Today was one of the best days at work that I’ve had in a long time. It flew by because of this, so that was an added bonus. About 2 months ago I was assigned the task of HEAT Administrator for our Help Desk. No added pay or job title, just another responsibility. HEAT is our call logging system, which communicates with an SQL server as the back-end. I love getting my hands in this type of stuff.

I’ve been working on getting HEAT to “talk” to LDAP and today was the day I decided to try it out. After changing some of the forms in HEAT, I realized that the DB needed some “massaging” to work correctly with LDAP. Our customer ID number was being stored simply as a number converted to text, but LDAP stores it with leading zeros. “Oh great!” was my first thought, but then it clicked.

I could export the data out of the HEAT DB, where it would be much easier (for me at least, with my limited knowledge of SQL), and work with it on my PC. So I pulled up Access to connect to the DB through ODBC and exported the data into Excel. From there I added some columns, gave the cells a custom format (7 digits with leading zeros displayed). Copied some things around, and then changed the column to a text field. Save the file and import it back into the database through Access and ODBC. Beautiful! It worked great for all three tables that CustID was stored in. I’m sure there is a much easier way to accomplish this, but by the time I would have found it, I was done.

Now that the data was correct, I linked up to LDAP and started the updates. It was moving painfully slow, so I talked to our System Administrator. He gave me the latest dump of data from LDAP so that I could run the first update on my own. I did it much like I did to import of the “messaged” data.

We now have over 27,000 profile records in HEAT, compared to just over 700 yesterday. I love working with this type of stuff and don’t get nearly enough chances at work. I really need to move out West and start fresh. Other than this exciting stuff, I also did a lot of other customizations to the HEAT system using business rules to monitor call ticket assignments and resolutions and autotasks to simply processes.

After work I went out biking with Mo. It was a great workout and I set a new PR for the Saginaw Valley Rail Trail. I like riding trails through the woods, but a paved path like this one is also nice to just crank out some speed and feel the burn. When I got back home I fired up the grill for some steak and garlic toast.