What’s A Techie To Do?

Or rather, what have I been up to lately?

Been doing a lot of “spring” cleaning at the office. Trying to tie up loose ends on lots of little projects.

1) Upgrading Shoretel – I’ve been using Shoretel since Shoretel 5. We’ve been through several upgrades since then and last week moved to Shoretel 12.3.  We have a fabulous reseller that did most of the work for me. Sometimes it’s nice to just sit back and watch the magic. The trickiest part was getting the MSI file for the new desktop software, Shoretel Communicator, out of the setup file so I could deploy it with a GPO.  This guy had a good blog post that helped me out.

2) Removal of Exchange 2003 – Back in October I migrated our mail to Exchange 2010 SP1. Our old server had going through several stages of being decommissioned and had been left turned off for several months as other more pressing project got to me. I finally turned it back on and ran the setup program to remove it.  It didn’t go completely flawlessly, but most issues were resolved by fixing a few public folder replication issues and then deleting the server from the Exchange 2003 ESM.

3) Training for Windows 7 and Office 2010 – We have finally reached the point where we are doing a bunch of hardware refreshes for staff in the office.  That means moving from XP / Office 2007 to Windows 7 and Office 2010.  I’m not doing the hardware deployments, but I’m responsible for providing basic training to the staff so they are prepared for some of the changes that will come.  My first two sessions were this week and I concentrated a lot on the new start menu and taskbar in Windows 7.  Also, Outlook 2010 has quite a few navigation changes that are notable.

4) De-cluttering My Desk – While not a super-techie endeavor, it needed to be done. I trashed piles of CDs and DVDs of very dated software, including diskettes for installing Windows 2000 Server. Diskettes!! Ah!!  If anyone is looking for the DVD to install Windows 95, I’m your girl. I’m hanging that in my cube for decoration.