Day 3

Wake up 5.30am. Attempts to get back to sleep fail. Turn laptop on around 6.30am and have cereal for breakfast. Chat briefly with Jono. Skype with Jodie before getting ready for work. Decide to go with work pants – no thermals – shirt, grey jumper, black puffer jacket, scarf, gloves and Nike Air Max. Work shoes in the backpack – no good for snow.

Picked up by Niklas around 8am then off to work. Stop past reception to fill out the lunch sheet – people pick from a four item daily menu in the morning. This is then ready for them at lunch time. First meeting is weekly SSC catch up. Review any after hours incidents taken by on call person – incidents are logged in spreadsheet including date, helpbox number, time call taken, time spent, description/comments. Niklas tells me he’s investigating potential alternatives to Helpbox. Options being considered (at this early stage) include Remedy, Microsoft’s solution (still in beta) and an online service. Demo of online service looks great – early pricing indication is $100 US per analyst. Fully ITIL compliant, looks great.

Phone conference with Niklas and Chris to discuss Volvo IT proposal/pricing, then lunch in canteen. Don’t know the Swedish names for what I had but it was sliced big sausage (boiled?), a mash of potato, carrot and swede/rutabaga, bread and butter and Pepsi. Not a fan of sausage, mash okay, bread great.

Meeting with Sharon Bowker, Corporate Communications officer for Entrance Systems/Besam. Turns out she’s ‘interviewing’ me for a piece on their Intranet. Nice lady, originally from Indiana. Been living in Sweden for 7 years – misses American football too! Explained her role as the editor of Besam intranet – Insite and upcoming migration to Sharepoint.

Spent afternoon with Jorgen, Entrance Systems infrastructure support technician. Much the same set up we have in Melbourne. Supporting about 250 users on site, using Dameware + NT Utils. Asset register is a spreadsheet, works as well as ours. Using Helpbox as call logging software – the phone only rings once the whole time I’m there. Apparently they have been successful in getting people to log request via email instead of calling. SOE developed by someone in Belgium? One image per model, no Ghost server. Deployed using boot CD. SOE consists primarily of Windows XP – no additional software, no sysprep. They have to run a SID removal tool after the image is loaded and deploy software via group policy. Ask about any issues deploying via GPO and he says they don’t have any. Similar set up to us – DFS share for packages. No PST file policy, can be stored on network or locally. Do not disable Auto Archive as we do. Have ‘synchronisation’ software running on laptops/desktops that copies Desktop/Favorites/My Documents to H: drive on server. Developed in house. Can be used to copy sync’d data back down to new computers. Backup Exec used for backups – to disk then tape similar to us. F-Secure used for Anti Virus.

Stopped at supermarket (not Gross) near work before catching bus home from the station. Picked up ingredients for chilli con carne, get home and realise I forgot to get an onion. Toss up cooking without and decide not too. Spaghetti for dinner again. Ice cream for dessert. Listening to Huesy and Kate on Nova while writing in Journal. Good to hear Australian news. In bed shortly after 10pm.