It didn’t work. Why? Wait, it did work. Why? 

Another week in working from home, another week of highs, lows and everything in between.

How have you all fared? Its had to believe that we have today entered a new month, April even in lockdown seemed to fly by. I wonder what May will bring?

Here at Datactics, we have had another busy week. We have started to form a focus group to start looking into what a return to the office (wherever that may be) will look like, we held our first virtual ‘Keep In Touch’ meeting with a full cross-company update, and outside of that, life in IT has continued at a fast pace. Thankfully our ‘KIT’ meeting went off without a hitch and it proved a hit with all staff; I even got a new Netflix recommendation out of it 😊!

This week for me has mostly been spent working with Powershell running scripts against our JumpCloud directory to get an overview of all things applications.

I have to say it’s been great to be back coding again and I look forward to more with a new addition to the JumpCloud PS module today allowing even more insights across our directory.

I have fought with }’s and {‘s, if and or statements and overall tore my hair out (what little I have of it) trying to figure out where the missing character causing my script to misfire is located!

Outside of that, we have had general support issues, more fun with our internet circuit, laptop failures and some MS Outlook issues thrown in for good measure.

With so much going on it’s great to have a dedicated, knowledgeable and committed team to work alongside and my thanks go to them again.

With the increase I have mentioned over these past few weeks in phishing attacks we have today launched some further online training via ‘Trend Micro Phish Insight’. I am happy to report that early indications from the quiz results are positive, and show that Datactics employees have a good understanding in this area and this will no doubt continue to keep our infrastructure safe and secure as the lockdown continues. Thankfully I passed the quiz after completing the training as man, that could have been embarrassing 😊

Patching also remains a high priority and this week has seen us patch various apps including MS Teams to combat the funny ‘gif’ flaw: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52415773 – If you have not already done so, please make sure that you are using the latest Teams app updates.

I also got to attend a few online webinars this week from the NI Chamber of Commerce and DevOps Institute; all those I attended proved useful and raised a point that I had not considered before: risk assessments for home working!

This, of course, includes making sure employees are working safely and comfortably but also goes further in regards to who can overhear and see what, now that our offices are dining rooms, family rooms, kitchen tables etc.

In an office, it’s easy to separate this out and if you need to make a confidential call or read a document you can simply get up and head for an empty meeting room – that’s not so simple at home.

We have already taken action on this getting other teams involved (HR for example from a well-being point of view), starting to think about how we can best gauge this risk and then what mitigation steps we need to take. Is this something you have all considered, or like me in the midst of all the other tasks for making a workforce remote, did it get overlooked?

Thankfully in the midst of all the work I have also managed to get some downtime and have enjoyed plenty of walks, a cycle, some more Lego building and a few Zoom quizzes. Strava reliably informs me that I covered 260.5km last month across all activities and recorded over 27 hours of active time.

Got me thinking, how much did I do in April 2019? I will maybe make a comparison for next week. As you can see from this week’s pics, the Lego Bugatti is starting to take shape and I hope to get more build hours logged over the weekend.

I trust that you to are getting some downtime and are not falling into the traps that have been discussed so much since lockdown regarding working from home; remember, that email that you “need” to send will still be there tomorrow (Monday in this case) morning. Looking after your own well-being will, in the end, increase your ability to work not diminish it – Take those breaks, get outside and allow yourself to properly unwind.

Right, think that’s it for me this week. On to the weekend which starts tonight with The Big Datactics Lockdown Quiz #3 – We will not talk about how #2 went but needless to say, there is room for improvement 😊

I hope you all have a good weekend.

Until next time. Stay safe and well everyone. Dave