Day 92/183: Have you tried turning it off and on again?

[nanila]

Ill Communication: A Very Short Play

Upper Management: How do you all feel about having calls to your currently inaccessible campus work phones forwarded to your mobiles?
Us: Our personal mobiles?
UM: Yes.
Us: That would be an emphatic no.
UM: OK, how about having calls redirect to your Skype for Business accounts?
Us: That would be acceptable.
UM: Great! Here are instructions on how to set that up through the IT portal.
Us: We've all tried and none of us have that option available to us.
UM: Oh dear. We've opened a service desk request on your behalf to correct that.

~~~Three Weeks Later~~~

IT: We've fixed your issue! Please log out of Skype for Business and log back in, and then you'll be able to redirect your calls.
Us: Um, so, we've all tried, and what you've done is enable calls to be re-directed from our Skype for Business accounts to our currently inaccessible campus work phones. We still don't see the option to do the reverse on the IT portal.
IT: ....Ohhhh, is that what you wanted? Sorry.
Us: ...

We're going to be back on campus full time before this gets fixed, aren't we.

Comments

[worlds_of_smoke]

-facepalms so hard-

[marymac]

I allegedly have voicemail set up. Except nobody has been able to leave me one. Someone else can be left voicemail but can't access them. We're all doing Teams calls and praying nobody external wants us.

IT have basically thrown the head up and told the powers that be to be grateful the servers are holding up and if they want the phones to work please buy the new system that they've been asking for for fifteen years.

It's inglorious chaos.

[hilarita]

We're going to be back on campus full time before this gets fixed, aren't we.

yes.

[nanila]

It's going to be at least another three weeks before we hear anything, and I predict it will be "we can't fix the issue with the portal until we're physically back on campus too".

[nanila]

I've never had access to voicemail. I think I put in a service request when I first started and then forgot about it, and by the time I remembered it, we'd gone through the whole "swap to new system, everything gets wiped" debacle.

I think your IT department is probably correct across the board; we should just be grateful for everything that continues to function at all at this time, however much it creaks.

[nanila]

Sigh.

[azurelunatic]

Oops.

[marymac]

Oh seriously. In the limbo week where the South had locked down and we were preparing to work from home, I had the joy of wandering into the KTP office just as the guy who was a systems engineer for quite a large organization in a previous life found out exactly how many Citrix licences we have. As an institution.

I did not know a man could go that colour.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes.

[askygoneonfire]

Ha! Also, who is even using Skype for Business anymore? I thought Microsoft was winding it up? So it's also a race against that piece of software being entirely obsolete *and* your return to campus!

[fauxklore]

We still use Skype gor Business though we are starting to transition to Teams.

On the other hand, we have functioning voicemail which even sends us email when we get voicemail, complete with a recording of the call (and a barely intelligible transcript of it).

[silveradept]

That is entirely familiar to us, and not just in IT.

[liseuse]

I very very begrudgingly forwarded my desk phone to my personal mobile because I don't have a work mobile and assessed the chances of getting one amidst all this as being very low. I made it very clear to my boss that I would answer calls in working hours and that that was it. Thankfully I've had very few. Unhelpfully they all come through as showing the main campus number because they're being routed through my work phone and all external calls from any of the work landlines show as the main campus number.

I also can't pick up any of my voicemail. I should be able to do so by ringing my own number and then some form of magic involving my PIN but it doesn't work. I don't care enough to log an IT job for it.

[white_hart]

I *do* have my work phone forwarded to my mobile during working hours (because, astoundingly, our newish telecoms system actually lets you toggle forwarding on and off via the web interface, and set rules for when to forward, and make calls via the web interface so people don't see your personal number), but other than for admissions queries no-one seems to be phoning anyone anyway. Except the academic who phoned me to say that her email account was compromised and could I let the person she was supposed to be having a Teams meeting with know.

[white_hart]

I gather that we made an emergency purchase of a great many additional Citrix licences on about 18 March, having realised that everyone was moving to remote working and the previous number was Not Nearly Enough.

[marymac]

We are supposed to behave everything on SharePoint. What actually happened is that the line managers all dumped the currently used share files on One Drive and we've flown by the seat of our pants since. Reconciling is going to be a nightmare.

[white_hart]

I had a backup plan to move all of our shared files on to OneDrive, but a lot of people are only comfortable using remote desktop and not accessing files directly so it would have been a steep learning curve!

[worlds_of_smoke]

uuuughhh.

[fred_mouse]

Oh, sympathy to that human.

We were told that VPN access was on a needs-must basis, and one co-worker had to go in to the (pretty much deserted) office to run their monthly scripts, because that wasn't 'must'. I was fortunate, having organised VPN access last October (and then using it not at all until sent home). My understanding is that we have less than 1/4 the useful number.

[nanila]

I was wrong! They fixed it! Just in time for me to go annual leave for a week. :D

[nanila]

Whilst it's nice to have the option, I predict I will never use it.

[nanila]

I was wrong! They actually fixed it quite quickly. :)

[nanila]

Apparently we'll be transitioning to Teams in a couple of weeks, so even though it has actually been fixed (!!), it will be irrelevant shortly.

[nanila]

It is, sadly, not an unusual anecdote!

[nanila]

That was very generous of you to do. I'm glad you aren't getting a high volume of calls as a result, but if you do, I would make noises about how Employer should be paying your mobile bill, even if they won't buy you a phone.

[nanila]

Wow, that is a very smart interface! I'm glad you have all those options. However, I do still object to the idea of employers expecting employees to provide their own hardware and pay the service bill. I think there is a very good argument for employers to be paying for their employees' broadband right now too.

[liseuse]

They probably would buy me a phone, but my position has never needed one until now so I've just never asked. And HR have already made it Very Clear that they won't be reimbursing us for anything we've bought/expenses incurred as a result of working from home.

I think there is probably a way to get our phone system to link to our Teams thing and have all calls come through that. But, I refuse to download Teams to my personal laptop (this is my arbitrary line in the sand) and for some reason working on the web app means I never get call notifications anyway. I spend a lot of time video calling people back.

[worlds_of_smoke]

Miracles never cease!!

[white_hart]

The other advantage of using the web interface is that it calls the phone you're using, then calls the person you're calling when you pick up, so it doesn't count as an outgoing call on your mobile either.

[askygoneonfire]

Hurray!

Against all my inclinations, I do quite like Teams. It works pretty logically. Happy new software.

[evilsusan]

Sorry, this is unrelated, but we should coordinate on a Pokemon GO thing. Is there a way to contact you that isn't on one of your posts?

[nanila]

Oh yes, are we about to become Best Friends? Please PM me here on DW and we can try and coordinate that for this weekend. My time zone is British Summer Time.

If I miss the set time for coordination then please do feel free to open the gift at your leisure; I'm not that fussed about getting rapidly from Lvl 39 to Lvl 40.

[evilsusan]

I'm not too worried about the alt account (the one about to tip over), but would like to get to Level 40 on my main so I can nominate new Pokestops. :-) From a game point of view, once you get to level 38, you can power any 'Mon up to Level 40, so it doesn't much matter.

Now I need to work out how to DM on DW.