Harmony Outage - Thursday November 11th 8pm through Wednesday November 17th

[quadplay]

From http://www.ntlworld.com/serverstatus :

We are currently upgrading our customer management and billing systems to improve our customer service. This means between 8pm Thursday 11th November until Wednesday 17th November you will be unable to make changes to your Internet service. However you will still be able to send and receive emails, surf the web and upload to your webspace.

If you need to change your service, such as add an additional email address, please make sure you do this before Thursday 11th November or from the afternoon of Wednesday 17th November. You can find Member services under "Your Account" at www.ntlworld.com During this upgrade our Internet support centres will have limited access to their computer systems. Full service should be restored by the afternoon of Wednesday 17th November.

As an alternative to calling Technical Support, why not utilise ntlââ‚Âà ‚¬ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¾Ã‚¢s new Broadband Medic online diagnostic and repair tool, available at www.ntlworld.com/help/broadbandmedic however this tool will have limited functionality during the upgrade period.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

[Scarlett]

Thats a hell of an outage just to migrate some data from one system to another...

I could understand a couple of days but a week!!!

Scarlett.

[Stephen]

Remember as well as moving the data across they also have to make sure the system is stable and works properly after the update, which will take a few days.

[Scarlett]

Originally Posted by DarthYoda

Remember as well as moving the data across they also have to make sure the system is stable and works properly after the update, which will take a few days.

How about parallel running for a week or a month until they're happy, it would save some time rather then taking the system out for a week...

All the upgrades I do HAVE to go in over a weekend (and I have to fight the user community just to get the system after hours in the week)

[Marge]

This is a really big upgrade of the existing system to the new version so impossible to run side by side, not a transfer of data.

[Russ]

We apologise for any inconvenience caused

Don't you just love it when companies say that? It's like when you're stuck in tailback on the motorway caused by roadworks - you don't want an apology, you want the head of the minister for transport on a pole as warning to anyone who tries it again!!!!

Well I do, anyway....

Back on topic - let's hope these 'improvements' make a very visable difference to the many ntl customers who've suffered in the past at the hands of ntl's "billing systems"......

[daxx]

Originally Posted by Russ D

Back on topic - let's hope these 'improvements' make a very visable difference to the many ntl customers who've suffered in the past at the hands of ntl's "billing systems"......

256 colors on your vdu now guyz and maybe color printing on the bills instead of the 'photocopied' look so fashionable at NTL Towers


"The pink porcine being now standing at gate #1 will take off shortly"

[Chris W]

Originally Posted by Scarlett

Thats a hell of an outage just to migrate some data from one system to another...

I could understand a couple of days but a week!!!

Scarlett.

The system in question is Microsoft's largest ever database project

IIRC at last count it contained 49 million tables...

[Graham F]

Originally Posted by monkeybreath

The system in question is Microsoft's largest ever database project

IIRC at last count it contained 49 million tables...

thats lots of fingers and toes

but it is a very complex project that i can voche for!!

Lots of bods at hook typing away to get this done to all you guys and gals have a fun week

[MikeyB]

How can a company as big as NTL take a customer system offline for a week?
The part that is the most worrying is "During this upgrade our Internet support centres will have limited access to their computer systems."

If anyone where I work suggested that, they would be laughed at.
We are going thru a lot of big major upgrades & system transfers at the moment, and if there has to be any downtime at all, it's done late at night, and in the quickest time possible.

Over 3 weekends last month, we did a complete LAN upgrade, which involved changing settings on every users PC. This was stepped, and planned so as to not affect OUR users, let alone our customers.

Anything more than an hour during normal office hours is totally unaccetable for us

[Graham F]

Originally Posted by MikeyB

How can a company as big as NTL take a customer system offline for a week?
The part that is the most worrying is "During this upgrade our Internet support centres will have limited access to their computer systems."

If anyone where I work suggested that, they would be laughed at.
We are going thru a lot of big major upgrades & system transfers at the moment, and if there has to be any downtime at all, it's done late at night, and in the quickest time possible.

Over 3 weekends last month, we did a complete LAN upgrade, which involved changing settings on every users PC. This was stepped, and planned so as to not affect OUR users, let alone our customers.

Anything more than an hour during normal office hours is totally unaccetable for us

The scale of this project means that there has to be down time for the upgrades to take place, but once all this is done ntl will hopefully have a customer management platform that will make processes quicker and easier and then will not have to go through this kind of process again!!

so far the project has cost £110 million but it will save money for them in the long run!!

[quadplay]

Originally Posted by MikeyB

How can a company as big as NTL take a customer system offline for a week?
The part that is the most worrying is "During this upgrade our Internet support centres will have limited access to their computer systems."

If anyone where I work suggested that, they would be laughed at.
We are going thru a lot of big major upgrades & system transfers at the moment, and if there has to be any downtime at all, it's done late at night, and in the quickest time possible.

Over 3 weekends last month, we did a complete LAN upgrade, which involved changing settings on every users PC. This was stepped, and planned so as to not affect OUR users, let alone our customers.

Anything more than an hour during normal office hours is totally unaccetable for us

Do you have 13,000 employees and 3.5 million customers? This upgrade isn't to migrate any data - that's to be done Q1 2005. This is to upgrade the code running the billing and customer management systems. There is a lot of work to be done here, and if it could be done overnight, it would be - but that's simply not possible.