Thursday, July 12, 2007

Upgrade Update

Well, I guess it's time to get everyone up to date on what is going on at work. We have spent the week upgrading the RAM in 420+ PCs and laptops. Surprisingly, this has gone very, very smoothly. No major issues whatsoever. We had a few PCs that got upset and we'd just reseat the RAM and it would take off. The number of calls the next morning after the upgrade have been minimal. Most of the time it is people who have forgotten their login name (since we logged in as an administrator). That was about it. Did hear a few people comment that their PCs had sped up since the upgrade.

Anyway, while that was going on, 35 new PCs arrived at the office that I had ordered. Unfortunately, due to no one's fault but my own, the PCs were incorrect. I had accidentally ordered towers and we prefer small form factors. So, I had to do an RMA on those last night and we're shipping them back tomorrow. Ooops... Also arriving were 35 20" LCD monitors, 18 laptops, 18 docking stations, 18 monitor stands and 18 laptop bags. That takes a little storage room.

Also arriving this week were 27 servers (25 DL380s and 2 DL360s). That takes a little more storage room. Add in 2 UPSs and 2 racks. Also arriving this week were new switches for all the offices. Needless to say, the office is overrun with boxes. The SAN should be arriving tomorrow or Monday...we found out it was somehow shipped to DC instead of Clarksburg. Innocent mistake...I guess.

As for the upgrade itself, I am invovled in a little of the switch infrastructure (trying to stay out of that as much as possible, really) and heavily involved in the Active Directory build and deployment, Exchange build and deployment, Citrix setup and deployment, Neverfail, Document Management System and SharePoint. In addition to that, I have to test all our software apps to see if their are Vista ready (along with our hardware) and order any upgrades should they be needed. If any of our specialty apps will not run in a Vista environment, we are hoping Citrix can provide our solution. And, in the middle of all this rollout, we have another major software rollout and are going to attempt to implement desktop faxing/routing towards the middle of the rollout. We also have another Application Review Group that I'm part of to determine if all our current templates, etc., need to be migrated. And we have to schedule the training with all this too.

I'm already sick of conference calls and meetings. We constantly are rehashing the same points over and over. I spent at least 6 hours this week on conference calls when I could have actually been accomplishing something. I guess they are vital but it gets annoying. I will be on at least two conference calls a week...that are scheduled. I'm sure there will be more as time goes on.

I could go on, but I won't. I'm sure you are bored already hearing about how busy I am. But this is why I haven't been updating as frequently as I had been. I barely have time to watch the news...let alone form an opinion on anything. I haven't watched baseball much and I'm afraid the first few weeks of Mountaineer football season are going to be lost on me.

Our test rollout begins in mid-September and general rollout should start in early October so, after that, I should have a little more freedom since a majority of the builds will be done and our image can be pushed. The entire project is expected to last until January or February. And then it is on to Phase II. Whew boy...

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