Back to SIMs.

So, that was Molly's day.
As for my day......
An interesting time today. Interesting indeed.

The big deal of the day was trying to sort out the problems we had with SIMs.
The council ICT bods had been on the phone the previous night and talked the admin officer through the solution to the initial problem of SIMs refusing to start after the update process. It seems that Microsoft .net2.0 was required on the machines for the update to work. No-one had told us obviously. That would have made it far too easy. And where's the fun in that?

This was the thing that's annoyed me the most really.
Before I came in this morning I thought it was a real screw up on the part of Capita, the folks that do SIMs, not communicating the need for this extra install through to schools and thus causing me a little bit more work in a very busy week.

But it seems that the council have been made aware of these issues for a long time now. Seems that they've had plenty of time to tell us about it and didn't.
Which is a bit of a poor show really.

But there was still the problem of the two machines that the staff had decided to cancel the update installations on. These proved slightly more troublesome.
Which is when the strange stuff started happening.

I do try and keep blog and me and home separate from work. I never direct blog names or locations here. And when I moan about work I try to do it in the rant-lite form I use at work.

Which is why I was surprised to find an email from Phil Neal, SIMs director at Capita in my hotmail account. He was concerned about the problems and offering to help. Which was very nice indeed.
A few hours later I was even more surprised to get a phone call from Capita regarding the problem. They'd tracked me down it seems. Email via the blog, mention of ERYC in my reply so they just phoned up the ICT head at ERYC ICT and asked if they had a Richard working somewhere in the ER. Just goes to show we can all be found!

This is when I realised that they were trying to do a good thing and were genuinely concerned over the problems we were having and tried to sort them over the phone. But time and a bad line defeated us and they kindly arranged to have a go at remotely fixing it tomorrow morning. All the way through it was extremely pleasant and really nice to talk to people who seemed to be genuinely bothered that their thing just wasn't working right.

So all in all, everything is fine. Ironically, I actually fixed the thing myself later on in the afternoon anyway. I wanted to at least try and it was as simple as a quick uninstall / reinstall job.
Capita have proven themselves bloody nice beyond all measure and SIMs lives on.
(Until the next time on of the teachers decides that waiting 2 minutes for an update is just an impossible amount of time that is!)