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Alfajor
Jun 10, 2005

The delicious snack cake.
What does your company use to track PTO of salaried employees? About 30% of the company is salary... and while hourly employees have an actual timeclock which schedules PTO properly, salary people get nothing. So, we came up with the idea of setting up an Outlook Public Folder (exchange 2010) and it seems to be filling the need, but not as elegantly as I would hope.

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aaronp
Jul 7, 2002

Alfajor posted:

What does your company use to track PTO of salaried employees? About 30% of the company is salary... and while hourly employees have an actual timeclock which schedules PTO properly, salary people get nothing. So, we came up with the idea of setting up an Outlook Public Folder (exchange 2010) and it seems to be filling the need, but not as elegantly as I would hope.

We used to use what the payroll service (ADP I think?) provided for PTO tracking, was built in to their offering, I think. Now they switched everyone to unlimited PTO, so no more need. But check with whatever software your payroll uses, it should have some way to handle it for you.

hanyolo
Jul 18, 2013
I am an employee of the Microsoft Gaming Division and they pay me to defend the Xbox One on the Something Awful Forums

Dukeofdummies posted:

Would anyone have any suggestions where I might go to learn more about VOIP? The company I work for recently started to get involved with some products in that market and some more knowledge and understanding about it would make a steadily growing portion of my calls a whole lot easier.

What are people usually using in that regard? Cisco seems to have plenty of say and certifications on the subject but from what I understand they're somewhat proprietary.

My main goal here is to give someone some starting points as to why our phone isn't working with their systems.

Do you have the hardware to set up an Asterisk server, DHCP server or router, and a LLDP/CDP capable switch at home or in a lab? That will at least give you an end to end idea on how to get a phone to boot up, get it's VLAN from LLDP/CDP, get its TFTP server/SIP server from a DHCP server or router with relevant DHCP options. From there you can look at how SIP works to the Asterisk server, and attempt to give out extensions to 2 phones and have them call eachother.

That should at least give you a base for troubleshooting if it's a DHCP/LLDP/CDP/TFTP/SIP/etc. issue when a phone won't boot up or connect.

AreWeDrunkYet
Jul 8, 2006

Alfajor posted:

What does your company use to track PTO of salaried employees? About 30% of the company is salary... and while hourly employees have an actual timeclock which schedules PTO properly, salary people get nothing. So, we came up with the idea of setting up an Outlook Public Folder (exchange 2010) and it seems to be filling the need, but not as elegantly as I would hope.

Are we talking for payroll purposes, or informally to make sure that half a department isn't out at once? If it's the latter, a shared spreadsheet worked well enough for a group of about 25 people.

Yaos
Feb 22, 2003

She is a cat of significant gravy.
What's a good rule for licensing? If there's no proof (proof of purchase or even a freaking key code) it was licensed assume it wasn't?

Edit: I'm excited about our upcoming project, everybody is getting on Active Directory. It will be fully licensed and everything!

Yaos fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Jul 25, 2014

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

Yaos posted:

What's a good rule for licensing? If there's no proof (proof of purchase or even a freaking key code) it was licensed assume it wasn't?

Edit: I'm excited about our upcoming project, everybody is getting on Active Directory. It will be fully licensed and everything!

I suppose you can try contacting the company and asking if there are any licenses associated with $business_name.

Yaos
Feb 22, 2003

She is a cat of significant gravy.

Comradephate posted:

I suppose you can try contacting the company and asking if there are any licenses associated with $business_name.

I think it's time for me to go to bed, I forgot to mention it was Microsoft software. We buy through CDWG (this does not mean the software had to be bought through them though) and there's no mention of buying any software through them, but if you buy retail it won't show up. I'll have to ask our rep tomorrow if he is able to tell if we've bought any software through them since it's not showing up on the website, only hardware.

Thanks!

Yaos fucked around with this message at 04:10 on Jul 25, 2014

Docjowles
Apr 9, 2009

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

Are we talking for payroll purposes, or informally to make sure that half a department isn't out at once? If it's the latter, a shared spreadsheet worked well enough for a group of about 25 people.

Yeah, good question. For HR purposes, all of our our payroll is done through ADP so we use their ungodly abomination of a web portal to formally submit PTO. Then we have a shared Google calendar that everyone posts to so people can see it and plan ahead.

We only have like 70-80 employees, though.

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

Docjowles posted:

Yeah, good question. For HR purposes, all of our our payroll is done through ADP so we use their ungodly abomination of a web portal to formally submit PTO. Then we have a shared Google calendar that everyone posts to so people can see it and plan ahead.

We only have like 70-80 employees, though.

Oracle HRMS sucks just as hard.

psydude
Apr 1, 2008

Heartache is powerful, but democracy is *subtle*.

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

Are we talking for payroll purposes, or informally to make sure that half a department isn't out at once? If it's the latter, a shared spreadsheet worked well enough for a group of about 25 people.

We used the calendar function in Outlook. Worked pretty well for a medium sized office.

Alfajor
Jun 10, 2005

The delicious snack cake.

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

Are we talking for payroll purposes, or informally to make sure that half a department isn't out at once? If it's the latter, a shared spreadsheet worked well enough for a group of about 25 people.

The request is from accounting. They claim that salaried employees don't use the same payroll system as hourly staff. I don't want to ask more because I fear the can of worms that it'd might open, and since however it is they keep track of salaries, they're having a hard time keeping track of it all. So far, a shared calendar and the honor system is the best we've come up with :3:

*ninja edit: we're talking about 25 people, from sales and IT all the way to the executives.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Alfajor posted:

The request is from accounting. They claim that salaried employees don't use the same payroll system as hourly staff. I don't want to ask more because I fear the can of worms that it'd might open, and since however it is they keep track of salaries, they're having a hard time keeping track of it all. So far, a shared calendar and the honor system is the best we've come up with :3:

*ninja edit: we're talking about 25 people, from sales and IT all the way to the executives.
I'm picturing something like one of those high school movies where the whiz kid hacks in and changes all his grades, except it's some guy in the warehouse changing his pay rate in an unprotected Access database and nobody notices for years

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice
several jobs ago we used Shiftplanning, it wasn't the worst thing ever.

Roargasm
Oct 21, 2010

Hate to sound sleazy
But tease me
I don't want it if it's that easy
Ours is web based with a self-service portal that does compensation, attendance, vacation, and tax info - I really like it. It's part of a larger suite though :(

lampey
Mar 27, 2012

There were streamers in the office for sysadmin day.

vibur
Apr 23, 2004
I'm in the process of getting MDT and such running for imaging fun. Someone in our corporate office is recommending SmartDeploy instead. Anybody have any experience with/opinions on it?

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

lampey posted:

There were streamers in the office for sysadmin day.

I am sure the network will meltdown on me today.

BaseballPCHiker
Jan 16, 2006

Docjowles posted:

Yeah, good question. For HR purposes, all of our our payroll is done through ADP so we use their ungodly abomination of a web portal to formally submit PTO. Then we have a shared Google calendar that everyone posts to so people can see it and plan ahead.

We only have like 70-80 employees, though.

Our company uses the same ADP site and it is awful. If you click the can't log in button it has helpful hints on how to disable pop up blocking on IE6!

Hughmoris
Apr 21, 2007
Let's go to the abyss!
After my scare last week with AutoIt, I've been trying to work with it a little more. Yesterday my group was tasked with inserting medications into a program for testing purposes, and the steps were extremely consistent for each task. So I decided to try and use another script. I still used recorded keystrokes and mouseclicks but I built in some safety features such as global script-breaks, ensuring the script only works on the proper window, and small pauses between each command.

It was a great success! There were about 25 entries, and each entry took anywhere from 10 - 15 minutes when completed by hand. My script could finish each entry in less than 1 minute.

I won't lie, as someone new to this field, it felt kind of good to learn something, create it and have it work in a real-world environment. :3:

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Hughmoris posted:

After my scare last week with AutoIt, I've been trying to work with it a little more. Yesterday my group was tasked with inserting medications into a program for testing purposes, and the steps were extremely consistent for each task. So I decided to try and use another script. I still used recorded keystrokes and mouseclicks but I built in some safety features such as global script-breaks, ensuring the script only works on the proper window, and small pauses between each command.

It was a great success! There were about 25 entries, and each entry took anywhere from 10 - 15 minutes when completed by hand. My script could finish each entry in less than 1 minute.

I won't lie, as someone new to this field, it felt kind of good to learn something, create it and have it work in a real-world environment. :3:

Well played. You will constantly be learning, and sometimes breaking poo poo is part of learning (test outside of production).

Tots
Sep 3, 2007

:frogout:
I'm trying to make the best of my internship at this SMB. Today the dude I'm working under (one man IT department) told me that I'm basically being retarded by trying to get my hands dirty in everything. For instance I'm asking about networking stuff, system admin stuff, security stuff, IA stuff. He said I need that to have a successful career I need to really focus on something and he'll help me. Right now, in this environment, I'm looking at focusing either on Windows Sysadmin or SharePoint. The SharePoint here is brand new, completely unadopted, and hosted offsite. They basically bought it and have let it sit here. What would people that are further along do in my shoes? Any suggestions?

Biggz
Dec 27, 2005

Tots posted:

I'm trying to make the best of my internship at this SMB. Today the dude I'm working under (one man IT department) told me that I'm basically being retarded by trying to get my hands dirty in everything. For instance I'm asking about networking stuff, system admin stuff, security stuff, IA stuff. He said I need that to have a successful career I need to really focus on something and he'll help me. Right now, in this environment, I'm looking at focusing either on Windows Sysadmin or SharePoint. The SharePoint here is brand new, completely unadopted, and hosted offsite. They basically bought it and have let it sit here. What would people that are further along do in my shoes? Any suggestions?

How are you meant to know what you'd like to focus on if you're not getting you're not getting your hands dirty in everything? I'd say fill your boots, get involved with everything, until you know what you'd like to specialise in.

Dark Helmut
Jul 24, 2004

All growns up

Tots posted:

I'm trying to make the best of my internship at this SMB. Today the dude I'm working under (one man IT department) told me that I'm basically being retarded by trying to get my hands dirty in everything. For instance I'm asking about networking stuff, system admin stuff, security stuff, IA stuff. He said I need that to have a successful career I need to really focus on something and he'll help me. Right now, in this environment, I'm looking at focusing either on Windows Sysadmin or SharePoint. The SharePoint here is brand new, completely unadopted, and hosted offsite. They basically bought it and have let it sit here. What would people that are further along do in my shoes? Any suggestions?

He's basically being retarded for saying you're basically being retarded. Milk it for everything you can, find what you love, profit.

CLAM DOWN
Feb 13, 2007




Tots posted:

I'm trying to make the best of my internship at this SMB. Today the dude I'm working under (one man IT department) told me that I'm basically being retarded by trying to get my hands dirty in everything. For instance I'm asking about networking stuff, system admin stuff, security stuff, IA stuff. He said I need that to have a successful career I need to really focus on something and he'll help me. Right now, in this environment, I'm looking at focusing either on Windows Sysadmin or SharePoint. The SharePoint here is brand new, completely unadopted, and hosted offsite. They basically bought it and have let it sit here. What would people that are further along do in my shoes? Any suggestions?
The guy's an idiot, how will you know what to focus on unless you try everything? Save your specialization for later and ignore him, get your hands dirty.

Also gently caress Sharepoint.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT
That and even if you specialize in one thing, you will work with a ton of other poo poo as well (unless you are siloed in a big company). If if you are siloed, it helps to know how other poo poo works. On a day to day basis, I do storage, network, vmware and windows administrator. All this poo poo ties in together.

Tots
Sep 3, 2007

:frogout:
Alrighty, he was really making me doubt myself. He's a good dude too, he's genuinely looking out for my best interests. He told me he doesn't want me to end up like him, working like a dog and stuck not making much money. As he put it "Jack of all trade gets poo poo on, master of one is a god."

I think a lot of it might be cultural too. He kept drilling that I need to have a career plan like yesterday, and I think people from Indian culture are generally drilled with that alot.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Tots posted:

Alrighty, he was really making me doubt myself. He's a good dude too, he's genuinely looking out for my best interests. He told me he doesn't want me to end up like him, working like a dog and stuck not making much money. As he put it "Jack of all trade gets poo poo on, master of one is a god."

I think a lot of it might be cultural too. He kept drilling that I need to have a career plan like yesterday, and I think people from Indian culture are generally drilled with that alot.

Who knows, maybe his ideal job is sitting around doing the same exact thing over and over.

Having your hands it a lot of different technologies will not only make you more valuable, but will most likely make your days more enjoyable (at least I find them more enjoyable).

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

Tots posted:

Alrighty, he was really making me doubt myself. He's a good dude too, he's genuinely looking out for my best interests. He told me he doesn't want me to end up like him, working like a dog and stuck not making much money. As he put it "Jack of all trade gets poo poo on, master of one is a god."

I think a lot of it might be cultural too. He kept drilling that I need to have a career plan like yesterday, and I think people from Indian culture are generally drilled with that alot.

People who get poo poo on at work get poo poo on because they aren't assertive enough to their management and they aren't negotiating salary properly, not because they have the wrong set of skills. There are jobs that require specialization that pay well and there are also jobs for generalists that pay well. There's no on track for finding a good, high paying job in IT. You can go about it a lot of ways and whether you ultimately succeed is ultimately going to depend more on your personality, ability to learn, and no small measure of luck, rather than what exactly is on your resume.

Work with things you enjoy and want to learn about for as long as you can, and know your worth so you can demand compensation for all of the new things you're learning.

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin

Tots posted:

I'm trying to make the best of my internship at this SMB. Today the dude I'm working under (one man IT department) told me that I'm basically being retarded by trying to get my hands dirty in everything. For instance I'm asking about networking stuff, system admin stuff, security stuff, IA stuff. He said I need that to have a successful career I need to really focus on something and he'll help me. Right now, in this environment, I'm looking at focusing either on Windows Sysadmin or SharePoint. The SharePoint here is brand new, completely unadopted, and hosted offsite. They basically bought it and have let it sit here. What would people that are further along do in my shoes? Any suggestions?

I was given the same advice by my supervisors, and I think they're wrong. You'll want to find an area of expertise in time, but there's no rush.

One thing that I did, and I think was a smart move, was to make an early push into virtualization. In order to 'specialize' in virtualization, you'll need to have a good understanding of Networking, Storage, Hardware, and a zillion other things.

A huge benefit to this is that now, if I decide that I want to learn about Server 2012, I can just create a test environment and go to town.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Tots posted:

As he put it "Jack of all trade gets poo poo on, master of one is a god."
Unless you work for a company that actually produces a technology product, chances are that you work for a company with a generalist IT environment. Do you think the person who understands everything or the one who only understands Lawson ERP would make a better technical director?

There's a lot of money in consulting for really good specialists. The market is also fragile, and you've got to work twice as hard to switch gears if the market for your specialty product evaporates.

orange sky
May 7, 2007

So, I've been trying to uninstall McAfee and deploy Kaspersky through SCCM and Kaspersky Security Center and I'm running into a wall here. Too many restarts needed, even if I had wake on lan it'd be really hard to do it. KSC, now that's something I hate right there. gently caress, what a headache. Filters don't work on machines and it starts a task and just hangs there all day and I have no idea what the hell is really going on - I just wish it'd go well :cry:

Also, I can't just insert a shutdown in my batch file after uninstalling McAfee, because if someone comes in in the morning and downloads the machine policy, then starts to work, bam machine off.

Roargasm
Oct 21, 2010

Hate to sound sleazy
But tease me
I don't want it if it's that easy
I'm not a generalist, I'm a one man army :black101: Hyper-V 2012 R2 is so easy to use it's absurd. After doing a Google Apps migration and bringing in 10 GbE last summer, I do the networking, system administration, purchasing, and supervise the help desk without breaking a sweat. I support exactly one piece of legacy software for our cafeteria and everything else is web based. Pretty cool way to start a career :)

edit: Oh wait it's two. I have a Rosetta Stone server too and it's a pain in the rear end

Roargasm fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Jul 25, 2014

AreWeDrunkYet
Jul 8, 2006

One way of thinking about it is that you will have no choice but to specialize over the course of your career, assuming you are in non-managerial positions of increasing responsibility. The hard part is going to be maintaining knowledge outside of your specialization - but making the effort to do so will make you more valuable since you'll be able to speak coherently to other people outside of your specialization.

BaseballPCHiker
Jan 16, 2006

Has anyone here used CloudShare before? I was thinking of using it for some labs and projects I'm interested in.

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

BaseballPCHiker posted:

Has anyone here used CloudShare before? I was thinking of using it for some labs and projects I'm interested in.

If the use case is labs and non confidential data, just go with google cloud, or if an institution go bing/google. What features are you looking for?

CLAM DOWN posted:

Also gently caress Sharepoint.


As someone who's built smallish (50 users) sharepoint environments for companies what's wrong with it?

The only problem I see with it is the fact people try to get too much our of it, or try and use it for something it is not designed to do.

vibur posted:

I'm in the process of getting MDT and such running for imaging fun. Someone in our corporate office is recommending SmartDeploy instead. Anybody have any experience with/opinions on it?

WAIK+WDS+ImageX

MDT is nice but if you understand any level of scripting WAIK+WDS owns, especially if you have multicast.

Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Jul 26, 2014

Cenodoxus
Mar 29, 2012

while [[ true ]] ; do
    pour()
done


Speaking of specializing in one thing and risking pigeonholing oneself into a single career track, I've recently been reading up on IBM System z and am interested in learning more about the system architecture, basic administration, and other z/OS concepts.

I've been reading through some IBM Redbooks but most of them seem tailored toward existing mainframe professionals. Are there any good resources out there for a novice with no mainframe experience and no readily available system access?

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug
Don't specialize unless it has the label "ORACLE" on it.

But seriously, find a focus you like, work towards it, however while doing so look at the dependencies you focus deals on. While it may take you longer to get to that goal, you'll learn and understand a bunch more.

Gucci Loafers
May 20, 2006

Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?


Cenodoxus posted:

Speaking of specializing in one thing and risking pigeonholing oneself into a single career track, I've recently been reading up on IBM System z and am interested in learning more about the system architecture, basic administration, and other z/OS concepts.

I've been reading through some IBM Redbooks but most of them seem tailored toward existing mainframe professionals. Are there any good resources out there for a novice with no mainframe experience and no readily available system access?

You're right and the only real way to get training is either work for IBM or an IBM Partner and shell out a few grand for training.

Geschi
Dec 22, 2007

War starts at midnight!

orange sky posted:

So, I've been trying to uninstall McAfee and deploy Kaspersky through SCCM and Kaspersky Security Center and I'm running into a wall here. Too many restarts needed, even if I had wake on lan it'd be really hard to do it. KSC, now that's something I hate right there. gently caress, what a headache. Filters don't work on machines and it starts a task and just hangs there all day and I have no idea what the hell is really going on - I just wish it'd go well :cry:

Also, I can't just insert a shutdown in my batch file after uninstalling McAfee, because if someone comes in in the morning and downloads the machine policy, then starts to work, bam machine off.

I'm actually doing this right now, although using just KSC and its been pretty painless. We have a three task sequence for machines, 1. Install Network Agent. 2. Remove previous AV and reboot. 3. Install Kaspersky AV.

It's typically required a reboot after definition updates but we're doing it off hours for less user annoyance.

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Vendictus Prime
Feb 28, 2013

Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.
Has anyone used CBTNuggets to help get their CCENT and what is your opinion of CBT's content for the cert? good or not?

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