As a note for these posts, I’m not sure I’m allowed to go into specific about what companies I’m receiving tickets from, so I’m just not going to risk it and just be ambiguous, sorry about that.
Monday
New week, new me… or something to that effect. So, we went in and there wasn’t a huge amount to do initially but we had a meeting at 10:30 that will occur every fortnight with the rest of the CRM support team. I mean, I hadn’t even started doing any work with any of the customers, so I had nothing to commit to the conversation but I did at least get to hear what other people are up to.
At which point, we started working on our first ticket. Myself and Joe working together through the tasks, and wait ’til I tell ya… it was slightly nerve-wreaking, but only because this is the first proper piece of work that we’ve done since we got here and because we don’t want to mess up anything, even if it’s only a sandboxed instance.
So, we finished as much of it as we could and proceeded to send an email to the person who sent the ticket in the first place requesting additional information, at which point I went back to doing some more Pluralsight courses, since I’ve nothing else to do.
Tuesday
Once again, the work just keeps on coming… but not after some time not doing a huge amount. The person from yesterday had yet to get back to us about our ticket yesterday, so we just went right back to doing Pluralsight course videos (and making me want to go back and fix up that MissingNo. Name Checker program I worked on last summer).
But we did end up getting more tickets, one from the same company and another from a different one that we also had a meeting about earlier in the day. They seem like they’re somewhat more manageable than the previous one, in which they’re system was set up properly in the first place… but the problem wasn’t that clear. They were having problem with the fact that there was duplicate data in their system? I think? Or was it a problem with the web portal as they kind of described it as in the ticket? I really don’t know at this stage, and the other ticket we got today wasn’t much better, though we we’re able to at least make some progress with it and it’s up to the customer to get back to us.
I also did some adult thing and booked some appointments for when I get home, and I’ve arranged to go into NUIG tomorrow to get a Leap Card. Onward!
Wednesday
Continuing on from yesterday, that last ticket where I was confused about where exactly the problem was? Yeah, it just fixed itself. We got in and had a reply saying that “everything was fine, did we change anything?”. Of which, the answer is no, we went home. Dynamics is a funny thing sometimes.
Then came another ticket for me, first one I’ve received that’s just address to me and not Joe and myself. “Hey, can you reactive this account? It was deactivated somehow”.
Wait, what?…
Yeah, go to the account in question, click Activate on the top ribbon, click Confirm, done.
Look, I don’t expect everyone to understand how to use Dynamics, just came across as such an easy ticket, but it was an easy way to past 15 minutes in total, that’s all.
Lunch came and myself and Joe got the bus down to NUIG to get out Leap Cards. Not a huge amount to say here, making saving when travelling on the bus now and I’ll have it for when we get to Dublin.
Back to work, and I was told to write up some documentation for that 15-minute ticket… ok sure. To be fair, I think this was more so to see how good we are at writing documentation as we’ll need to be doing more of as the work placement goes on. Wrote it up, reviewed it a couple of time to make sure it read well, sent it off to our manager. She proceeds to send an email out to the rest of the employees and says we did a good job. Sure, I’ll take it.
Thursday
So, after having a good day yesterday, I went in today feeling great about doing work. Get a ticket about two users needing some more security roles to be able to send emails. EZ let’s go.
Not so fast, this ticket seems like it had been kicking about for a couple of days and the problem is still there, so ok, let’s take a step back and see what I can do. Added some permissions to the users and sent off an email to the person in question to see if the issue has been resolved. They didn’t get back to me today, so we’ll wait and see I guess.
Had to kill some time until the next ticket was assigned to me, so back to Pluralsight courses for me. But not for too long.
Next ticket involved making a user able to use the Interactive Service Hub (ISH) within Dynamics. This one stumped me for a while, since it looks like ISH is being depreciated in Version 9 of Dynamics 365, but it still works in this customer’s version. But no one online seemed to have it on Version 8. Great.
After about 40 minutes, found a post from 2014 saying that you have to edit the sitemap and add it back in manually. Thanks Microsoft. Anyway, one URL addition later, customer is satisfied.
Friday
The end of the week, once again. But this week, there was a bit more going on then last week. I got a total of 3 new tickets while Joe got… 0. Lucky me.
The day started off with a ticket that myself and Joe were assigned the day prior, where some records were being updating when they weren’t supposed to. We had a meeting with one the main developers who was involved with the original project, and he said it’s because the proper validation isn’t in place just yet, but we’ll be in a meeting with him on Monday to go over what we’ll need to add to the system.
As a follow-up on the guy needing ISH permissions, he also needed to be able to create Web Resources. So, I gave him the System Customiser role, and that was that.
For another ticket I had to login in to a PC using RDP and unblock some IP addresses, so they could update some software that they use. Well, it would have been like that if it didn’t take me an hour to just get to the point of logging in as I had to ask around for the password and the VPN software that we have to use to get RDP to work with the PC. And the account was disabled for the day because I tried to login and got the password wrong too many time. Oops. Guess I’ll have to wait until Monday to do that one.
The final ticket was the one where I just had to stop and ask other people for help since I had been working on this ticket on and off were certain people couldn’t use email templates. I think I have it now, but I couldn’t get the customer to check since it was the end of the day by the time I finished up on it.
At which point, we went go-karting and I got trashed…
Until next time,
– Jamie