Did you know that Microsoft have some free online training courses for Office 2003 and 2007? The Office Training Homepage helpfully shows you popular and new courses - worth checking out and referring your end users to.  If you have Software Assurance then there are additional courses available too under the Microsoft e-learning scheme. To access these courses you will need to request access from the person who administers your Microsoft Licensing. In my experience, getting the e-learning access for my users took about 4 weeks or repeated emails and phone calls with Microsoft before someone could fix the system to allow my users in, but the content was worth it.

In a surprise announcement Friday night, September 28, 2007 at the Podcast and New Media Expo in Ontario, California, Chuck Tomasi, co-host Technorama and Gmail Podcast, was tapped by author, Tee Morris as the newest co-writer for the upcoming 2nd Edition of “Podcasting for Dummies”, co-written by him and author, Evo Terra.

Tomasi said. “It’s an honor to be asked to co-author and update a book I have read, respected and used repeatedly. I look forward to including all the new advances in podcasting that have taken place over the last 3 years. I think it is a great way to give back to the podcasting community that has given me so much.”

Tee Morris offers up this reason for choosing Tomasi: “Chuck was the first person to contact me identifying the need for an update to the book. His experience with the technical side of podcasting and writing for Podcast User Magazine make him the perfect fit.”

Tomasi co-hosts Technorama with Kreg Steppe, a weekly light-hearted look at tech, science, sci-fi and all things geek. Tomasi also hosts the Gmail podcast, a series of hints, tips and tricks to help you get more from your Gmail account. Both shows can be found at http://www.chuckchat.com.

Tomasi is an IT Manager for Plexus Corp. (http://www.plexus.com), a contract electronics company headquartered in Neenah, Wisconsin.

Technorama and Gmail Podcast are also members of Friends in Tech (http://friendsintech.com) and Farpoint Media (http://farpointmendia.net), a podcasting network of over 70 shows.

The expected release date for “Podcasting for Dummies” 2nd Edition is June 2008.

Earlier this year Microsoft ran a promotion called Exam Insurance which provided you with a free retake on a failed Microsoft Exam or a discount on the next exam if the first one was passed successfully. A subscription to TechNet was also included (if you passed) but you had to pay extra for the Exam Insurance but the extra was well worth it to get a discounted copy of Technet. Unfortunately this offer expired at the end of July but Microsoft have come back with their 2nd Chance promotion again. This time you get a free retake if you fail the first exam.

This offer runs until the end of January 2008 which provides 4 months of insurance so now is a great time to get cracking on your Microsoft certifications and try those tests that you’ve been meaning to get done but not got around to it just yet.

Personally I’m hoping to get my MCSA by the end of the year - I already have my MCDST (Desktop Support Technician) and Small Business exams, the former qualifies as an elective for the MCSA and the latter an elective for the MCSE which will be my next milestone. It is tough getting the time to sit down and do the studying for these exams as work is very busy but obtaining the qualifications is often part of a professional development plan and often comes up in annual review discussions (which I am about to have very shortly.)

Update This post was actually written a couple of days ago and intended to be released later today but the information has already been posted on In The Trenches and on Mike McBride’s blog so I am now posting it here too! My first exam is scheduled for Friday morning.

Previously in this mini series, in my previous posts (part 1, part2) the question was asked - What are the likely dangers if all of the users were in the domain admins group and what pitfalls could occur if the users were removed from this group.

The answer? The users profiles would get deleted when they logged out of their machine! A very unexpected result but as mentioned in part 2, the previous administrators decided to add everybody to all of the domain usergroups to ensure that everybody could do anything on the network and so the network administrators would not be bothered with user permission requests. Unfortunately, adding everyone to every group includes the Domain Guests group. It is a VERY little known fact, that if you are a member of Domain guests, your profile is deleted when you log off the network - after all, you are a guest in the domain so why keep your settings? The saving grace for the previous company was that if you are also a member of Domain Admins, your profile is not deleted. See Microsft KB Article 165398 for documentation on this fact.

By removing Domain Admins from the users group, the users were now part of Domain Guests and as they logged off the network, their profile was deleted. This includes all files in My Documents, their archived email, desktop icons and the current work they were using (stored on their desktop) as all these files were stored in the default location, c:\documents and settings - on the desktop machine, in their profile.

Once it was discovered that the profiles were getting deleted after logging off, everyone was told not to log off whilst I did some research to find out why this was happening and the above knowledge base article was found. Everybody was removed from Domain Guests but the problem still existed for the users who were currently logged on as group membership is refreshed at logon and so everyone was still a member of Domain Guests and therefore the profile would be deleted! For the first time in my life I was actually telling people to turn off their computers at the power switch rather than logging off and shutting down their computer. By pulling the power, the logoff functions would not run, the profiles would not be deleted and the subsequent logon and logoffs would work as originally intended.

As you can imagine, the solution to this perplexing problem was very welcome after a VERY long weekend. I hope you have enjoyed this mini series. Let us know whether you would like similar series to run. What did you like/not like about the series. My goal was to make you think, impart a little known fact that might help someone else and give you an answer to Mike Mcbride’s question - What did you learn this week?

Working on a helpdesk, especially one that isn’t just a call center, there are a couple of things you have to deal with. One, you have to multi-task. You have no idea how many times each day I get a call about something that is going to take some time to fix, or deal with, but I still have to answer incoming calls and/or emails in between working on this longer project. The other thing you have to accept, is that when you walk in the door in the morning, you have no idea what you’re going to be working on that day. Let me give you a case in point.

Today, my boss asked me to see what I could do to help one of our secretaries with an Excel problem. Basically she had a spreadsheet that listed something like 2500 checks by customer with amounts, etc., and a second sheet which had a list of customers with the grand total of their checks. What my boss and she had done yesterday was to sort the checks by customer name, then simply put the sum of their checks on the second sheet. For example, let’s say the customer’s checks were check 9-16 on the list, on the second sheet you had their name and a formula, SUM(Sheet1!D9:D16). That worked, until her boss dropped the bomb today. Oh yeah, the list of checks was not final, they will be editing it, adding to it, and the formulas on the second sheet need to adjust for that as it happens. Oh and it’d be great if we could somehow do it so that they didn’t have to go in later and change all 900 customer formulas if the list got larger than the cell range we used in the formulas.

So, I spent nearly an hour coming up with a nice SUMIF formula, referencing two named ranges (so we could grow the cell ranges in one place, as opposed to 900 formulas) and having the IF depend on a relative cell reference so that it could simply be copied to all 900 rows. I did it, but needless to say, the rest of the organization did not stop calling or emailling the helpdesk while that was going on, so I had to manage to focus on this formula in between getting calls for printer service, resetting passwords, and teaching people how to remove gridlines from Word tables.

So if you’re a programmer, or sys admin who gets to focus on a project without fielding those kinds of requests in the middle, or who knows how you’re going to spend your day ahead of time, thank your helpdesk.

I got an email today from someone who was trying to drum up some blogosphere PR for Computerworld’s 20th annual Career Survey. I gave it a quick glance and immediately thought, “this is Friends In Tech material!”

The email gave this as a quick overview:

For most IT workers, pay raises have stalled out around 3.1%, according to the nearly 15,000 who took part in Computerworld’s 20th Annual Salary Survey. But for those with sought-after Web skills, employers are starting to loosen the purse strings

Read more, and then, come back here to discuss…

I’m working on going through the PR folks to get some more information, I’ll be sure to pass along whatever I find out!

First off, I see that Andy beat me by a few hours to posting something up on the FiT blog. Stupid job getting in the way of blogging!

Anyway, I thought I’d make my debut here by pointing out a really interesting career development idea I stumbled across yesterday. The idea of creating a Hero folder in your email client.

The basic concept is that everytime you get an ‘atta boy, or thank you email from a customer, you store it in this folder. Then, on those days when you’re feeling a lack of inspiration toward going the extra mile for your customers, you go into this folder and review all the times that taking the extra step really made them happy. Happy enough to send you a nice email note. Now, as an internal helpdesk jockey, those customers would be my users. I know that there are plenty of days when, no matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to make a user happy. It’s very discouraging to have that sort of experience, and I am going to give this a try to see if I can right myself a bit quicker when I feel that sort of discouraging funk coming on. (Not to mention have some real concrete stuff to fall back on come annual review time.) Only, in my case, I named the folder “Appreciation” so it would show up at the top of my Outlook folders.

As I thought more about it though, I think there could be even more uses for this idea. If you manage a helpdesk or IT staff and you get these sort of messages about your folks, you can forward them for them to store in their hero folder, or you could keep a public folder of happy customer emails and even turn it into a friendly competition among your staff. If you have integrated messaging like we do, you can move your happy customer voice mails into this folder too.

Now I just to figure out a way to get all the comments of appreciation that are made to me in person or on the phone into the folder. Maybe I’ll grab our spare digital voice recorder and start making people repeat them into the microphone.

If you’ve done this sort of thing in your organization, or even just in your own career, let us know how it’s worked for you.

This series originally aired on In the Trenches. It is a series of short presentations on various technology professional associations. Good for furthering your IT career.

In this episode we wrap up with volunteering to further your career and credentials.

This series originally aired on In the Trenches. It is a series of short presentations on various technology professional associations. Good for furthering your IT career.

In this episode we cover the High Technology Crime Investigation Association.

This series originally aired on In the Trenches. It is a series of short presentations on various technology professional associations. Good for furthering your IT career.

In this episode we cover the Information Systems Audit and Control Association.

This series originally aired on In the Trenches. It is a series of short presentations on various technology professional associations. Good for furthering your IT career.

In this episode we cover the ASIS International.

This series originally aired on In the Trenches. It is a series of short presentations on various technology professional associations. Good for furthering your IT career.

In this episode we cover the Association for Information Technology Professionals.

This series originally aired on In the Trenches. It is a series of short presentations on various technology professional associations. Good for furthering your IT career.

In this episode we cover the Information Systems Security Association.

This series originally aired on In the Trenches. It is a series of short presentations on various technology professional associations. Good for furthering your IT career.

In this episode we cover the Association for Computing Machinery.