ML Starkey's Weblog: Service with a smile!
Providing Technical Support to Sun's customers and other topics

While many of our colleagues were attending the Customer Engineering Conference this week, some of us were attending an instructor-led class on Sun's Net Connect product. Today was day 2 of the 3 day class. It doesn't seem to be a particularly difficult product to support, but there are ALOT of pieces that comprise Net Connect, and a ton of paths and config files.

On Day 1, we registered ourselves are users and downloaded the Net Connect software to be installed on the class room systems. We logged in to the main srsnetconnect portal, and created our "companies" and got accustomed to the portal interface. Today we created groups and worked with Shared Shell and Shared Web. We also worked with the portal that allows us to view data base information. Tomorrow, we finish up with "DMM", which allows you to create one system as a proxy. DMM allows you to designate a system as the collector that then transfers data on other network systems to Sun, which cuts down on network traffic. We got a good dose of troubleshooting tips and strategies along with practice on identifying issues that can we can solve versus issues that can only be resolved by the database maintainers (resetting passwords, removing hosts from the database; tasks for which we don't have the proper access).

Most of our product training is now self-paced and/or web-based. I do understand that this is cost effective. Nothing beats a real "class" with systems that you can install/modify/break/fix along with good "take aways" such as workbooks, manuals and other references. Our internal instructor Ken is topnotch. (scroll down on that page for a picture and a short bio.) He has taught support engineers here at Sun on topics from serial communications to Solaris 10 to DNS and whatever we need to learn to meet the high expectations of our customer base. I always have my highlighters and Post-It flags handy for whatever class Ken is teaching. Highlighters and Post-It flags are not much good for web-based classes; tends to make the screen hard to read!

Anyway, when class is done and I'm back to the usual this Friday, I'll be put into the rotation and will start taking live Net Connect cases. Anticipating the first day taking cases on a new product makes me anxious, but I know I'm prepared.