How do you document all phones

[drange]

Hello.

I have a job where I'm responsible for approximately 6-7000 telephones. We have a problem with documentation.

The phones are placed in ~30 different buildings and I guess we have 100 cables going out from the central.

All our documentation is in an Microsoft Excel document (yes, I know, I want OpenDocument) and there are four of us who has that spreadsheet open at the same time. All doing minor edits.

How do you document everythin from number, apparatus type, building, floor, cables and so on? Do you use a database?

Pardon my bad english...

 

[johnpoole]

i print a tnb once a month a use an excel macro to put each phone on a row, that macro is on pepedog.com as a free download. at one site cable records are added as des, pair and building number. the most detaled records i've seen was each tn/dn was linked to a hyperlink txt that pulled up station details as well as user name, pair location, tie pairs etc.. that site with 3000 stations had a person that does just records. my site does not maintain cable records, 8000 stations 4 techs, we utilize tones and probes to trouble shoot. the trouble with static records is just that, unless they are perfect, they are useless. the phone company keeps detailed cable records, with depts just for that, they are seldom correct. the amount of time needed for good records is not cost justified for the site i work at now.. if we hired a person just for records, the cost offset would not save enough install/move time to sell to mangement.. 20 station move, 4 hours, plus 2 to correct records, might be able to move ethe same 20 if i had perfect is 3 hours, usually not..

john poole
bellsouth business
columbia,sc

 

[dehlert]

We use a in-house/home-grown access database for tracking all of our data. We also do monthly billing to our users via this database.

We have about 10,000 stations but use the database to track lease lines, cell phones, and business lines. There are about 8 of us who are in and out of the database throughout each day.

But as John states, maintaining the records are hard.

We are working on a project to relocate approximate 3000 of our stations from an old Option 71 to a new Option 81.

I am currently taking a DNB, reading it into the Access Database, and then trying to reconcile each station's TN, Set type, and DES against our data (which is supposed to be current). I am finding about a 50% inaccuracies in our records when looking at DN's vs TN's vs Set Types vs DES.

In fact, due to the inaccuracies, I have co-workers complaining that we have no DID's available on the switch, but in looking at the DNB, I have found almost 600 available. This is mostly due to bad record keeping.

I would recommend an Access database for this, although, a SQL Server database with an Access or .NET front-end might be better.

David Ehlert
IT Analyst - Communications
County of Fresno

 

[kprintz]

We use a Peregrine Service Center.

 

[johnpoole]

you can move that data with a new install and restore the 71 data base to the 81, commands in 143 let that happen. i've never done it with different switch types but have from an 81 to a 81, saved about a million keystrokes

john poole
bellsouth business
columbia,sc