(no subject)

[agentz.livejournal.com]

I spent the day on our Helldesk today for the first time in aaaages. I normally do third line support and systems admin but our desk was very very short staffed today (1 operator and a New Deal-er) so I got asked if I'd fill in.

I agreed because I stupidly fell for the flattery of the boss and quickly wished I hadn't. At the start of this week we introduced a completely virgin version of our database (assyst Enterprise), with a whole new schema. Guess who spent so much time trying to find appropriate items and categories?

That would be me.

I was heavily involved in the previous version of our schema (well for the Education sector anyway) so everything was nice and easy and simple and made sense. All our categories started with ED, we struck the right balance between generic and specific items and all the dependancies were all sweet. Our user hierarchy was pretty good too, and people were generally where they were supposed to be.

The problem was that the 'corporate' people didn't keep any control over how the DB was managed so it grew bigger and bigger and bigger and got more convoluted. We had approximately 200 combinations of cause item and category available to our techs which seemed to work very nicely thank you. Just before the decision was taken to start afresh our corporate colleagues had over 1500 combinations. For less than half the nubmer of users and only about 25% of the number of sites we support.

So I spent most of my day trying to find suitable items and categories to use.

Oh and we had total power failures in two of our major sites today which meant that payroll wasn't payrolling, finance wasn't financing, social work wasn't, um, well, whatever the hell they do.

Oh and today also happened to be force password change day for one of our domains.

Gah.

Never mind, its Friday evening and I'm going to spend my weekend packing crates preparing to move house a week on Monday.

Have a good weekend y'all!