Work in IT

Tracking and Automating Business Processes

By / June 1, 2020 / Administrator, Microsoft

As businesses grow, it becomes challenging to keep up with business processes. To keep up with a constant flow of tasks associated with these processes, you need to track them, especially when multiple people are involved with the process. Business processes become difficult when you have to enter data into multiple systems. Entering the same data multiple times increases the risk of human error each time data gets entered.

In recent months I’ve been tasked with helping different business units improve and track their processes. Specifically, I started with our onboarding experience. The process tasks get assigned to people that are geographically dispersed, and sometimes the people involved with the onboarding only do a few a month. There is a lot that needs to go into it. You want to factor in things such as IT, Payroll, Equipment, Licensing, Training, which makes it keeping everyone in the loop difficult.

To combat these difficulties we settled on a product called TallyFy. TallyFy gives us a dashboard that will show us how our processes are progressing. It helps keep everyone on the same page and helps communicate issues in a more rapid manner.

Our hurdle with TallyFy was that it was tacking yet another system into our onboarding experience. We already had three different systems involved in someone applying for a job to ultimately receiving their first paycheck. Having multiple systems caused data re-entry, which is prone to typos. To combat the data re-entry, we needed to integrate our different systems. As previously blogged about I wrote a PowerShell Module to interact with the BirdDog HR system; we use this to send our new hires their employee packet to fill out before day one. This PowerShell Module I was able to query new in-coming employees – my next task was to integrate it with TallyFy so that it would track the progress of the onboarding.

Luckily for me, TallyFy has done a fantastic job writing an API that their web interface runs on, and I can do everything they can do. One of the challenges with this is that their API is very complicated. I’ve been lucky enough to work closely with their team to build out this PowerShell Module that only touches on a small fraction of what is available thought their API.

PowerShell Module Git Repository:

I am storing this Module on my personal Git Repository; as it is built out more I might publish into the PowerShell Gallery. You can find the Module at TallyFy API PowerShell Module.

Store the psd1 and psm1 files in Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\TallyFy.

Connecting to TallyFy API

  1. Login to https://go.tallyfy.com
  2. Click on your name in the Top Right corner of site
  3. Click Settings
  4. Click Integrations
  5. Note your Client ID and Client Secret
  6. Open PowerShell and run the below command
  7. Connect-TallyFyAPI -ClientID 'Your client ID' -ClientSecret 'Your Client Secret' -Credential (Get-Credential) 
  8. Use your TallyFy Username and Password when prompted

Feel free to explore the other commands by running the below command.

Get-Help -Module TallyFy

Life Update

By / May 31, 2020 / Out-of-Band Post

This blog has been quite dead for a while now. Never fear I am still around! Life has been busy, work has been busy, and I took a step back from being on the computer 24×7.

I took a new job back in 2015, which lead me to believe I would have tons of free time – not the case, but not exactly a bad thing. Being out of consulting did free up a lot of my schedule and let me focus more on my social life and personal health. In-fact after settling into my new job (About 6 months!), I decided to put a significant focus on my weight. I had gotten up to 245-250 lbs. I had low energy, it was tough for me to do anything due to weight in combination with my Muscular Dystrophy and enough was enough. I started exercising using a manual chair around the house in late January of 2016 – I took a serious focus on my diet in early March of 2016. I am happy to say I am down to 185 lbs. Since December of last year, I have had a hard time losing weight, and I am going to be putting a big focus into dropping another 20 lbs.

Now that my health is in better shape, I am spending tons of time with friends and exercising semi-regularly. With the weight loss, I am not having nearly as much of an issue with my muscle weakness from my Muscular Dystrophy. I am even walking around the house/neighborhood and shopping some!

Last time I tried kick-starting this blog was with the HoloLens – it was a fun experience. Still, it quickly died off due to the learning curve to get into programming and trying to balance my health, social & work life. Keep in mind that this blog is entirely outside of my work life and tends to consume other parts of life so that I can dedicate some time to it.

I am not going to commit to regular updates on this blog. I do have some stuff I’ve been working on recently that I am going to be posting in the coming weeks. So please keep tuned to this blog!

Long Absence, but I’m back!

By / May 16, 2015 / Out-of-Band Post

It has been nearly 8 months since my last blog post. For that I’d like to apologize, as I really would love to have been posting all of this time; it just hasn’t been realistic for me. Let me recap what has happened in that time.

  • October 2014: Made an offer on my first house
  • November 2014: Moved into my first house
  • December 2014: Holiday madness and still settling in the house
  • January 2015: Working on new Training videos for Pearson
  • February 2015: Still working on the training videos
  • March 2015: Wrapping up training videos for Pearson, trying to have a bit of a life.
  • April 2015: Company I work for was sold, started looking at new career opportunities
  • May 2015: Attended Microsoft Ignite 2015, started a new job!

I started looking at houses around September of last year, and fell in love with one of the houses I looked at. I made an offer on the house and within a months time I was moving it. I wasn’t expecting it to happen so fast, but I am glad it did. I’ve been here since November of last year and it provided a great private recording studio for me!

ShowCover

The new videos I’ve been working on are about to come out! It is a video series focused on helping you pass the 70-346 exam. You can take a look at it for when it will be coming out later this month! On InformIT, or if you have a Safari Books Online Subscription you can see it there.

April 1st was quite an interesting day for me. That is the day that the buy-out of the company I work for was announced. I had been at Apparatus for nearly 4 years, and in all honesty we were like a family. I am still very close with a lot of people at the company and I wish them the best. I just thought that after that announcement was made it was a hint that it was time for me to move on; after-all working in IT at the same company for 4 years is quite amazing for a millennial. My last day at Apparatus was May 1st, and the I left work and headed for Microsoft Ignite 2015.

Microsoft Ignite, was quite an experience – in fact you will be seeing a detailed write-up about that later this week. Let’s just say it is a much bigger event and there are still all of the great opportunities you had available to you at TechEd.

Upon my return from Microsoft Ignite 2015, I started my new job as the Systems Architect at Gaylor Electric, Inc. This is quite a change from what I’ve done for the last 4 years. I will now own my very own infrastructure, and be able to make the decisions on what I think is best for the company and the environment. My first week has been completed and I’ve already put the wheels in motion for some sweeping changes to bring this company to the latest and greatest Microsoft Technologies. I really look forward to the opportunity this is going to give me to go deeper into specific technologies that I’ll be sharing on this blog!

Overall you are going to see me becoming much more social, I am going to be as active as humanly possible on Social Networks and keeping this blog as active as possible. I look forward to feedback and hearing about topics that everyone is interested in hearing more about!

Considerations When an IT Employee Leaves

By / September 24, 2014 / Out-of-Band Post

Recently I’ve helped clients and even off-boarded IT employees from our own team. There are quite a few considerations you must make when someone in IT leaves a company or even just moves to another team within the same company. This article is going to focus heavily on the employee leaving the company; but you will run into some of the same obstacles with them moving to a new area in the company. The “normal” HR off-boarding or cross-boarding doesn’t usually cover the amount of access that these employees have, and the IT staff themselves must make many additional considerations to make things as smooth as possible.

At a high level you have to consider the following:

  • How many accounts do they have?
  • Are these accounts tied to any applications?
  • Which devices use a shared password they know?
  • What access rosters are they on?
  • What knowledge will be lost when they leave?
  • Who is going to take over ownership of their current tasks?

Let’s dive into these questions in more depth and explore some possible solutions to them.

…

Considerations When an IT Employee LeavesRead More »

The ever Evolving Career of IT – Reflecting on the last Decade

By / June 12, 2014 / Out-of-Band Post

I’ve been working professionally in IT for 6 years, and I have been working with computers for over 10. I quickly realized that if I continued down this path for my life, I would be in a constant learning curve. This was something that interested me as I always enjoy learning new things and playing with new technologies.

My initial interest was in web development up until I reached college. I took two part time jobs, one doing web development, another doing help desk support. Initially I was very excited to do the development job, I started digging in, expanding my knowledge and trying to advance all of my skills. I quickly realized that I enjoyed the help desk support much more. My favorite part of help desk support was that I was able to help people every day. I would leave a faculty members office and they would be very satisfied that they received assistance. I had no previous customer service experience, but was exhilarated with the interactions I had on a daily basis.

As the years progressed I continued down the IT Pro path, and started moving into server administration prior to graduating college. I had loved the customer service, but I felt there was a greater good I could provide by managing the back end systems. I wouldn’t get as much recognition as I had previously, but I would have many more challenges and still be helping.

I started at Apparatus 1 year prior to graduating college and I have just wrapped up my 3rd year here recently. In those 3 years I have gone from part time employee, to full time entry level management. In the last 6 months I’ve done a lot of reflecting on where I want my career to go. I’ve been saying that I had no idea I would be where I am last year, lets see where this year will take me.

I currently am in an internal battle with myself on if I’d like to pursue my IT career further or if I’d like to jump over to management; while trying to keep my IT skills as fresh as possible. I still have yet to make a decision, and I am considering my options on a daily basis. I do love the management by getting to help co-workers develop their skills and become greater at their job. I like to help them pursue their dreams while working in IT and I love getting hands on dirty with the work.

As of today I am Matt Griffin, Technical Team Lead at Apparatus. Tomorrow… who knows what I will be.