Brian Gruben Email & Phone Number

After six years of band directing in public schools, I decided to pivot out of education and into IT at the end of the 22-23 school year. While I loved teaching, I accepted that I didn’t have the tools to be successful in that path. I completed my A+ certification at the beginning of August 2023, and accepted a position as an IT Service Desk Technician the same month. In my current position, we don’t have tiered system, so I’m tasked with troubleshooting and working with all tickets unless I don’t have permissions. I work in the admin centers for Microsoft 365, Exchange, and Entra. Some ways I use these admin centers:- Create Microsoft user accounts and groups- Assign correct licenses and apps- Place users in correct groups- Convert user mailboxes to shared mailboxes- Create new mailboxes and groups according to user needs- Give users “send-as” and “manage” permissions to various shared mailboxes- Set up user email signatures- Configure MFA- Monitor and release quarantined emailsWe also use an on premises Active Directory using Windows Server. Some tasks I complete here:- Create/disable domain accounts- Assign necessary groups- Reset passwords- Join/remove computers to/from the domainOther tools I currently use and work with:- O365 apps (using and troubleshooting with proficiency)- Manage Engine for ticketing- Splashtop and NinjaOne for remote connections and troubleshooting- Dialpad (call center software) management and troubleshooting- SharePoint (I’ve migrated our KB to here as a searchable Wiki)- Power BI (basic troubleshooting, but currently working on building reports with it)I’m still very new in my career, and I’m looking to soak up as much knowledge as I can. While I enjoy helping users in a service technician role, I’m currently learning SQL and hope to move into an analyst role in the future and that is the language my current employer uses. Once I gain comfort and certification in that language, I plan on moving to C#, or whatever language will better serve me in a role that I find. At home, I’ve built two gaming PC’s. Mine is new, and my old one from 2017 is used by my wife. After upgrading the GPU in the 2017 machine, it can handle most games thrown at it. I’m currently planning on using decommissioned machines from work to build a home server. My goals for a home server:- Smart home automation- A NAS- Self-host a blog where I’ll update on server and data analyst projects- Host VM’s and containers to experiment with

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  West Texas A&M University

  Music Teacher Education