Matthew’s Blog – My Busiest Week Yet!

This week was most likely the busiest I’ve ever had, especially in terms of travel and variety.

It started at 6:30am on the Monday morning, today we had a visit to one of our clients in Oban. There was no plan set for the day but we definitely wanted to give them a bit more awareness about Office 365. This is to get the staff thinking about some of the problems they currently face and how they can use the technology they’re paying for to solve them. For example, one of the main applications of interest is Microsoft’s To-Do application available on Windows desktops, iOS and Android.

September 20, 2017 No Comments

Matthew’s Blog – Webroot Installs

I mentioned the anti-virus we will be offering to customers, Webroot, in the last blog post. This week I had two tasks around this, to get it installed on every computer our client has and to standardise our pricing in an Excel spreadsheet so we can give businesses a quote easily.

Our client didn’t have many computers and we didn’t have any information from their old provider about what anti-virus may already be installed. It seemed like the best approach was to remote onto each computer, check for old software, uninstall it and install the new.

September 13, 2017 No Comments

Matthew’s Blog – CIG Meeting

After much research, talking to others in the IT industry and discussion The Apprentice Store has decided on Webroot as the anti-virus we will be offering. This week was exciting for me, I got to see it in action.

The computer I mentioned in last week’s blog post was going to be picked up on Tuesday and I had little on my checklist to complete. I did however need to install the anti-virus and here is where I saw some of the real benefits of Webroot. Webroot allows you to deploy their software with a license key already bound to it.

September 6, 2017 No Comments

Matthew’s Blog – Problem Solving

The Windows course was now over and I was back at work glad to be getting back to the usual routine of things. However I don’t know if I can describe my job at The Apprentice Store routine as there’s a lot of variation in my work, another thing I’m glad about.

The first problem I was presented with this week was in Excel. Our client was trying to link to files in SharePoint but these would open in the web browser rather than in Windows Explorer like they intended. Initially I had no idea how to solve this but was keen to get this solved for them. This one of the cool things about working in this way, the client comes to me with a problem, I either know how to fix it from past experience or have to research it.

August 30, 2017 No Comments

Matthew’s Blog – The Course Continues

The second week of the Windows course is here, not much had changed but since I mainly talked about the course contents in the last blog post I thought I would talk about the areas outside of that a little more.

When it comes to other people on the course, there was about six of us on this one. The earlier Cyber Security course had about the same amount. There was a clear difference between how we interacted though. In the cyber course people generally kept themselves to themselves and there wasn’t much talking between one another. The instructor on this course had us create a group chat through WhatsApp.

August 23, 2017 No Comments

Matthew’s Blog – Back to Glasgow!

This week was the start of the “Windows 7 Configuring and Installing and Configuring Windows 10” course. Everything was very similar to before, I was going to the same building, the same hotel and getting there the same way so I found myself looking forward to it and my nerves were kept at bay.

The first day of the course was the introductions, how the teaching was going to be laid out, what we were going to cover everything you would expect. We got given access to two official Microsoft books one on 7 and one on 10 respectively, these were online and weren’t physical copies but that didn’t bother me too much.

August 9, 2017 No Comments

Matthew’s Blog – Clear the desk

There was one more week to go until I went away on another training course, this time around it was all about “Windows 7 Configuring & Installing and Configuring Windows 10” it was again in Glasgow so I was nowhere near as apprehensive as before, I was simply just looking forward to going. I’m sure you’ll hear all about that in next week’s blog post though so I’ll talk about the activities this week.

It was originally last on the list but after thinking about it I moved it straight to the top, a business proposal on cloud managed anti-virus software, due for the end of the month. Why was this promoted? The course! It would take up 2 weeks of my time so I had to get as much as possible done this week.

August 2, 2017 No Comments

Matthew’s Blog – 3 month milestone

I have gone past my 3 months at the Apprentice Store and it’d been great so far but the workload was about to increase. Number 1 on the list was daily server checks for a client while they were on holiday, I really was clueless about this but looking forward to learning.

Thankfully I wasn’t thrown in the deep end and David spend time with me showing me the ins and outs of everything I needed to do. The process was to check Windows Event Logs which for those who don’t know log information outputted by the operating system and applications, including errors, this is what I was looking for. In addition to that, I had to check some specific pieces of software the client was running such as the anti-virus. Of course this was no use unless documented so this was put into a Excel spreadsheet and sent to the client daily.

July 26, 2017 No Comments

Matthew’s Blog – Meeting the Clients

The main event for this week was a session on Office 365 for the client that we most recently did an Office 365 migration for. I was quite heavily involved with this migration so I was looking forward to meeting all the people I had spoken with on the phone for the last couple months.

This client was based down in Edinburgh and we were heading down on the Wednesday morning, I had some time in the week before my course to prepare but David had also given me Monday and Tuesday as well. About half way through Monday, I thought I wouldn’t need to do any more. I felt I had gathered all the information they needed to know and could present it.

July 19, 2017 No Comments

Matthew’s Blog – More Travel, More Training

This week was the week of my Information Security Fundamentals course. While I had mentioned in previous blogs I was apprehensive, when it actually came to it I found I was more excited.

I arrived in Glasgow late on Sunday night and headed to the hotel. It was called “Point A”, it was very modern, you could change the colour of your lights in your room, they had USB ports on the plug sockets and a TV with on demand. The room I had didn’t have a window but it was still a nice place to stay and it’s in a really good location with Buchanan street, Sauchiehall street and more importantly the QA building very close by.

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