At Home with Arkom: A Cup of Joe
Joe’s our 1st Line Support. Any issues that arise with maintaining CRMs or Sharepoint, Joe's the go-to guy.

What've you been upto this week, Joe?

 

CRM cleaning. Cleaning out 80k records.

 

80 thousand?

 

So far yeah, there’s another 45k to go today. They want to only keep records that are less than 3 years old, so they’ve given us certain criteria to delete against. So we have to go through them, mark them as inactive, call the client up to ask if that’s okay and get the go ahead.

Then I:

  1. Mark it for deletion,
  2. Make a manual backup of the database,
  3. Test that the deletion runs correctly on the manual backup
  4. Schedule the deletion for real.

How long have you been working on that?

 

We had this project all set up for last year, but then the client updated to version 9 of Dynamics, which knackered their CRM up a bit. So we held off deleting these records until their CRM was functioning properly again. When I went down to deliver some training to them a couple of weeks ago, I got the go ahead to begin cleaning up the records.

 

What have your challenges been?

 

It takes hours to delete so many records from the database when I run it, either as a test or for real. In order to get it done ASAP for our client, I’ve had to wake up at 6am and even 1am to either schedule a deletion or check that a deletion has gone through properly. So yeah, waking up at 6am has been the challenge.

 

What internet video has made you laugh recently?

 

I haven’t really been watching internet videos recently. I tried to watch the football because I thought City were on. But they weren’t. So I watched a bit of West Brom’s game and it was rubbish.

 

Where've you been or what’ve you seen recently that you’d recommend?

 

I was away the other week, Playa Blanca, Lanzarote.

 

Playa Blanca, nice, job done.

 

No worries.

 

Oh, just one more thing...what’s your prediction for Man United v Liverpool?

 

Man United 3-2.

 

Cheers Joe, I'll let you get back to cleaning more records!