Despite the challenges of Monday everyone was in high spirits Tuesday morning as we went over to continue our work. I think we had all been surprised how quickly we had got through the offices, with nearly half the building done in the first day despite the hold ups.
The first port of call was the admin offices on the ground floor. We had electricians in there most of Monday fitting extra power sockets so the first thing on the agenda was to re-cable most of the admin staff Sun Rays and get them all powered up and running. I spent the first hour of the day under various desks in there trying to make some sense of the cabling. Despite the extra power we still had some really long runs where our standard power leads were too short. This lead to much debate from myself and the other techies as to how we could get everything plugged in. Krypton factor challenges have nothing compared to lying on your back under a desk and trying to visualise the power requirements of the desks above you while running the cables around. I think a few of the admin staff had a surprise when a techie suddenly appeared from under their desk!
It didn’t take us too long to get admin up and running with quite a few of us working at it. I decided to take a wander downstairs and see how Solstice were running and check on their printing. When I got there I found out that because of issues with floor mounted power being in the wrong place they still had nothing up and running!! I got on my mobile and called for backup and started plugging in the Solstice (and LTD) computers. I should mention at this point that as the staff there do a lot of development work they have some quite fancy computers and these were moved over from their offices in the LINC. With the work they do it wouldn’t have been appropriate to use Sun Rays but I still felt that they should get the chance to use some so I spoke the Derrick and we arranged to have three sent over. By the time I had spoken to Derrick my re-enforcements had arrived in the form of Ste, Paul, Neil and Adam from Core Services. The left photo shows Ste doing some cabling under one of the desks, you can see the floor mounted power units on the right. Before long we had most of the computers up and running and I had used the lessons from Monday to programme most of the telephones in the office. We had some lunch and then went over and put in three Sun Rays in the Solstice office (pictured right), I’ll be interested to see what the staff there think of them.
Printing was the name of the game in the afternoon. I have come to the conclusion that there are several tiers of IT requirement for most users, the bottom tier consists of a computer and a login, the next tier is email and internet. The next tier calls for office applications and other software, after that the tiers include things like printing and usb pen drive support. Think of it a bit like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for the computer user! The fact that we had reached the printing stage so quickly suggested to me that everything was going well so far and that the Sun Rays were working as expected.
Printing on the Sun Rays works a little differently to a normal computer. Usually you would have just the printers you use installed on your computer but because the Sun Rays are actually using printers from a server we need every printer that can be used by someone on a Sun Ray to be available on that server. Originally we had just manually installed all the printers on each server, having to do it six times as we have six servers! As we started deploying the Sun Rays to some of our own staff we decided that having every printer available was confusing so the Core lads came up with something new. Using Novell Iprint we can assign users to a printer, this printer can follow the user to any pc (or terminal server) and will always be available if Iprint is installed. This works really well and means that you can have people all sharing a big office but only able to print to their teams printer. Installing one of the other printers for a user is as simple as adding them to the specific group for that printer.
By the end of the day we had virtually all of the Sun Rays installed in the building. Thanks to all the help from the different teams with IT Services and the ease of deploying the Sun Ray workstations we had got through an incredible amount in such a short time! We still have a lot to do before we are finished with wireless access, information screens and all sorts of other things left to do over the next few weeks but I hope that we have made the transition a little easier for the Aintree staff by getting them all setup so quickly. Above are a few more photos of various colleagues from our different teams at work around the FOH, as I mentioned it was a real team effort from the whole department.