Diamondb Stress Management and IT Solutions
20 Feb 1995—30 Dec 1997
Lever Brothers Ltd (Part of Unilever Plc) PO Box 69, Port Sunlight, Wirral, Merseyside LA62 4ZD
First contract Support Analyst in Business Systems at Lever Brothers.
Hardware and software support for the three Lever Bros. sites at Port Sunlight, Warrington and Kingston (1000+ users), including help desk and personal visits. Support for the 1000+ users at the three sites.
Original 3 month contract extended to 6 months, with extensions to 30 December 1997.
At the various times in the contract, I have operated the help desk alone, supporting the entire user community at level 1 support, passing on calls to second-level support where necessary. Typically 300 calls per week are taken, 100 usually on a Monday. 60% are solved within 10 minutes, 20% within 1 day, the rest taking longer.
Duties: PC support including Windows 3.11, Word V6.0c, Lotus 123 V4.0, WordPerfect V5.1, Freelance V2.0, cc:Mail V2.1, Lotus Notes V3.0., Netscape 2.01.
cc:Mail support also involved password control.
Lotus Notes support included setup of user access and password ID disk.
Netscape support included Internet advice to users and IT staff.
Awareness of the business functions of departments and relevant software (sales, finance, personnel, production, logistics, etc.).
VAX/VMS system awareness and location/usage of the 20+ main VAX servers for user account set-up(Allin1 & PC), control, passwords and printer queue maintenance. VMS System password level access.
Project work
Account and Printer queue set-up under new server/client project for Levers, using Window NT 3.51 servers and Windows 3.11 clients (some NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 clients). Assisting user/PC migration team both at a technical level and knowledge of user requirements. This was to allow the 1000+ users to be migrated between September 1997 and February 1998 from VAX servers using Pathworks 4 (via Pathworks 5 node). Network troubleshooting, both at PC level (network card diagnosis) and segment level (thinnet and UTP), using software monitoring tools (net sniffers) to collect statistics. Used VB 3.0 and MS ACCESS 2.0 to collate/convert data from various VAX/PC audit system records, thus allowing presentation of several hundred PC/User audit data of PCs and printers in need of hardware/software updating, ready for new SAP module roll-out. Joint maintenance of TCP/IP Host table and address allocation, within Class B and Class C subnets. Simple TCP/IP PC troubleshooting. Implemented simple Reflections macro-driven allocation of TCP/IP addressing for printer Netjet cards (several hundred printer queues required urgent allocation of static TCP/IP addressing to prevent a rogue dynamic allocation process allocating Server addresses to Printer Netjet cards!). Designed Approach database for help desk call and job logging, making helpdesk statistics gathering a much easier task. Set up Approach database to co-ordinate and mail-shot users for server account transfer. Trained new help desk personnel. VMS printer queue creation/support. VAX account creation/support.
Discretion was needed as to when to call in third-party engineers to fix faulty PCs, printers or VT terminals etc.
Whilst there was not an excessive number of users (1000+), there was quite a diversity in software packages amongst the different departments at Lever Brothers as well as diversity of equipment. There was a profusion of VT Terminals and DEC printers using terminal servers, together with PCs using networked queued printers and slave printers of different vintages (early HP PaintJets to HPLaserJet 6m's) connected via PCs, ethernet cards and Decservers. This made diagnosing problems quite a challenge. A user in the soap making factory using a legacy system on a VT terminal would have different needs from a PC user in the Lever Development Centre with a Lotus Notes problems.
There were a number of "legacy" systems still in operation (stock control, logistics etc.), who's problems would have to be quickly diagnosed and passed on to the relevant second-line support.
It should be pointed out that prior to the contract, Lever Brothers Business Systems had not employed contract staff for the support desk. Hence there was a steep learning curve and on-the-job training only when time could be spared by the Operations Support Staff from their other duties. Consequently I had to devise my own methods of assimilating and co-ordinating the information needed to carry out support tasks.
LAN/WAN Components. Cabling: 10BaseT, 10Base2, 10BaseF.
Email connection to Europe/World using Wellfleet connection to SPRINT, latterly Global One. Decservers. Repeaters and bridges. TRANSLAN connection, using British Telecom's Flexible Bandwidth Service, of the three main sites. Protocols; initially mainly based on Decnet Pathworks LAT, now moving to TCP/IP.