Work

Call Center Day

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Today I went to Kingston. I had to meet the construction guys for an update. The work is coming along and should be done ahead of schedule. The cable guys still need to come and do their work, and the furniture needs to be setup but it is going along smoothly, so far.

I got an update on the new deployment method they are going to use for desktops. They are going to use RIS from Microsoft. For me seeing RIS actually working in a beta group was nice since I asked about doing this over a year ago.

Took Kai to lunch. I need to work on his review this week. it is late since I was sick this month.

The Kingston trips are always busy, but I never feel productive. I am beginning to think that the feeling of not “really” doing anything is because I am not getting what I want to get done, but helping out or doing stuff for other people.

Fresh New Circuits

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We just got our new 3700 series Cisco router today. it will be used for our new 4.5 megabit internet connection we are getting for NYC. This replaces our 2 redundant T-1’s. this connection is basically 3 T-1’s plugged into 1 big router. less redundancy, but triple the bandwidth. We figured our corporate office can have some acceptable downtime. Since our uptime stats have been great on our current circuit it seemed like a good gamble. I hope that once this is done I can use my VOIP phone without getting terrible choppiness sometimes.

We hope the circuit goes live in about 1-2 weeks. Verizon will be out tomorrow (had to cancel for some reason today) to do the smartjacks. Like I always say, you cannot have enough bandwidth.

Build Out

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Our build out of our new downstairs space in our call center is progressing. I got the ok (or the if it was budgeted go buy it and don’t ask about it) to get supplies for the new space. We need new WIFI points, printers, etc. Phones and computers are already on the way.

The last major purchase is the UPS for our downstairs computer room. It does not have to be as big as the one we are deploying upstairs since all it has to support is a switch. Granted it is a huge mother f–king switch, but still.

Other work going on is a reboot of half of our smart jacks tonight. No idea why, but one of the LEC’s (Local Exchange Carrier for those who have no clue what I am saying) we use needs to upgrade some stuff so they need to reboot the smartjacks. Until they called I had no idea you could or would do that at all.

New Servers

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We got 3 new servers this week. G4 HP Proliant box’s. We got one 2U, and 2 1U. They will be for our Biztalk 2004 deployment. We have 1 box for QA and then the other two goto our data center. Jay was building and testing them earlier in the week. Due to issues with our original quote we are way behind schedule. I would like to thank HP for their great process for securing special pricing if you buy in volume. They even admit they have issues with it recently. We hope to finish the build out early next week.

Jim’s Last Day

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Today was Jim C’s last day. Well big Jim C, since we have 2 of them at work. I missed his goodbye lunch but I ended up at Dukes for drinks after work. Several of us showed up. I had 1 drink (big macon jar of Jack and lemonade) since I am still recovering from my issues last week. Of course that 1 drink was dam strong. We had a good time.

It kind of sucks when someone you like actually leaves your company. There are plenty (well a few, not as many as before) of other people that I would rather see go. He is moving back down south so it is not like he is punking out and going somewhere else. He is moving so we all will miss him! Well I assume everyone will miss him, but I don’t know that for sure!

On the bright side I was wide awake enough and feeling up to actually going to a bar. That is a big step from how I was feeling all last week, and most of this month.

I need to go put away laundry and then hopefully do some more writing. Until then…

IPCC Is a Go

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After months of negotiating (and years of thinking and talking about it) my company finally decided to purchase Cisco’s IPCC software. Gus and I started looking into this stuff way back in December of 2002. It didn’t pan out. We ended up going to Cisco Call Manager 3.3.2 with our incumbent ACD Zeacom Smartconnect. Call Manager was a vast improvement over our Avaya Magix system we were using so we were sort of happy. Unfortunately Smartconnect has major problems integrating with Call Manager. We have uncovered several issues that have taken us months to overcome. Other issues are not correctable.

As we grow the need for a new contact center software became apparent. We looked at the major players, Cisco, Genisys, & Aspect. We were slightly limited with our options because we were already on Cisco’s Call Manager IP phone IP-PBX. That made us need to look at Genisys’s and Aspect’s IP based products. The problem with them was that either very few or no one was using them on Cisco’s Call Manager (CCM). To me that was one of the two killer problems for our situation. The other problem was integration. As we saw with Smartconnect the “hooks” that tied the Software to our IP-PBX was critical. Cisco was great at selling the integration between CCM and IPCC. Of course you assume there will be tight integration between the two, they are both Cisco products. The other two companies (in my opinion) had problems proving the tightness of their software to CCM. And for a major purchase such as this, I needed to be totally comfortable with the software we were buying. Because even if no one said it, if this integration fails peoples heads will be looking at me as to why.

There is allot to be said by having “one throat to choke” when dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars of phone gear. The up hill battle for IPCC was proving to our business people that the ease of use and functionality of IPCC was on par with Genisys.

So my multiple trips to Boston, Philly, Kingston, etc, and endless conversations with sales guys and pre sales engineers have finally paid off. And if you know me, dealing with sales guys a fate worse than death (sometimes).

The next step is scheduling this massive upgrade to not interfere with our other major projects going on. Such as expanding into our new Call Center space downstairs, new Fulfillment system, and upgrades to our data center infrastructure.

As part of this upgrade we will also be upgrading our voice mail from smartconnect’s voice mail system to Cisco’s unity. We will also need/want to upgrade call manager to 4.x after we are done with the IPCC upgrade. This is because Smartconnect as of now does not support CCM 4.x, so that upgrade has to come after we move to IPCC.

This will be exciting but stressful.

Can’t Get Enough Bandwith

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I just finished the paperwork on getting our office more bandwidth. We currently have 1 T-1 (and its redundant shadow twin). That amount of bandwidth is just not cutting it. We are maxing out our circuit several times a day. With the price drop on bandwidth we just ordered a 4.5 megabit link and are going to drop our redundant pair of T-1’s. Since we don’t have a call center in our office anymore we don’t need the extra redundancy, and the 4.5 meg link is actually cheaper than the 2 redundant T-1’s we currently have.

Save money and triple our bandwidth, that was worth the trade off in redundancy. Since there is such a lag in order time to delivery we won’t see this bandwidth for several weeks. I estimate it up and running by May 1. Sounds like a long time, but it is worth the wait.

VMWare Server

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We just bought our first (of many I hope) license of VMware GSX server. We also just picked up a nice Dell Poweredge 2650 off of eBay to run it on. We are plugging it into an existing SCSI disk array we had. We are bumping the ram to 4gig and with the existing dual Xeon 2.8ghz processors should make this a nice little server. VMware suggests 3-5 virtual machines per physical box depending on its configuration. I figure I can get more if I have several virtual machines that need to be always up, but are not always worked on. I already have a list of a bunch of projects that can be virtual machines, vs buying a physical server. We already built a Biztalk 2004 Server and SQL server to go along with it in GSX virtual machines using the demo copy we had. Once this new server is built we will port them over. Since it is just copying a few files it is trivial to move the VM’s to a new server.

I am also itching to try out the beta of VMware Workstation 5.0. I downloaded the beta but have not had a chance to try it yet. it looks like there is a bunch of new features. The more I use this software, the more I think it is the wave of the future for an environment such as ours. I can cut down the number of servers I have and save money doing so. Allot of my dev and QA servers are old, and will slowly need replacing. Putting them into VM’s makes sense. I see a ton of other applications for the software. This is our first foray into VM’s for server use. If successful I hope to do more with it.

Back To Work

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It was my first day back since I got sick. I ended up leaving early (3ish) since I was still very tired. The bright side is I made it through the day! I am resting now (sort of). hopefully I will be at 100% tomorrow since I have a full day planned that I cannot really bail out of if I start feeling bad.

New Switch

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We just upgraded our network in my companies call center office. We put in a new Cisco blade switch. it will act as our primary core. We did some reconfiguration on the old core’s and will use them as backup. this is phase 1 of our expansion plans.

When I say “we” did the work. I mean we hired a contractor, and told them what to do. We then looked over the configs and did testing. It is nice to leave the heavy lifting to others.

The upgrade actually went well. I am always hesitant to say that because I am fearful that something out of the blue will go wrong. But actually it went as good as to be expected. no major problems. I was back to the hotel and in bed by 3AM. I would have been in bed sooner but I had some cell phone problems I had to play with to fix.

Friday it is back to my normal office. I miss my chair:(