Thursday, September 11, 2008

Thank you, technical difficulties have been resolved.

Today is a good day :-)

Did a WebEx session with a support person in Malaysia who removed a huge obstacle in one of my projects. Technology can be a good thing!

So, I'm using this open source product called Joomla to create an internal, company web portal. And I'm absolutely clueless with web development (I'm a Tech Writer, not a web developer, Jim!). But, I was told that this product is simple to use, doesn't require PHP coding, blah, blah, blah. There's a big push to get a blog put together and I was stuck, stuck, stuck. The blog part worked but the commenting feature was busted. I was trying to get the IT folks to give the vendor access to our server, but the suggestion was to use WebEx instead (honestly, I don't know why I have to bargain over everything here...for once, I'd like to put in a request for something and have it done, no questions asked, no compromises, no arguments!).

Not having run a WebEx session in ages, I was a nervous wreck. And, to top it off, I had to use Skype to communicate with the support person (apparently phones are not in the budget) -- another thing I hadn't used very much. But it all turned out well. One of our support folks gave me a good walk through on how to run the session and the Support guy in Malaysia turned out to be quite clever and had no problems using WebEx. And he fixed the problem!

Still some issues with communication between the server and remote systems. It takes a long time for comments to show up. But, that's an issue for those elusive IT folks.

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