End of day: 21st Aug 2007

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Yesterday I (re)started posting an End of Day report - veteran Force9'ers might remember these reports yonks ago on Usenet. What is an EOD I hear you ask? Simply a quick update from around the departments here at PlusNet Towers. I'll try to provide you with some insight into happenings and events from our perspective. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, it's not meant to be absolutely comprehensive and it's not meant to be scientific.. it's just meant to be vaguely interesting (well, I hope it is anyway) and provide a feel of what it's like here today. I'm eager to hear from any of you who remember the original EODR's and certainly about what you'd like to see. So here we go then.. Customer Support Centre: When is it not a busy day on a Tuesday? CSC has been working hard to keep call waiting times below 10 minutes using all hands to reduce the overall wait. The average time to answer today is 3mins 40s, with the longest call in the queue at 9 mins 30s as I type this - you can see the stats in real time in our support section. Some customers are experiencing delays for their hardware to be delivered. We are working with our suppliers to resolve this unwelcome problem. The other main reasons highlighted for customers calling in today to report speed problems, asking for help setting up hardware and for updates on faults already raised. After a successful recruitment day Saturday we have been looking at possible new recruits and when we can get them started. Comms: James has been speaking to God, one of our Community Site forum members. God was asking about our new Broadband Your Way products and how these could be of benefit to him. Whilst God may not be all-seeing and all-knowing, He seems to be quite impressed with our new products and is now surfing along happily on our Option 2 product. Networks: Tickets escalated to Networks for resolution you know just have to be thorny.. today Networks cleared around 35 tickets. As well as fixing problems SPAM work has been of core focus: evaluating the different anti-SPAM beef we're adding to our e-mail platform. Three products are under evaluation at the moment; one will be selected for deployment. Early days, but this is to improve our anti-spam services for Customer e-mail. Website & Development: Big news for Force9 and Free-Online customers today. From September 13th we're bringing the two sister websites together to use the PlusNet website (www.plus.net). Force9 and Free-Online customers will receive an email to explain what's happening and the forum is of course discussing it. Having one website to serve all our customers will be of tremendous benefit for our systems, developers and comms staff, and we expect, for you. I think there is consensus that the Community forums are much better for having all our customers talking in one place. We have a big challenge to make the PlusNet website capable of being used by Force9 & Free-Onliners and this work has been underway for some time. The Support Pages posed an interesting problem as you can imagine. The development work is now in beta testing and so far is looking good. Force9 & Free-Onliners please note - you can't log into PlusNet yet! Concept prototypes are currently underway for a usability improvement to 'Manage My Mail'. This project is being used as a pilot for the new development process we are trialling called Scrum. We've also been looking at the design of the community site as a whole and looking at potentially adding a new skin to the site. We are hoping to show it to the community sometime in the next week. Pete Jackson