NRC Newsletter - December 2017
In this issue
Holiday schedule
No matter which holidays you celebrate, all of us at New River Computing hope you have a safe and wonderful time off with your families.
NRC will be closed on the following days:
- Monday, December 25
- Tuesday, December 26
- Monday, January 1
Millionth ticket
We let a milestone go unrecognized for too long: Our millionth ticket. Eleven West received this ticket. The ticket was not a glorious 15-minute solution to an intractable problem. Nor was it a debacle, where we went down rabbit holes while searching for a solution. In fact, we didn't put any time into this ticket at all. And it wasn't on real hardware, either. An Active Directory Domain Controller running virtually in Azure had a low-memory condition. The alert was auto-remediated and the ticket was automatically closed. The bulk of our tickets are created by our management software and many of these problems are resolved without human intervention.
The inscription reads:
"Service Ticket: #1,000,000 Presented to Eleven West by New River Computing. This plaque commemorates New River Computing's One Millionth Ticket, created on December 6, 2016 at 1:06PM. This ticket was an automated alert indicating a temporary low-memory state on an Active Directory Domain Controller running virtually in Azure. The ticket was auto-remediated and closed without human intervention."
Congrats to John Giesen and all the folks at Eleven West! Eleven West has been providing innovative screen printing and embroidery to the NRV for 40 years. In fact, I learned recently that they will soon be celebrating their 10 thousandth order!
Immersion Experience-NEW!
Want to get hands-on experience on Office 365 tools—especially the unfamiliar ones—to help solve your business process headaches? We'll provide the venue, the hardware, and some snacks. You bring an open mind and knowledge about your company's business process, that's it. And it's surprisingly fun, I guarantee it!
We hope to provide several of these sessions per month, and we're booking February and March now. If you're interested, email jeff@newrivercomputing.com.
Quick takes
Microsoft Azure Credit for Nonprofits
Is your company a nonprofit? Considering cloud? Using Microsoft's Azure plan could be free for you: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits. Basically, they give you $5,000 in credits. That's more than most nonprofits could reasonably use in a year. Microsoft has been a generous donor of free and reduced-cost software through the years. Glad to see philanthropy extend to Azure, too.
FindTime is back
Through some concerted lobbying by IT Pros on Microsoft's own social media platforms, Microsoft re-enabled FindTime. I'm glad Microsoft got a clue and brought back this awesome meeting scheduling tool. It really is the easiest way to schedule across companies. Find out more at: https://findtime.microsoft.com/.