I've been on both sides of this. I read once that it isn't the people you fire that make your life miserable its the people you don't fire. We used to keep two checklists around; expedited and unexpedited departures. Some kind of checklist is helpful. This wouldn't be a bad place to peruse. http://www.businesstown.com/people/firing.asp[^] Or you might pick up a book on HR that walks through it. It is well worth researching a little beyond the conversations you'll have about it because of the legal implications of doing it wrong, or the specific impact to the other employees. If your company creates a policy and then doesn't follow it that could also be trouble, so you want something that makes as much sense as possible. From personal experience I'd say the things people forget the most are the things that fall into "Other Duties as Required" on the job description. Such as taking care of a particular inventory, like the software license inventory. They aren't likely to threaten to go to the SBA over software licensing are they? Some jobs are minor but have a big impact if they aren't done. In general I think little jobs like that should be handled more formally so that if someone does leave, voluntarily or not, you don't have a drop in service. If someone leaves you should ideally be able to know within a short time what was on their plate. Your accounting department should know if they had access to a corporate credit card or cell phone and there should be a procedure in place for employees who work with an expense account, any benefits continuance, that sort of thing. If the employee did any purchasing you have to close off those elements so they don't order up a laptop or something at your expense. Not that you couldn't prosecute but why put yourself there? If the employee was responsible for getting rid of old equipment you'll have to reassign that. This is the sort of thing that usually slips through the cracks. I was once let go after I'd been put on a committee to get our company into HIPPA compliance. Imagine how that could go if I had been disgruntled? I'm usually gruntled when I leave a company. _____________________________ Give a man a mug, he drinks for a day. Teach a man to mug...

Hey Mike, Nothing like chucking you in at the deep end is there? Find yourself a mentor within the organisation. Make at least one of the accounts guys your best friend, and get some help from them. They'll help to get you through your first budget and hopefully you won't f*** up too much. Keep your aims modest and build in some financial contingency. Always, always, always keep a close eye on costs but don't let on to your team that is what you are doing. Lastly remember the three aspects of management: planning, finance and people. Be on your guard not to let the people aspect suffer by the other two. They are always interconnected and a change in one aspect with always affect the other aspects in some way. As far as building an IT department goes, I would say this is still a technical task, even if it is a larger problem. Go througth the process as you always would, gather requirements, design etc Now instead of estimating in man days, you are estimating in pounds and pence. This is where your accounting buddies come into play because their experience of costs is going to be much better than yours ever will be. Do this course with the Open University: "Certificate in Professional Management". I found it hard, but has really elevated my confidence and skills as a manager. Hope this helps.

A lot of laptops have VGA & HDMI - but I have no idea if they can work concurrently.. "For fifty bucks I'd put my face in their soup and blow." - George Costanza CP article: SmartPager - a Flickr-style pager control with go-to-page popup layer.

GAH :confused: Thought that the certificate was going to be the silver bullet but I still get my now least favorite response: The server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized. I'm headed back to the drawing board. Not defeated yet, but getting there. X| Mike Devenney

Mike where you able to solve this, I am facing the same problem, if you have a solution for this please share Thanks, Sridhar bc_sridhar@yahoo.com

Ok... turns out I was wrong. :doh: We are, in fact, not in business. I ran the code and didn't get any error so I assumed that all was well, but I wasn't getting to the line inhe code where the response was requested. When I removed the breakpoint and re-ran the code the 401 error was still happening on the line where I do: WebResponse wr = myReq.GetResponse(); Anyone have any experience with the Automated SWIFT download that can see something in the code below that could be causing it to fail? I've spoken with their support team but they don't offer support on automation, all they could do is verify that my username and password were correct and that I was authorized (ironic, no?) to download the file. // build credentials for SWIFT authentication System.Net.NetworkCredential cred = new System.Net.NetworkCredential(); cred.UserName = "mySWIFTUsername"; cred.Password = "mwSWIFTPassword"; WebRequest myReq = WebRequest.Create(URL); myReq.Credentials = cred; // build credentials for WTC Proxy authentication myReq.Proxy = WebProxy.GetDefaultProxy(); myReq.Proxy.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials; // send request and get response WebResponse wr = myReq.GetResponse(); Stream receiveStream = wr.GetResponseStream(); StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(receiveStream, Encoding.UTF8); StringBuilder bicFile = new StringBuilder(); // parse response into file, write file out to \\server\BICDownloads do { line = sr.ReadLine(); bicFile.Append(line); } while (line != null); File.WriteAllText(bicFileTemp, bicFile.ToString()); Mike Devenney

Wow, it's been almost 3 years since this thread was started and the answer is still helpfull :-D