A day in my life

Greetings,

In my job here at Wycliffe Associates I do a great diversity of things. If I am not traveling I am helping out around the office. One of the main parts of my job is to set up equipment going oversees.
These past few work days I set up some computers going to Russian speaking countries. This provided some different challenges and I thought I would share a few of these with you.
There are a decent number of computers that we set up at Wycliffe to go oversees. Because of this volume, we use a master image to begin the process of setting up computers. Wycliffe Associates has recently created a new help desk system to work on any tech related stuff. This new help desk has completely changed how we receive work, inventory and catalogue our work. Because it is new it has quirks being worked out. In Tech Advance we have meshed our older system with this new help desk. Part of my time is spent seeing were the meshing is not smooth and fixing it.
One of the issues we faced was languages. You may have noticed language packs for windows in your updates. Well, there is a difference between a program having a language pack and a program coming in that language. A program like windows or Microsoft Office will come in a default language like English. You can then get a language pack to change most of the languages that program uses. However fundamental parts of the program will still be in the base language. So if you want to uninstall windows, or do other core procedures, you will see the base language and not the language pack. In a small number of cases this can impact the ability of someone oversees using the computer. So the question is, which base language do you use and will a language pack be sufficient.
Language packs are dealt with differently in different programs. So if you get a French language pack for windows, it has no impact on Microsoft Office. You will need to buy additional language packs for that separately. By they way only Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate have all the language packs for free. Anything lower than these will have a smattering of language packs available, but otherwise you cant use them (So your base language is important).
I discovered all this when I was given a computer with a French install of windows and word and was asked to make it useable in Russian and English. It is interesting to try to set up a computer in a language you don't know. For instance, when I had Office in Russian and was trying to activate it. I don't know Russian but I do know generally all the right buttons to push, so I managed ok.
At one point I was talking with the person I was setting up three computers for. She had some questions about how certain things looked and how to do a couple of tasks. I had to figure out how to explain all this stuff and quickly because it is not easy to connect. She did not have our internal video conferencing software (Vidyo), so I came up with a different solution. I used Join Me (https://join.me/), which is a free program online, to connect. Join Me lets you share your screen with someone else through a web browser and it lets either you or the other person control the computer through that browser. This also lets you call the other person for free through the browser. I stayed on the phone in this case, but I was able to show her the computer I was working on, answer her questions about how to do what she wanted and let her look around herself. She was able to set up an account on that computer from her own computer half way around the world. That was pretty cool.
There are plenty of other stories like that, but this is your sample of what life is like when I am working here.