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Have you ever started a sentence with, "Wouldn't it be cool if..."

3/24/09

Written by Anna Abramovs

Well, Ken Stroud and Ryan Cochran, IT techs at the Bank of the Carolinas did, and it went like this, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could send an email from our Blackberrys that could unlock a Domain user account?” So they did it.

It proposed a substantial inconvenience to a user if the bank wasn’t able to unlock their account after business hours, so they created a script where they could simply send an email from their Blackberry to a specific account that would trigger Foxtrot to perform the unlocking action. Normally, the customer would experience a 24 hour turnaround, but with Ken and Ryan thinking outside of the box, the customer receives access momentarily, any time of the day. Now that’s what we call customer service!

When they send the email to the specific account, a Visual Basic script parses the subject line, and based on certain trigger characters, it will launch FoxtrotOne. From there, Foxtrot does the heavy lifting. It signs into Premier Navigator, unlocks any locked out accounts, and then closes the application. They set their Microsoft Exchange server to only allow incoming emails from their 3 IT guys, thus eliminating spoofing.

They realized that as long as they have Outlook running with the appropriate Visual Basic script, they could kick off any of their Foxtrot scripts remotely. Their next goal is to develop a process that will allow them to reset a customer’s password from their Blackberry.

Impressed? So are we. This process was mentioned at our morning meeting last week and all of our developers oohed and aahed when they heard it. We called Ken and Ryan to get details of their innovative script, and it wasn’t long before our Director of Development was peering over the wall to hear what they had to say.

We love creativity like this!

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Based on your assistance, I was able to successfully write a script that automatically logs a message when an error occurs without having to stop and restart the script manually for each record. Last week, this would have 'liberated' me from having to do so 104 times while the script was trying to run to completion. We will now be even more efficient with this process, plus I can incorporate my newfound knowledge to other scripts which may have similar scenarios in other areas of our bank. Thanks for setting aside some of your valuable time to follow up with my support question.

Ken Scharnagl, AVP Research, Testing, Implementation