The Work Update

The good news first I guess...only 2 more weeks of rollouts. 4 more classes which means there's only about 28 people left on XP. After 2-weeks, everyone at the company will be on the same operating system. The bad news: the operating system is Windows Vista.

The amount of support calls we are receiving from our users has decreased substantially over the past few weeks. If you take that as a sign of improved performance you would be wrong. The users have found ways to work around the problems and, thanks to the e-mails we've been sending, have learned how to fix their own problems. Some of those problems include, but are not limited to, our Document Management System disabling itself randomly, documents being lost despite hitting save, an error if you open an e-mail to fast (back to the document management system) and just overall sluggishness. So, we're upgrading the DMS next week...which should provide an interesting challenge.

Perhaps the biggest problem today is the fact that our laptop users can't open documents on the road. This problem is related to a folder redirection that was setup by the 3rd party that is helping us. So, when a user is on the network, his My Documents is redirected to a network drive (which is good for backups and whatnot). When out of the office, that drive should be created so they can still access their desktop, document or whatever. Unfortunately, it is only working in one office which means the other 6 can't work on their machines off the network. Do you think that would be a high priority issue? Me too but I've gone 2 weeks without getting any help and, despite a multitude of testing, I can't narrow the problem down. It's going to get ugly.

We've increased our WAN capacity multiple times now but the sluggishness issues won't go away. This company assured us that WAAS devices (WAN Accelerators) would make our network issues minimal. Well, that was inccorect. So now we're going to have to bring in a network analyzer to try to determine why our WAN is so slow despite the high capacity. There's something amiss. I'm guessing our NeverFail system or replication system is setup incorrectly.

The issues are so monumental that we're not even sure where to start. My first place is the laptop issue because, well, what's the point of having a mobile workstation if you can't use it? Two more weeks and everyone will be on this system, which is a huge milestone. But I'm pretty sure the real upgrade is just beginning. Thankfully we hired a summer intern...so, maybe he'll have all the answers...or will become the scapegoat if not.