It makes my head spin..

Yesterday I spent probably two hours discussing a change that we’re doing at work. In layman’s terms, one of our employees is moving into a newly created position with another entity that is a “partner” of ours. He’ll work for them, but still be our employee, work out of our offices and have an email address on our domain. But, it’s not that simple, because his current boss wants emails addressed to him that involve our business as opposed to thier business to automatically be forwarded to someone within our business, and his new boss wants him to be “fenced off” from our business, so he’s not to have network access or access to our internal email system, just the internet address and internet access. Of course you also have to factor in that they will now have two employees working in our building, with one PC.

Make sense? Now consider that I have to create a new address for him, so his old address can be forwarded internally, but the new address can’t go into effect until the switch over date. The other person who is working for them is on vacation until a week after this switch over date, and he needs access to her email to deal with information about an upcoming event they are having, but he doesn’t actually work for them yet, she has the one laptop that belongs to them with her, so he needs to use our PC to access that stuff, yet still have it available for her when she returns, because by then, he’ll be on vacation.

Thus far I’ve accomplished that by setting up an OE profile on his current PC to get a copy of her email, leaving the email on the server so they’ll all go to her when she returns. I’ll then setup two different profiles on their laptop for their email, at least until they actually get a second one. I”ll create the new account for him on the switch over day and forward the old account at the same time. Of course, if she has the laptop then I don’t know what he’s going to use until she returns, but that’s not really my problem. 🙂

This should take care of everything they need, internet email wise. The real problems are going to come into play when he no longer has a internal mail account and decides he still wants to be updated on things that normally are just sent to the Postoffice Address list. (Keep in mind we’re using Microsoft Mail internally and connect to our ISP’s mail server for internet email, we don’t exactly have a bunch of features and options on this aged beast..)

So that was two hours out of my life, and we haven’t even really started discussing the potential of buying himself a new laptop and configuring it properly, and what all he’ll need on this new laptop. I imagine that conversation will be even more time out of my life.

You know, it’s not the technology that makes things complicated, it’s the people trying to use it. 🙂

Follow these topics: Uncategorized