One of the best things about working for Microsoft is that (a) we have lots of competitors and (b) I get to be involved in lots of competitive situations. There will always be an opportunity for us to improve what we do and one of the best ways to figure those things out is by competitive engagement. Nothing focuses the mind like a good win or loss :-) So it upsets me greatly when I see an IT department wasting time and effort on ‘science experiments’ rather than an intelligent way of supporting and delivering value to the business which pays their salaries:
“How do you move 300 desktops, locked down with Windows ADS Group Policies (GPO), over to Ubuntu desktop? We have tried Centrify, Likewise, Gnome Gconf, and the like. Of course, we evaluated SuSe Desktop Enterprise and RedHat Desktop. Samba 4.0 promises the server side, however nothing for desktop lockdown. And while gnome gconf does offer promise, no real tools for remotely managing 300 desktops running gnome + gconf exist. All the options listed above are expensive, in fact so expensive that it's cheaper to leave M$ on! So while we've figured out the Office suite, email client, browser, VPN, drawing tools, and pretty much everything else, there seems to be no reasonable, open source alternative to locking down Linux terminals to comply with company policies. We're not looking for kiosk mode — we're looking for IT policy enforcement across the enterprise. Any ideas ladies & gentlemen?”
source: Slashdot
I could paraphrase the above as “we in the IT department really hate Microsoft so we’re willing to waste inordinate amounts of time looking into non-viable – or even non-existent – solutions if it means we can remove all Microsoft technology from our environment. Sure the end result might be expensive, flaky, bleeding edge, difficult to support and perform badly (especially once we’ve left this company in search of the next science experiment) but it’s all about our ideology”.
I’m sure the CEO and/or business owner would be rapt.
From my perspective there is nothing more exciting and energising that getting involved in a competitive situation with an IT department who is intent on delivering value to their business. The person who wrote the query above doesn’t work for one of those.
Does s/he work for your company ?
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