It's been quite a ride with Jim2 so far - and it's only the end of the first day.
Ian arrived this morning and we got into questions & answers almost as soon as he got into the car - one interesting point I found out is only about 40% of the Jim2 users out there are "IT shops"! There's quite a mix of business types including a number of engineering firms, mining and even a hardware store.
Mostly today was for discussing the various aspects of Jim2 and how they apply to our business, how we'd use them and what things Ian needs to get me thinking about.
Stock is one of those areas that needs some careful thought, particularly with regard to product codes. We typically use vendor (or mannufacturer) part numbers where possible to ensure we can order the same part from more than one distributor but some of these part numbers can be rather obscure. Whilst I personally might be fine in handling a part number like "PE-740K2L" it's not the simplest thing to replicate to the rest of the team.
So, it's time to categorise the various product types we work with and get them into major categories that will help to make a bit more sense of the part numbers. I've decided to split into various groups like: cables, rack equipment, software, computers (servers, desktops, laptops etc), hard drives, accessories, UPS components. It might look like a bit of a list but the part numbers themselves should simplify things a bit more for us although they may appear a bit cryptic at first (eg from the list above we have cables, rack, sw, comp, hdd, acc, ups). This yields our own part numbers that are a mix of the "major category" then the vendor part number such as "HDD.431958-B21" for an HP 146Gb SAS hard drive - we know it's a hard drive instantly.
Perhaps it's not the most ideal system but it'll work.
So I've got a number of part numbers to enter in order to accommodate purchase orders currently "in flux" but that should only take perhaps an hour to get done.
The real trick, apart from getting the rest of the team trained, is going to be getting service types worked out. This is going to be something new for us to get our heads around - remote desktop support, phone, email, on-site or do we want to get more granular?? Ian will give me more headaches tomorrow as we work through this side of things.
All in all I'm still very excited about what Jim2 is going to do for us and also for our clients - we will be even more organised moving forward. I should get back quite a few hours in my week and might even start to get some sleep.
Ian has been great to work with, but there's one really freaky thing - Ian reminds me soooo much of my mate David Mackie (who runs the Canberra SBS user group too). Their voices are similar, their manerisms, they even look quite similar (although David has more hair!). Talk about dopplegangers! I'll have to ensure they meet one day - it'll be quite a sight.
OK - time to wrap up for day 1. Got an email too from Andrew Dugdell (aka Dugie -
http://blogs.virtualserver.tv/blogs/dugie/default.aspx) who works at Clariti - another Jim2 user but based in Brisbane. They're happy with Jim2 which is good to hear and he sent me a video file on getting Outlook calendars to "talk" with Jim2 automagically - looking forward to watching that probably later in the week.
Tune in tomorrow for more news on Jim2 (and remember - it's
www.happen.biz !!)
Posted
Oct 17 2006, 12:52 AM
by
calvert