Laptop Standardization…
While as a general rule I do plan to try to avoid talking (or bitching) about work, I will from time to time give you a (all things considered) fairly useless update on the trials and victories of my job.
So when I first signed on, we had about 30 workstations in the company and 2 servers. The servers were set up so that anyone could access them (everyone had administrative rights). Imagine setting up your home internet router to allow anyone inside your house to have total control over your internet connection, and then having a LAN party with some friends who aren’t quite as computer savvy as you. That’s about how comfortable I was with the set up.
So I started locking people down and re-imaging workstations with standardized images.
Naturally that led to some problems, but it’s solved more problems than it’s created. Just this week we rolled out an upgrade to our CRM (customer relationship management) software. This means that we had to download a 150MB file to each workstation and automate the installation process of this application, including setting registry settings. Sadly, we had a 40% failure rate because I had no test environment to simulate the experience prior to the “go live” event.
So this week I spent my time troubleshooting workstations of people who were not standardized (3 hours on one person just to get remote access so that I could even try to troubleshoot his problems). Comparatively, systems that were standardized took significantly less time to troubleshoot (30 minutes was the largest amount of time invested in a standardized workstation.)
Naturally, I made a big point with my boss of highlighting the value of the changes that I’ve made to the environment since I’ve arrived. Now, I need to convince him to let me permanently dump Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, because the previous “IT guy” changed the IP address of the domain controller/SBS server and did it improperly (as in, doing it at all). Now, we have all sorts of little glitches in the network where things don’t work properly. And I cannot solve any of them until I can gut the existing set up.
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Thank you susan bradley for my first bit of spam. I have no idea who you are, and I won’t do you the justice of a linkback (knowing how search engines function, I would be rewarding you for the useless addition to my blog that you offered). Instead, I marked you as spam and I’ll make a (what I thought was going to be) short commentary.
This is not an IT blog. I do not have readers who care about the nitty gritty of managing an IT infrastructure. I do not need to discuss with them the pros and cons of the SBS Remote Web Workspace (which no one in my company uses). Even less important to my readership is the support structures available for SBS. While it is certainly a great application for small businesses, businesses with pretentions of being larger than the 10-50 users needs the additional flexibility given by redundant and seperated application topology. I have no reason, in this blog, to go in to the business reasons why seperating the IIS server off to a secondary server chassis and putting it on the DMZ so that I can host the company’s internet web presence is desirable. Nor is it important to my members whether I removed administrative desktop or administrative server rights (and for your information, you have it backwards. I removed administrative rights from all users on the server infrastructure, and left their desktop administrative rights. I care less about them screwing up their desktops with a desktop image ready to wipe and rebuild their workstation from scratch than I do about them horribly screwing up our single SBS server which currently hosts every bit of data the company has.) And frankly, in my industry, with the number of applications that need to be installed to support our customers (Nortel BCM, Nortel CS100 Telephony Manager, Nortel Enterprise Switch Manager, Nortel Java Device Manager, Nortel OrderPro, Nortel Application Builder (various versions), etc. etc. etc.) I have no ability to take away administrative rights until I’ve put a lot more work in to standardizing workstation images than I have currently. And that doesn’t even count the application compatibility testing between these various applications and applications like our CRM software or our accounting software. All of which is way off topic, but I think marginally demonstrates that there are factors occuring at the desktop level of which I did not speak and of which you are poorly informed on to respond seriously to my generalized commentary about my work environment.
I want the additional infrastructure for business reasons, redundancy and management purposes. I want systems in place to monitor our infrastructre rather than flying blind, like we currently are doing (and yes, I’m fairly well aware of the SBS monitoring tools that come bundled with that product.)
While I appreciate the linkage and publicity, I’d like to kindy suggest that you shut the fuck up and spam someone else who gives a rats ass. This isn’t an IT blog, and I don’t feel the need to go in to the level of technical detail that you did with those who frequent here… why? because unlike you and your readers, my friends just don’t care to be bored with the complications of my work.
The bottom line is that someone in my office made a mistake, and I just discovered it, and having discovered it, I’m now left with the cleanup and training of other people in my staff.
I have no intention of removing Microsoft, but instead on moving from SBS to a more robust infrastructure involving seperate domain controllers, SQL servers, exchange servers and IIS servers. I struggle with why I’m even explaining myself, except that you linked to me, and I’m sure you have readers, and invariably some of them will read this blog. It’d be nice if they understood that I glossed over a lot of the factors because my members don’t care about that kind of thing, and your linking to me as an example of your pet peeve is erroneous