IT people, please communicate plainly

[Doppel]

I'm not quite sure how you want them to describe a federated service - I guess they could have spent the time determining how it can be adequately worded for you, not like they have anything important to do.

FWIW, "federated" services in Microsoft's world typically mean they're offsite. They're saying the communication between your Lync servers can't communicate with the ones in Malaysia.

This is what he is talking about. You think you described it but didn't; how can the rest of the office pool know what a lync server is? How about just email the group that video conferencing with Malaysia is down and there will be an update when it is up?

People do no actually care about the reason behind the outage, just what is affected. For example "If the Internet is down" you tell them it's down, not some long winded irrelevance about a switch failing.

 

[dougp]

This is what he is talking about. You think you described it but didn't; how can the rest of the office pool know what a lync server is? How about just email the group that video conferencing with Malaysia is down and there will be an update when it is up?

People do no actually care about the reason behind the outage, just what is affected. For example "If the Internet is down" you tell them it's down, not some long winded irrelevance about a switch failing.

Lync is your IM client. That's pretty freaking simple and easy to understand if you use that client at your job.

 

[ImpulsE69]

I once sent an email out to our entire division that said something to this effect:

Everything is broken. Please take the rest of the day off and we will contact you when it is fixed.

They didn't like that so much.....but these days I'd probably be out the door.

As companies grow and get more people telling them how to do things and alleviate risk, I think the biggest red tape makers are auditors. I swear their job is just to prevent everyone else from doing theirs.

 

[kranky]

Our IT department usually will say something like that, but then bullet point "who's effected," "what features will be unavailable," and "workarounds."

It's rather nice.

That's how to do it. Good for your IT group.

 

[Apple Of Sodom]

Learn to fucking use the tools that you are given. You use Lync? Then know what the fuck Lync is. Learn the difference between a CPU, hard drive, tower and a monitor. You use the tools and there is a reasonable expectation that you know what the fuck you are doing. You would go purchase a bunch of carpentry equipment and call the items a banger, twister, twister with a flat thingy, sharp cutty thing in a straight line, sharp cutter thingy that lets you go in circles...

I agree that it behooves us to speak in normal terms and that part of doing well is making the customer not feel stupid, but for Christ's sake, I've actually flown 400 miles to push the power button on a server (to the tune of $1000 + travel expense which they happily paid) because the person on the other end of the phone didn't know what a server is, or how to find the power button on it.

 

[kranky]

Learn to fucking use the tools that you are given. You use Lync? Then know what the fuck Lync is. Learn the difference between a CPU, hard drive, tower and a monitor. You use the tools and there is a reasonable expectation that you know what the fuck you are doing. You would go purchase a bunch of carpentry equipment and call the items a banger, twister, twister with a flat thingy, sharp cutty thing in a straight line, sharp cutter thingy that lets you go in circles...

I agree that it behooves us to speak in normal terms and that part of doing well is making the customer not feel stupid, but for Christ's sake, I've actually flown 400 miles to push the power button on a server (to the tune of $1000 + travel expense which they happily paid) because the person on the other end of the phone didn't know what a server is, or how to find the power button on it.

Just for the record, I have worked with computers for a long time. DEC minicomputers (sysadmin, VMS OS), Unix systems (sysadmin), PC servers (developed plan to convert from Unix, sysadmin), networking (first Ethernet network in the company was in our group), designed and developed software, wrote the first disaster recovery plan in the company (our group had the only on-site server, which I was the admin for) ... However, I have nothing to do with "Lync Federation." It's installed on about 10% of the machines, and mine isn't one of them.

So yeah, it's not about me, and apology accepted.

 

[sotired]

This is what he is talking about. You think you described it but didn't; how can the rest of the office pool know what a lync server is? How about just email the group that video conferencing with Malaysia is down and there will be an update when it is up?

People do no actually care about the reason behind the outage, just what is affected. For example "If the Internet is down" you tell them it's down, not some long winded irrelevance about a switch failing.

sounds like you're a busy body. why do you care if it doesn't apply to you? no one has time to explain every damn thing to you. if you don't know what lync is then you obviously don't use it. move on.

 

[dmcowen674]

This message is hidden because Doppel is on your ignore list.

sounds like you're a busy body. why do you care if it doesn't apply to you? no one has time to explain every damn thing to you. if you don't know what lync is then you obviously don't use it. move on.

Just put him on ignore

 

[Howard]

This message is hidden because Doppel is on your ignore list.




Just put him on ignore

This is so rich.

 

[Exterous]

Dear non-IT people, please don't be so dumb



Maybe they are just getting back at the people who send vaguely worded support requests in. "I am having problems - is the server down?"

 

[mammador]

Blame their communication skills, not IT as a profession.

it's most likely that they were not trained to communicate properly. it's human nature really to presume others think and perceive as we do. But in communication, the reality is that people have their own speech and idioms. So blame their department's management for not schooling them on how to communicate, not them per se.

 

[mammador]

I personally dislike the whole "customer" concept with IT. It is an incredibly poor model for IT and end user interactions. You are not my customer. You are my coworker. We should be working together towards whatever the goal is. The customer model tends to make people think they are dealing with Best Buy and the whole "customer is always right" poor attitude that goes along with it. I mean we should be nice and work with you but we are not the office whipping boys.

We provide services to other departments. they rely on our services.

In my experience, people who are overly reliant are too dopey to get how organisational politics/life operates. If something is not done immediately, it's for a number of things. We have more pressing things to do (based on our own strategy/goals), we may have issues buying in a part, we may not (for a valid reason) want to install a device, etc. People who take things personally in a work setting are dopes.

 

[LTC8K6]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Lync+Federation+with+Malaysia

That's way too long to type into a search box, and no one cares anyway...

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

I added a "Help@" box for people to send tickets directly to. I said that if you sent an email there, assume that the problem was being looked at. I never once checked the box. 90%+ of issues resolve themselves once the person stops double-clicking everything and types an email.

 

[Mide]

Weird usually IT peeps have to send all mass emails to their managers who will re-write it for common folks. I am guessing you are using Lync for Unif Comm at your company and somehow you have a link with an entity in Malaysia. Federated means that it is not internal so some sort of external company or entity.

 

[StinkyPinky]

I'll say one thing. I never understand in all the years of doing IT support than certain people would never take the time to learn how to use the most important tool in their job. Their computer. I don't expect them to understand the inner workings of it, but come on. AFter all these years of using them a lot of people don't even try simple stuff like restarting the PC or checking basic cables. If your TV didn't power on, would you firstly call the TV repair shop or ya know...actually check the cables?

I swear to god I still have lecturers who don't know how to connect their laptop to the AV system. The same AV system they use time and time again. It's like two buttons to push and one cable to plug in FFS.

 

[bearxor]

I personally dislike the whole "customer" concept with IT. It is an incredibly poor model for IT and end user interactions. You are not my customer. You are my coworker. We should be working together towards whatever the goal is. The customer model tends to make people think they are dealing with Best Buy and the whole "customer is always right" poor attitude that goes along with it. I mean we should be nice and work with you but we are not the office whipping boys.

100% disagree.

There are only two jobs at every company. You either serve the customer directly or you serve someone who does.

 

[pmv]

The Lync Federation were a minor race in Star Trek. I think they got assimilated by the Borg. That may be why they aren't working.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Lync is a Microsoft product. It provides Voice Over IP phone service or VOIP, chat, and teleconferencing....so it's a communication suite of software.

Federation is an authentication protocol/process (kinda like SAML 2.0 or one of the other token-based auth types). SO basically all that message is saying is that you can't make Calls, Chat, or do video teleconferencing until someone fixes the authentication servers so they can pass authorization to the Lync servers.




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FWIW, when they rolled Lync out, they either replaced your phones with VOIP phones or made some big deal about the new system. It's a competitor of Cisco's VOIP which probably has more marketshare these days in the VOIP office telephony market. If you don't know what Lync is, it may not affect you directly enough to worry about. They'll probably restart all the systems involved and fix whatever is going on with Active Directory/Federation and you'll be ok...

 

[Scarpozzi]

100% disagree.

There are only two jobs at every company. You either serve the customer directly or you serve someone who does.

I sort of agree with that, but I don't look at the labor units as people....I look at them as departments. There are middle layers of departmental labor that never touch the customer or serve the sales force.

In business, you have profit centers and cost centers. Simply put, the cost centers cost the company money and are a liability. The profit centers are where the money comes from. The goal is always to offset the profit centers and the cost centers so you are as efficient as possible. Hub and spoke systems come to mind in distribution and IT support systems to make things easier to process, but they're typically far more complicated depending on industry, region, target demographics, and other demand factors.

 

[Juddog]

Thread tldr version: OP is too lazy to google.

 

[Murloc]

I think on one side there's people not even making an effort, on the other side there's burned out bitter IT people who just hate them.
Some people have been too long away from school to be able to learn something new.

Writing who is affected and which features don't work is much more useful imho. Add what the issue is so that people in the know understand, but explain it simply for the noobs.

 

[kranky]

Thread tldr version: OP is too lazy to google.

 

[TwiceOver]

There's no way I could get away with sending an email like that. The president would email back immediately asking WTF I was talking about.

 

[zCypher]

If you're that clueless about the email, chances are it doesn't apply to you hehe. I get where you're coming from though, I hear this all the time at work. They speak to others as if they are on the same level in terms of technobabble, with no regard as to whether the person actually understands a damn thing. I try to be mindful of this during my interactions with coworkers and clients. I definitely inadvertently technobabble people at times, but I will usually pick up on the confused response and explain myself when that happens. Having people understand you can sometimes result in a very surprised and thankful response from the other person, even if it was a very trivial thing on your part.