Category: Tech support
-
From support analyst to DevOps thinker
The title of this post might seem a bit on the conceited side. After all, who am I to claim to be a DevOps practitioner, much less thinker? I will simply say that I am working to implement DevOps principles in my day to day life, am spending more than a little time reading, thinking,…
-
Thoughts on single piece flow in IT support
My first IT job was a one day per week internship with a pharmaceutical company while I attended my last year of high school. It was the first time I was exposed to the constant stream of support and service calls that makes up a large part of the day to day life of a…
-
The value of Kanban
Kanban (capital-K, as in the method) uses a kanban (lowercase-k, as in the board) to visualise and reduce work in progress (WIP for short). This is the most well-known, and visible, part of Kanban. It is achieved by limiting how many pieces of WIP any one work centre can have assigned. At first glance, this may…
-
Understanding bookings in Outlook
I’ve been seeing a surprising number of tickets from users asking why they are seeing double bookings of meeting rooms of late. In each and every case, the issue has boiled down to one of user error, with users not knowing or understanding how meeting invitations work in Outlook. This was a source of confusion…
-
Windows: Quickly find system information
For a number of reasons, I often find myself needing to find information about a system that can be somewhat difficult to source, such as when it was last rebooted, or when the system was installed originally. Luckily, there’s a tool to help us out, called System Information. A command line utility, systeminfo.exe, offers a…
-
Find attachments opened in Outlook
Early this year, a user called in with a somewhat peculiar story. They had previewed a file attached to an email, and the subsequently deleted the email. It wasn’t important enough to be worth it to restore the entire mail file, and so they wondered if there was any other way to find the attachment.…
-
Adding a shared mailbox in Outlook
A not infrequent question at work, is how to add a second mailbox in Outlook. Here’s how: Open Outlook Click File Go to Account settings, then account settings again Double click your current account Click “More settings” in the Server settings tab Go to the “Advanced” tab, and click add Add the mailboxes you want to…
-
Word: “Track changes” shows up as “Author” instead of author name
A user called in, reporting that Word’s Track changes-function tagged her as “Author”, instead of her name. I opened a remote session, and started out by confirming that everything else was working correctly, and that her name had been set as the author in the settings for Microsoft Word. Stalling for time while I researched the issue, I…
-
Excel freezes on 10 MB file
A few months ago, I had a user call in complaining that Excel would freeze and become completely unresponsive when she was working in a specific workbook. It was fairly large (10MB), but well within what the computer should have been able to handle. I opened a remote session to the computer, and started troubleshooting. My…
-
AD Group member does not show up in Exchange address book
A couple of months ago, a customer sent us a ticket, complaining that a mail group was incomplete. Specifically, his manager was not listed among the recipients. The mail group in question contained all managers, and membership was gained through dedicated active directory (AD) organisational units (OUs), one for the manager of each business unit…