|
|
  |
 |
|
Stop the insanity!I subscribe to an email newsletter from ZD Net - The Berst Report. It's an interesting computer industry news summary and occasionally has a worthwhile article. But almost every issue has something about the latest utilities, games, shareware and other downloads that you can load on your system TODAY! Speaking for every network, help-desk and PC support manager out there...this has got to stop! We have to stop treating our work computers as toys and experimental workbenches where we can load cool screen-savers, download fun little graphics programs from the email our buddies send us, and fuss for 5 hours, with 3 frantic calls to the help desk, because the program we downloaded from filepile.com screwed up our word processor. In this article, I'm not griping about HOME computers - just work computers. If you want to rebuild your home computer every few days because the latest video driver you installed has scrambled your hard drive until there's smoke coming out of the speakers, go ahead on. Everyone's got to have a hobby. But leave your work computer alone. Our work computers have a multitude of purposes and we have to keep them uppermost in our minds. If we have a computer to help write letters, prepare proposals, look up product information on the Internet and prepare forecasts, just why, precisely, are YOU installing a graphics package? Yes, it might be neat to punch up that report with some cool graphics, but do you really need to spend a day on one graphic for one page? Stop it. Just stop it! I was visiting a client the other day. They have about 70 PC's and five full time people to support the PC's and the network. When they had a time-sharing system with a service bureau, and every user had an ugly green text screen (with no opportunity for cool wallpaper), they had one person on staff. And his job was basically to do hardware repair and to be the contact point with the service bureau. I've talked to many network managers who really long for those good old days. Today, we've got a scary world where every user can install video plug-ins for their browsers (why they need to watch CNN while they're at work, I won't go into), every worker, including shipping clerks, can install Pointcast to stay up to date on the news, and Microsoft has 45,923 versions of their various operating systems that have to be managed. All this so people can have pretty windows and cut-and-paste. You won't get me into an argument about the value of today's computers. I get most of my ideas and information from the Internet these days. And I love the windowing environment for getting work done (as long as it doesn't crash more than once or twice a day). But the costs of managing and supporting such diverse environments are getting to be more than many businesses should deal with. And they're not going to take it anymore. Tools are coming on the scene that will allow those poor, forsaken network managers to take back control of YOUR desktop. With products like Novell's Z.E.N.works, they will be able to pretty much prevent you from doing ANYTHING on your machine that they don't want you to do. You won't be able to install new software, you won't be able to run Solitaire, you won't be able to hit web sites that management doesn't think are really related to why you're being paid the big bucks. They will breath a sigh of relief as the phones stop ringing in tech support. There won't be any more problems, because you're all using standard, managed, boring machines that do what they're supposed to do. And it's all YOUR fault. You just had to install that Christmas Tree screen saver last Christmas, didn't you.
|
|
|
Copyright MMXIV The Gadwall Group,
Ltd. All Rights Reserved |
