One of the complicating factors of my job is that I need to use the same tools, with different user credentials, often at the same time. For example, most of the companies I and my colleagues support use services that have some sort of integration with Microsoft Azure. As a result, I need to log in to the Azure portal for many of them on a daily basis.
Category: Tech support
Like so many of you, I arrange a fair number of meetings for various purposes. Among these are the ones I arrange for the members of my union local in my capacity as its head. Now, EU – and thus also Norwegian – data protection law clearly categorizes union membership as one of the numerous special categories of personal data. I understand this to mean that I am not allowed to share the membership list with my members.
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Free text search in ADUC
A critical component to successfully closing a lot of the tickets I handle at work is the ability to search for – and find – Active Directory User, Computer, and Group objects. In about eight of ten instances, I’m able to do so using the standard search types (searching for Users, Contacts, and Groups or Computers). Sometimes, however, I need to find each and every object that has a name containing some predefined string. When that string might be found anywhere in the name, the standard search fails me pretty consistently. Luckily, there is another search type: Custom Search. Here’s how to use it:
I have previously written about key metrics for support departments – and I stand by everything I said then. I have, however, come to the conclusion that another metric should be placed under consideration. A quick recap, however, of the metrics I proposed then, as well as what they are intended to measure:
Last week, I wrote about the added value that derives from writing longer answers when it comes to giving support. This week’s post is a corollary to that; writing more detailed tickets when sending them on through the tiers is also better support.
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Longer answers are better support
When working tech support, it is often tempting to give short answers to a ticket, in order to get on to the next ticket. This tendency is particularly problematic when responding in the negative to a request. Though understandable, we should fight this tendency. I have three specific reasons why it’s important, but I would also like to note that this is closely linked to Continual Service Improvement in ITIL, or the Improvement kata in DevOps.
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OneNote: Change backup behavior
Over the past few years, we’ve had sporadic calls from our users who complain that their drives are filling up. One of the reasons for this is that OneNote has filled them with backups of their notebooks. As it turns out, this can readily be set in the OneNote options. Here’s how:
Since starting to use Microsoft Teams, I’ve been encountering an issue when calling in to meetings; when joining a meeting, I’d get a loud buzzing on top of the meeting audio. Said buzzing was reminiscent of dial tones of yore. Digging into it a bit, I found that the buzzing ceased when I exited Skype for Business. Looking further, I was able to solve the issue by disabling the dial tone in sound settings. Here’s how:
It’s no secret that I use an iPhone and Apple Watch. With those in the house, adding an Apple TV to the mix made a lot of sense from an eco-system point of view. A while back, I encountered the issue that I had duplicate Apple TV entries in the Remote App on my iPhone.
A pet peeve of many users of Outlook is the fact that deleted messages that were unread when being deleted are counted in Deleted Items. Like the behavior when going from one unread email to another in the Reading Pane, there is a setting for this. Here’s how to change the behavior:
A while back, a customer complained that Outlook always marked emails as read when he clicked over to another email, and wanted to know if there was a setting that would change this behavior. As it turns out, there is. Here’s how you do it: