The last couple of years at the office, we have had a great deal of changes. Gained new staff, lost old staff, saw a couple ownership structural changes and all of this had worked for the better. Many of these changes have made me learn a lot more about all aspects of running a business.
Despite our company having been around for over ten years it still is a small business startup. This means wearing many hats sometimes to make things work. In the past, this has caused a lot of problems and probably made us lose at times. In 2011, it finally began to click and we had best year ever with great growth and profitability. 2011 really was more wins than loses.
I was excited and looking forward to keeping this progress, when we had a slight change in plans. A key team member of the staff decided to leave to pursue a new life changing option. Staff members had come and go but this was a big deal as it was the IT manager. This person made sure users computer issues were minimal, oversaw our servers, and worked on our CRM systems. We have a corporate headquarters that helped guide him and lead many of the actions but at the end of the day if something wasn’t working it fell upon him to fix it. Before this IT Manager, we had a terrible IT Manager that was never in the office that consistently made excuses to not come into the office during office hours.
My first thought was who would be in charge of our IT and help with day to day options. Soon after, I was notified that I would have to learn how to do many of the day-to-day things with major projects or issues going to our headquarters. I love computers and typically don’t have any problems with my own or dealing with companies web servers. However, was I ready to be in charge of a user group with Microsoft exchange servers and no telling what else? I think not. I then remembered, a friend of mine, Iman Jamali worked for a company called Train Signal that might be able to help.
Train Signal has a full line of different instructional videos for IT professionals to receive training. They have a variety of videos from basic course like Microsoft office training to VMware(Whatever that is). I have been using the trial over the past two weeks to really learn how to manage our companies Microsoft products. So far the courses for a learning in IT course have been fun with courses that are hands on to what I actually need to know.
Am I now an IT Pro in two weeks? Of course Not, but I have learned a lot. If you continued on and took all the courses, you could become Microsoft certified for sure. If you had more technical knowledge than I had coming into it you could easily become prepared to transfer knowledge to others quickly. If you are learning IT they have great products for you to check out.
It has made this transition go fairly smoothly and now I will easily be able to step in to help with basic Microsoft exchanges issues and questions. Advanced projects, I will still likely pass over to main headquarters but I can now feel a bit confident handling the small things that arise. Basics like setting up, configuring exchange servers, creating new users, and adding mailboxes are just some of the tasks I have learned.
Those were many of the basic task but I welcome you to learn more advanced tasks by trying out Train Signals. Check them out and even take a free online course “Intro to Virtualization” to see what I mean.