Customer Service with Personality
Do you provide tech support or manage people who do? Tech support and other kinds of customer service can be a joy for the “customer”, or it can be something they dread. Their reaction is based on primarily on how the service is delivered, and not necessarily how technically accurate and useful the service is. Are you or your team fun to interact with? Boring? Confusing? Too stuffy? We’ll discuss some ideas for how to add some personality to your customer service interactions (whether in person, on the phone or in writing). The goal is to build a culture of satisfaction and joy so that the missionaries and support staff you serve are as effective as possible for building God’s kingdom!
Virtual Office and Working Remotely
Exploring the dynamics of remote work, both by plan and by accident. In light of the pandemic, where nearly everybody was suddenly working remotely, a time for discussion of Lessons Learned. What went right? What went wrong? What would have been better if there had been time for better planning? What does the immediate future look like for you and your organization? I’ll also be sharing more of how Frontiers Canada does an entirely virtual office, with no physical building.
How to Replace a Legacy System
Every really successful system will eventually need replacing: people will keep using and needing it, but their needs and the environment will change. There are lots of ways to replace an aging system, ranging from extensive refactoring (rewrite in place) to a purchase or rewrite from scratch with customer/user migration. We’ll consider a variety of examples, some of mine and some of yours, to explore and understand the tradeoffs. Luke 14:28-30’s admonition to estimate the cost before starting is wise counsel (even though it’s part of a much bigger and more important point).
Asking Questions
We’ll cover some common problems and trouble-shooting techniques (what to do when “it works for me”), and ideas and anecdotes on asking the right questions. This session will include at least one role-playing exercise.
Cross-platform Development with Nuxt.js
Nuxt.js is a free and open source web application framework based on Vue.js which is an open-source model–view–viewmodel front end JavaScript framework. One area that Nuxt.js shines is that it automatically generates routing configuration (URL page paths) based on your file tree. It also has a nice Auth module that handles multiple forms of authentication such as JWT or OAuth. We will cover how to combine Nuxt.js with Cordova to neatly develop JavaScript apps and easily deploy them as native apps to multiple platforms.
Device management with Intune & Conditional Access to Office 365 Data
We will talk about real-world experience with Intune, Microsoft’s platform for managing Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. We will also talk about Conditional Access to data on Microsoft’s Azure/Office365 platform. Kevin will teach some overview information about the platform, but will not be giving a lot of hands-on examples, because there are so many inexpensive/free and easy-to-find training materials on the web about these technologies. The goal will be to help you decide if you should be seriously considering moving to Intune and/or Office365 with Conditional Access.
Azure/Office365 Azure AD Administration
We will look at real-world experience administrating the Azure platform and the Azure AD system that is also behind the Office365 services. Some of this material will be useful to anyone considering a serious move to cloud computing, regardless of the platform, but all examples will be from the Microsoft services. Kevin will teach some overview material about the platform, but he will not be giving hands-on teaching. There is plenty of inexpensive/free training material easily accessible on the Internet. The goal will be to help you decide how seriously you should be considering both cloud computing in general and Azure in particular.
Azure Advanced Security Features
This session will cover information on Azure Firewall and Azure Web Application Firewall, with recommendations on where to implement and how to implement
Sessions listed are subject to change.