No phone for new testers

As I was (sort of successfully) getting our new tester's office set up for her, I opened a box labeled "phone." Those of us that have been here a while have had a desktop phone since we started. Originally, they had analog phones and phone lines which was the norm 10+ years ago.

On a side note, analog phones were a blast. I remember using a 56K modem for 6 months for all email just to verify Outlook's performance. Cached mode really helped there - the only downside were people sending huge attachments.

Anyway, a few years ago we switched to VOIP phones. Now instead of simply having a phone on my desk, I have a network connected device with a number pad that makes me log into the domain every so often. It also ties into Lync, which is nice, but it takes a network cable into my hub which limits how many computers I can have in my office. I've always believed testers should have more machines than other disciplines. It's just very handy to have a German Windows 7 machine, an Arabic Windows 2008 server and a Japanese OS ready to use at any given point to test interoperability of the language support we have as an example.

To get back to the phone, our new tester only had a headset with a microphone. We have started the transition to using Lync for all communications, apparently. I guess this is just expected change. The only downside was when the network port in her office had a "hiccup" last week - for about an hour, her network connection simply was not working. Back in the day of having an analog phone, you could just call our internal helpdesk to report the problem. But since the phone now requires a network connection, you now have to roam the halls to find a working computer to report the problem. No worries with this - by the time we were ready to contact helpdesk, the intermittent problem was resolved.

Now back to work!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John