End of Day: 18th March

[#1]

We won! We won! Woop, woop! Spirits have been high today with the news of the uSwitch survey results. There were some celebrations this afternoon with a quick word from Big Neil then we all got back to work. First place in nine categories is great but we really ought to be winning all eleven! Have a look at the homepage of the PlusNet site and you'll be able to see what Marketing have been focussed on today. The uSwitch announcement has given us a real spring in our steps, but it also means we've had to move fast, with some of the team coming in at the crack of dawn to prepare the web pages. Not only that, but the PR line has been red hot. We've also been working on some advertising for local press and writing an email about My Referrals. The uSwitch celebrations have been slightly dampened however by the knowledge that it's our web analyst's last week at PlusNet. With that in mind, we're heading to the pub for his leaving do. Short 'n' sweet today from Commsland. James: forums, couple of problems, account management and sales. Bob: problems, mild forum posts, change controls, catching up other than that. Mand: openreach review, random home phone queries, training, problems and eating bananas. Matt: Dev change controls, ad-hoc task work, forums and other bits and pieces. Me (Chris): Problems, forums, personal tickets, customer sat blog, task cleanup. Matt from Networks here, well what have the guys been up to today? Me and Dan have been cracking away at Tickets, plenty of them to keep us busy today, I've also worked on some Ellacoya additions (keeping you gamers happy!). Neil, Kev and Aaron have been doing a great job with Parbin. Plenty of planning and documentation going on by Josh and Ade. Mike P, Ben, Dunc and Rich aka Kris have been tackling problems and Riz has been monitoring the platform like a hawk. Ian has been working on security whilst listening to MOS Annual 2008 and Russ (with his ever-growing fro) has been doing some preparation work for a rollout tomorrow morning. Thats it for another day in Networks. Today in the Web Team, James has been pimping up the Twitter plugin for the community site (see it on beta), I've been learning about the deep dark secrets of our amazing PHP Framework and trying to work out how to hook in frontend interface widgets and input validation. Colin's been scratching his head trying to figure out why WordPress on the Community Site keeps stripping HTML out of posts when the exact same code running on the beta site works fine. Jonny's been having a Bad Car Day: first his tyres went flat, then his dashboard 'crashed' and had to be reset with a secret manoeuvre by the man at the garage, and finally he lost his phone only to find it again half an hour later under his car. Another busy day in the CSC with a massive influx of calls around 11am with an unexplained authentication problem mainly in London, this was resolved shortly after but caused massive amounts of calls:

1. Authentication faults: this caused alot of calls today, along with the normal amount of auth faults we get.
2. Router setup: with the rollout of new hardware replacing the BT 4 port routers we are having to learn new equipment, this won't take long as the new routers are pretty easy to setup
3. Email setup: this includes webmail and setting up of email clients, many customers are not aware of the help guides on our site, this is pretty easy to setup with the right information and many customers have the incorrect data, this is easily solved.
4. Billing: this is for normal subscription payments, billing for hardware and new provides.
5. And finally, provisioning updates: housemoves, new orders and regrades are hot on the agenda at the moment with the Max Premium offer.