IT people, please communicate plainly

[kranky]

Yes, I know you know lots of words that are only used in Serverville, and the cool IT thing to do is to obfuscate as much as possible, but it would be helpful if you'd deign to communicate in such a way that we lowly users can put some context on your missives.

Urgent email sent to all employees, titled IMPORTANT!!!

Lync Federation with Malaysia is not working, will advise when it is repaired.

​

A. I don't know what Lync Federation is.
B. I don't know why it matters to me.
C. I don't know who sent this.

For the next 30 minutes, all I can hear is people asking other people what that email is about.

An hour later, a second Urgent email arrives, again titled IMPORTANT!!!

Video conferencing and OCS calls to the Malaysia office cannot be done until the Lync Federation is repaired. We will notify you when it is repaired.

​

OK, reading between the lines I guess as long as I don't need to talk to Malaysia this is irrelevant to me, and whatever Lync Federation is has something to do with that.

Stand down from DEFCON 4, everyone!

 

[Red Storm]

The only thing worse than IT people speaking IT, is non-IT people trying to speak IT.

 

[Jodell88]

It goes both ways.

 

[Jodell88]

The only thing worse than IT people speaking IT, is non-IT people trying to speak IT.

This!

"Um, I deleted the Internet"

 

[rudeguy]

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

 

[dougp]

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.

 

[PowerYoga]

Or you can learn to read and figure out in 2 seconds that the chat/video conferencing thing that you use all the time to talk to your coworkers is called "Lync".

Or see that it has something to do with Malaysia, and figure out in another 2 seconds that since you don't need to talk to Malaysia that this is irrelevant to you.

Or take another 2 seconds and google it.

 

[ImpulsE69]

A quick google translate shows that this is an alert that your Malaysian tranny porn sites are down. They will alert you when they are back up. It was sent by the owner of the sites of which you apparently have platinum membership to.

 

[slag]

Do as you are trained... AND KILL THE MALAYSIAN PRIME MINISTER! - Zoolander

 

[rudeguy]

A quick google translate shows that this is an alert that your Malaysian tranny porn sites are down. They will alert you when they are back up. It was sent by the owner of the sites of which you apparently have platinum membership to.

oh come on...I just bought more tokens

 

[Red Storm]

This!

"Um, I deleted the Internet"

"I save everything to Outlook."

 

[imagoon]

How about when you can't chat with Malaysia, you stop putting in tickets saying: "Internet is down. Please advise when fixed."

 

[CPA]

My company has several "customer service" departments within the organization. These would include, Employee Data Management, Payroll, Accounting, Billing, Cash Collection, IT, etc. Each function has a set of customers that it assist, some deal with just internal customers, some external, some both.

A couple of years ago, there was a push by the company to train, standardize and measure customer service performance. The IT department didn't like that and basically said "customer service is not our priority", even though they have a group dedicated to provide customer service.

 

[imagoon]

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.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

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% agree.

 

[kranky]

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.

I don't want them to describe a federated service. I don't care what it's called.

I want them to identify that the communication is from IT, and whatever the issue is, describe it in terms of what the impact is on end users.

"Video conferencing and OCS calls to Malaysia are not working at this time and the IT department will notify you via email when calls are working again."

That's what they should have written.

 

[rudeguy]

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.

I agree but also in the sense that a lot of IT folks have a holier than thou attitude. That attitude usually stems from the "customer" concept. We work for the same company, neither one of us is the other's boss, so aren't we coworkers or teammates?

This morning my computer crashed. Really pretty pixel pattern on the monitor followed by the CPU fan cranking up to 11. That was cool. I powered it off and let it think about what it had done, turned it on and no post. Cracked it open, no visible problems, so I yanked the memory. Sure enough it posted. I went up to IT with the bad stick and asked for a new one. I grabbed a new stick and was back up and running.

In the "customer" world of IT, I would have been beaten with sticks for cracking open my computer. We need tickets and SOP and drama to get things fixed. Too many times IT makes things a lot, lot, lot more difficult than it has to be.

 

[Red Storm]

In the "customer" world of IT, I would have been beaten with sticks for cracking open my computer. We need tickets and SOP and drama to get things fixed. Too many times IT makes things a lot, lot, lot more difficult than it has to be.

I find that it's not because of IT, it's whoever is ultimately in charge of the IT people who needs some way to quantify what IT does and so they come up with all this bullshit overhead.

 

[zanejohnson]

it's LINK AGGRAGATION, and it means two or more ports on a switch are tied to act like one, therfore doubling your throughput on said LINK.

 

[zanejohnson]

say you've got a huge network of users who need to access a huge database silmultanously, on another network (WAN) or another subnet on another switch, your gonna have a bottleneck where the network with all the users, transmits and receives data to and from the server on another network.... therefore, you need to improve the link between said networks... you do this with link aggragation...


i'm sorry there's really no way to easier explain it.

 

[imagoon]

I find that it's not because of IT, it's whoever is ultimately in charge of the IT people who needs some way to quantify what IT does and so they come up with all this bullshit overhead.

To be fair, I would still make a ticket for history reasons but yeah, if I knew that you were computer savoy and you handed me a dead RAM stick, I would just give you another one. Ticket would be opened with replaced ram and closed right away for reporting / history of that serial number.

If you were the office person who called the mouse a foot pedal... and handed me a RAM chip there would be issues.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

The only thing worse than IT people speaking IT, is non-IT people trying to speak IT.

Yup. When they mix up all those terms and buzzwords, what they want, what they said, and what is possible rarely have any overlap.

"Can I sync my Android with Googlebox without using the iCloud? I heard that's insecure - russian pirates will steal all my bank accounts. Can I encrypt Excel instead? My desktop has the Explorer."

::expectant pause::

 

[purbeast0]

i don't think it's the emailers fault to explain what Lync is. i know what it is because i've used it before, it's a microsoft communication tool. it was perfectly clear to me in that email that using Lync with Milaysia wasn't working, and they would let you know when it is back up and running.

just sounds like the op is a nub for not knowing what the software is.

 

[zanejohnson]

i guess i could further explain that one port on a 10/100/1000 switch is gonna give you a max throughput of 1000mbps... well that's the link between the two networks if your not using link aggragation

now the problem is, all the users on the other end of the switch will be using also 1000mbps connections... see the problem??? they'll bottleneck the switch if they are all hitting the server on the other side at once..

so you tie a few ports together from switch 1, to switch 2 (which the server resides on), you'll also aggragate the same way from switch 2 to the server... say you use 4 1000mbps ports... now you effectively have a 4000mbps link from users on switch 1, to server on switch 2

 

[dave_the_nerd]

i don't think it's the emailers fault to explain what Lync is. i know what it is because i've used it before, it's a microsoft communication tool. it was perfectly clear to me in that email that using Lync with Milaysia wasn't working, and they would let you know when it is back up and running.

just sounds like the op is a nub for not knowing what the software is.

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.