system, which is fine. But at the end of the week we have to make a time sheet and enter the contents and time and department for every ticket, along with details on anything else done in the week not in the ticketing system. It all needs to add up to 40 hours. My bosses are like "My hands are tied! This is the only way we can report hours to the CIO!" but it's bullshit. What do I do about bathroom breaks? Times when the queue is empty? I assume everyone but us new guys are hourly, so are these guys working 10-hour days to make sure they have 8 hours of work to report? He told us to embellish if necessary, and we can count the time spent on the timesheet (sometimes a couple hours a week, from what I've been told), but it's seriously the most anal system I've encountered in IT.
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Jun 20, 2014 13:40
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Bob Morales posted:Stacks of copy paper make great monitor risers. I did exactly this at my last job. 2x2 reams of paper underneath of my docking station to align my laptop screen with my monitors.
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Jun 20, 2014 13:52
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Sulphuric Sundae posted:So my company got bought out near the beginning of the year, and we all became employees of the parent company back in April. Our IT department was small. About 5 people including myself. My boss quit, and his boss got let go. That left three of us. I work in smaller office, and they work in the old company's main office about 2.5 hours away. We were all doing desktop support due to earlier cutbacks, but I was also running our SCCM server (including software, driver, and update packages) and doing other maintenance on other servers. As for the other guys, one was a DBA who was also doing server admin work, and the other wasn't even IT before I started and got drafted into the department to help with some online database software everyone relied on. Seems like the writing is on the wall. I'd start polishing the resume and sending out apps. The poo poo thing about situations like yours is that it seems like the peon who can sniff out the BS and just files flagrantly dishonest time reports will be the one who succeeds. Cant say I'm blame that person either. If management cares so little about these that they tell you to embellish them just make up whatever BS is going to make them happy and keep busy working on something else.
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Jun 20, 2014 14:50
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Sulphuric Sundae posted:But the worst thing is the time. I'm still salaried (and I still get my old pay), but I'm sure that will change. We enter time for every ticket into the ticketing system, which is fine. But at the end of the week we have to make a time sheet and enter the contents and time and department for every ticket, along with details on anything else done in the week not in the ticketing system. It all needs to add up to 40 hours. My bosses are like "My hands are tied! This is the only way we can report hours to the CIO!" but it's bullshit. What do I do about bathroom breaks? Times when the queue is empty? I assume everyone but us new guys are hourly, so are these guys working 10-hour days to make sure they have 8 hours of work to report? He told us to embellish if necessary, and we can count the time spent on the timesheet (sometimes a couple hours a week, from what I've been told), but it's seriously the most anal system I've encountered in IT. Judge make poo poo up while you're looking for a new job. You can always use von Braun's "General Research" or "Professional Development" to fill in gaps or cover for I WAS TAKING A GIANT BURRITO poo poo.
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Jun 20, 2014 15:26
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I'm a lead developer on a website. I'm working with people that don't have specification (they don't need specification), whose job is to tidy stuff up. Add CSS, move poo poo around. What do you do in a situation where they remove parts of the functionality for no apparent reason? Or - they want to be helpful and they move stuff around. Consider the following code: [$content->company] - content is an instance of User object. Bam, move it to somewhere where content is either not defined, or not an User. I tried yelling, i tried pleading. Seriously - what is that I have to do, so that after every update I don't need to go through every loving file to check what did they gently caress up?
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Jun 20, 2014 15:51
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eithedog posted:I'm a lead developer on a website. I'm working with people that don't have specification (they don't need specification), whose job is to tidy stuff up. Add CSS, move poo poo around. What do you do in a situation where they remove parts of the functionality for no apparent reason? Or - they want to be helpful and they move stuff around. Consider the following code: Make a testing script or something
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Jun 20, 2014 15:53
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GargleBlaster posted:*googles* Those can't possibly be very expensive. Contact HR and ask for morale budget to spend $20 per employee.
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Jun 20, 2014 15:55
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Sulphuric Sundae posted:So my company got bought out near the beginning of the year, and we all became employees of the parent company back in April. Our IT department was small. About 5 people including myself. My boss quit, and his boss got let go. That left three of us. I work in smaller office, and they work in the old company's main office about 2.5 hours away. We were all doing desktop support due to earlier cutbacks, but I was also running our SCCM server (including software, driver, and update packages) and doing other maintenance on other servers. As for the other guys, one was a DBA who was also doing server admin work, and the other wasn't even IT before I started and got drafted into the department to help with some online database software everyone relied on. Anytime you are available for work is time spent working, even if no calls come in. Have you tried talking with your boss about what they want to accomplish here? Do they just want you to say 9-5 turned it off and on again?
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Jun 20, 2014 16:07
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sfwarlock posted:Those can't possibly be very expensive. Contact HR and ask for morale budget to spend $20 per employee. But then they can't repaint their yacht this week. 
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Jun 20, 2014 16:08
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eithedog posted:I'm a lead developer on a website. I'm working with people that don't have specification (they don't need specification), whose job is to tidy stuff up. Add CSS, move poo poo around. What do you do in a situation where they remove parts of the functionality for no apparent reason? Or - they want to be helpful and they move stuff around. Consider the following code: Source control, automated tests, CI server, automated deployment. The thing that's missing, which is the most important part, is consequences for continuously loving things over, and without that there's realistically nothing you can do except finding a real job with professionals and management that gives a poo poo that your coworkers are actively making things worse.
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Jun 20, 2014 16:30
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ratbert90 posted:But then they can't repaint their yacht's heliport this week. Because painting is expensive and I doubt you'd get a full yacht painting out of monitor stands
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Jun 20, 2014 16:34
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