My organization recently migrated to Office365, including Exchange / Outlook 365.

I was impressed with Outlook 365 OWA (outlook.office365.com). My initial thought was that having the entire infrastructure presented through a single portal is a recipe for disaster. Yet as soon as I type in the @company.com portion of my email address, it re-directs to our own authentication infrastructure (Ping in our case). None the less, I am sure that there are people working night and day trying to figure out how to MitM outlook.office365.com

Office 365 OWA and Outlook 2013 are nearly identical in terms of UI layout and functionality. For the average user, I think that they could do without the desktop client and most likely, not notice much if any loss of functionality.

Clutter is working well. I turned it on almost two weeks ago. So far it has done a great job of filtering out of all of the junk emails from the sales drones, while at the same time letting the important emails through. I have not missed any emails that I need to see.

+1 to this. Having to switch into edit mode to work on every single document that someone sends me is annoying.

First results from a good search for "project manager job description"

http://hrcouncil.ca/hr-toolkit...

What you described here fits the typical definition of a project manager.

So they had one person, a "manager", keep an eye on people, keep an eye on projects, allocate resources, and basically manage the group

The difference between a project manager and a manager is that a manager has direct reports and is responsible for dealing with all of the human resource issues (hiring, firing, training, reviews, etc.)

In the situation that you described, who took care of those tasks? The boss? The manager?

We call those people Project Managers. Someone has to keep the timelines, project plans, meeting minutes, and other assorted paper work together. You do not want to waste the time of the people actually doing the work by forcing them to make sure that their co-workers are on task.

In the case of my organization, they are trying to transition to recurring revenue streams by offering technology solutions with predictable, monthly fees. They are hoping to balance out the cyclical and sporadic revenue cycles inherent in traditional consulting engagements. The organizational structure has not yet adjusted to address the realities of employing a skilled technical workforce.

...or would have moved to another job elsewhere that offered an equivalent to a promotion

This is what I see happening in the industry that I am. We compete with the larger consulting firms (KPMG, Deloitte, etc.) and more often than not, people are changing jobs every 2-4 years. For people who have been in the industry long enough, they often times end up going back to a firm that they might have worked at previously.

I do not really understand it because it is counter to my own career progression during which I have spent at least 5 years with each employer and received steady promotions and increased responsibilities. The only thing that I can figure is that those big firms are always hiring the "best and the brightest", overachieving, Type-A personalities. If a person is not getting promoted, they have to constant deal with an influx of new, eager to be overworked, dreamy eyed college grads who will do the same work, for less pay.

Or another way of looking at it is that managers should be so highly skilled that they can do the work of everyone on their team. Those managers should then train their people so that one day, those people can replace the manager.

I know it sounds ideal, but this is exactly what I am doing with my team in my organization. It is working so well that every time I have an open position, I have people on other teams scrambling to apply to the position.

There is a tangential corollary here. Often times employees are expected to do a job / handle the responsibilities of a position for a year or more before they officially given the title and pay that goes along with it. In that way, organizations protect themselves by trying out an employee in a position before promoting them.

While the above is okay, it potentially puts the employee in a disadvantageous position. Unless they are willing to negotiate or leave for another job, they run the risk of getting stuck doing work far above their pay grade without reaping any of the benefits.

I work in an organization that struggles with this. One of my guys is a very competent technical resource who deserves to be paid more than we are "allowed" to pay him based on his current title / position. Our company is a consulting company and the compensation model was designed to reward managers who are leading large teams of people on client engagements. The model is not flexible enough to reward people in technical positions who do not have direct reports.

In order to hack the system, we had to setup a bunch of dotted line reports for him on the organization chart. He does not technically "manage" them because he is not responsible for performance reviews and all of those other fun managerial tasks. But since he could technically delegate to them, they count towards his head count requirement.

Well played sir

They are probably all selling access to the same set of DSLAMs at the CO.

The de-regulation of DSL was a mixed bag. On one hand, it produced competition and lowered prices. On the other, there was so much competition that companies were folding left and right. When I was doing SMB consulting in the mid-2000s we had one client who had to change providers four times in three years because they always went with the lowest priced provider and those providers kept folding.

Agreed. I was with Charter for about a decade and had good service. I always got more bandwidth than I was paying for and the service was stable. In ten years, I never had an outage.

It is a bit of an interesting situation because the Century Boulevard exit shares the transition lanes from the 105 onto the 405. So from the Waze POV it probably saw it as the "105 Freeway" and noticed that it was less congested than the 405. Having said that, the instructions were "Take Century Boulevard exit" and not "Merge onto 105 transition".

This should link to the area. The exit is basically at the 105 and I merged back onto the 405 near W Arbor Vitae St

https://www.google.com/maps/@3...

We see them on electronic billboards over the freeways. I received one on my phone once upon a time, but it came with the option to unsubscribe from future alerts and I did that.

I am not sure how big of a problem child abductions really are. My sense is that nine times out of ten they are just custody disputes. Mom / Dad gets upset with their spouse and takes the kid out to run errands / go to the bar. Spouse freaks out and calls the cops. Cops over react and issue Amber Alert.