All Things Technology Related Thread

Management in a municipal IT dept up 81 from you. We convinced our director and city management to remove admin rights for all users. Has virtually eliminated spyware and virus issues. I'd recommend going to the mat on the issue. "Honor code" ain't got nothing to do with it. The internet is full of crap..even in reputable places. Whether people intend to cause issues or not doesn't matter.

Did your calls of "I need to install this", increase, decrease or stay the same? Just curious because my staff has some limitations technically (inherited them, didn't hire them!) and the less I can make them do, the better.

Dirtbag, I agree. The one REALLY scary thing we got was the Cryptolocker virus. Talk about something that TOTALLY Fs you. We have DeepFreeze on all of our public machines, a part-time person logged on, got the virus, ALL attached drives get encrypted. The bad part about this virus is that you really have no recourse besides to recover every single file/folder of the connected network drives. This took down one department an entire day while we recovered half a terabyte of data.

I started pushing this GPO (because I'm the Law School director, so I get to do what I want independent of the Undergrad side :D) that is supposed to block it. Time will tell, but good call on that. Just curious if work increases or decreases based on removing admin rights.

BD, interesting about your Macbook. They used to burn me up because our students are probably 80% and they tell me honestly, "I bought it because it's cool." I had a huge chip on my shoulder against Apple products that has cooled down since.

Do you ever find that Apple breaks down physically sooner than PCs? I work on Apple hardware just as much as I work on PC software. The past two weeks alone I've replaced a dozen Macbook HDs, at least 3-4 motherboards and numerous iPhone requests (that I don't touch because that's a DELICATE operation).

Apple is rock solid software-wise, but damn, nobody seems to have one older than 3-4 years from what I've seen.

Ummm, I think I burned out motherboard, and probably the fatherboard and, when I tried to restart, I couldn't find the "any" key. Oh, and I accidentally spilled my soda in the machinery box thingy. ... you can fix that right?

Did your calls of "I need to install this", increase, decrease or stay the same? Just curious because my staff has some limitations technically (inherited them, didn't hire them!) and the less I can make them do, the better.

Increased for awhile since they couldn't do it themselves. Faced with an almost universal response of "no" it didn't take them long to realize we were serious. Removing admin rights meant they couldn't just install whatever. That was the point. Too many security issues, too much to have to support, and biggest of all too much risk associated with licensing. When we told management micro$oft could fine us hundreds of thousands of dollars for being out of licensing compliance it didn't take them long to agree that having a free-for-all had to end. Within a year everyone got us to it. We figured out quickly too: if people don't think the IT department is a bunch of dicks theyre probably not doing your jobs.

BD, interesting about your Macbook. They used to burn me up because our students are probably 80% and they tell me honestly, "I bought it because it's cool." I had a huge chip on my shoulder against Apple products that has cooled down since.

Do you ever find that Apple breaks down physically sooner than PCs? I work on Apple hardware just as much as I work on PC software. The past two weeks alone I've replaced a dozen Macbook HDs, at least 3-4 motherboards and numerous iPhone requests (that I don't touch because that's a DELICATE operation).

Apple is rock solid software-wise, but damn, nobody seems to have one older than 3-4 years from what I've seen.
My boss (CIO) has been an Apple guy for years, and Apple has slowly infiltrated our hardware inventory. Before that, it was Dell and only Dell. We have 2 Mac Minis (2010), 4 MacBook Airs (Mid 2011, Mid 2012), and 2 MacBook Pros (Retina, Late 2013) in use right now, and the only hardware issue we encountered were the 128GB flash drives that were recalled. Before I got mine, I just saw Mac as completely overpriced for what it is. Now that I've used it everyday for a while now, I dig it, but glad I'm not paying for it LOL. I've thought about getting a Mac Mini for home. Fairly affordable, small form factor, solid software, and since my wife and I have iPhones, iTunes runs so much better on Mac than Windows.

I'm using Mac at work because of mobile app development. I'm able to keep tabs on the iOS Developer in XCode while I develop for Android in Eclipse.

With our company moving more and more resources to the cloud it'll be a matter of time before we move to Chromebooks and Cloud Desktops for a majority of our users.

mac's cost like 40% more for the same hardware (apple is a hardware company, after all), but most of it is the same, so i doubt there are any more hardware issues than pc. and once they went BSD/intel... well, it's hard to mock technically.

if you want to save money you can buy min spec'd and up the ram/hds/etc yourself if it's a big enough lot.

With our company moving more and more resources to the cloud it'll be a matter of time before we move to Chromebooks and Cloud Desktops for a majority of our users.

We're piloting a small VDI implementation. Just got our first batch of zero clients. They're just monitors basically. Pretty cool.

Ummm, I think I burned out motherboard, and probably the fatherboard and, when I tried to restart, I couldn't find the "any" key. Oh, and I accidentally spilled my soda in the machinery box thingy. ... you can fix that right?

I know this in jest, but allow me to blow your mind: I just helped a recent hire (less than 30 years old) learn how to DOUBLE CLICK.

Increased for awhile since they couldn't do it themselves. Faced with an almost universal response of "no" it didn't take them long to realize we were serious. Removing admin rights meant they couldn't just install whatever. That was the point. Too many security issues, too much to have to support, and biggest of all too much risk associated with licensing. When we told management micro$oft could fine us hundreds of thousands of dollars for being out of licensing compliance it didn't take them long to agree that having a free-for-all had to end. Within a year everyone got us to it. We figured out quickly too: if people don't think the IT department is a bunch of dicks theyre probably not doing your jobs.

Very, very interesting. It's tough to be a dick because the climate here is almost a "even though this is a W&L computer, it's MY computer." For me, the biggest benefit of users calling for installs is that we get to vet them. I imagine our calls will go down significantly once people realize how embarrassing it'll be to call and say, "SooooOoo, I was hoping to get this Hello Kitty! screensaver installed."

Since I'm in one building, I don't mind walking to someone's office to check out an app for them. What did you do for laptop users? That's my biggest concern right now since I have professors traveling all over the world and the last thing I want is for them to absolutely need an install and we can't help them.

My thought was to create a local backdoor account with like a 25 character password so they can install in case of emergencies, but the password would be prohibitive to them logging in as that account all the time. Sure, we have a couple savvy users who would change it, and I would just deal with that as I went forward.

Sorry for all the questions, but I'm in charge of this initiative for both sides of campus and we're wanting to work through all scenarios.

We're piloting a small VDI implementation. Just got our first batch of zero clients. They're just monitors basically. Pretty cool.

Are you doing Citrix? If so, we're 3 years into it right now and I can give you a ton of input on that. We're going with streaming applications this summer because honestly, people just HATE waiting for a Citrix desktop to load.