----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, June 30, 2003 1:07 AM
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] MMS 2003 and
ADAM 2003
No
problem on the ramble.
-
*grin*
It
sounds like you have an amazingly together environment. I would say
that if it is true, you are the very small minority. We are trying to go
that way but there are so many different new and cool things going on at any
given moment it is tough to keep focused and work towards any one single goal.
I know when we were out for the 2k3 RAP we asked for a GPO option to disallow
AD/AM installs so we could control them, not sure if that made it in.
-
well, I did provide the "10,000" foot view of the environment, and
certainly didnt go into specifics. There are some problems of course,
and its not always smooth sailing.
We
have backing of management at varying levels for various things. Nothing what
I would consider strongly consistent. The company I work for is huge and there
are so many different management chains about the only thing that the top most
layers of management would care about concerning AD would be whether or not it
has totally stopped working across the entire company and everyone is dead in
the water and then you would spend considerable time just explaining what AD
was and why we were dependent on it.
-
true, that is a problem. Getting CIO/CTO signoff can be problematic, but one
of out saving graces was that during the insourcing procedure the management
structure was flattened significantly, allowing the operations team to get "in
the ear" of the powers that be. If you cant do that, it really comes
down to an education process, but you may not be able to get infront of the
right people.
Interesting your comment on the outsourcing and then insourcing in the
other response. We are now on the insourcing swing of that pendulum. It was
supposedly cheaper to get good quality and outsource and now it was realized
that it is cheaper to insource and get that quality as well as ownership of
the products. I think if the company could move in one direction for more than
3-4 years we could probably hammer out a great deal of our issues but that
doesn't seem to happen. If it doesn't fix everything in 2-3 years, expect we
will make a major shift and reorg again.
-
agreed, insourcing is quite a shift away from the outsourced model, and does
present some unique challenges (and opportunities). There was a spate of
outsourcing here (Australia), and we are now on the brink of these coming up
for review in a number of places. The major problem with going from an
outsourcing to insourcing model is that all of the staff who know how things
run work for the outsourcer and cant be encouraged to stay (unless you get out
the chequebook). This does provide issues during transition and
subsequent management of some systems. We have left some things alone
that we dont have specific info on, and have scheduled to replace them with
newer versions / different products that we install and have documented
completely.
We
also won't support anything that doesn't run against the official production
environment. Anything outside of it is considered Shadow-IT and my personal
opinion is that that is larger than the official IT and probably has more
money to spend because it is all of these different pockets of business. They
are slowly coming into the fold as we find them because they come to us
because of some major failure they had but it is still pretty wild west.
- Exact problem we
had (a lot of shadow systems running). During the transition we
basically put the foot down and said that if we didnt have documentation on
them, we couldnt manage or back them up, and when we located them they would
be terminated (waving the virus / security threat banner worked a bit for
us). This bought the majority of them out of the woodwork. We have
also been able to centralise purchasing of server hardware (they still have
the money, but have to buy approved hardware with signoff from us). Next
step is to centralise hardware spending so we have the money and own the
equipment, and they petition us for resources (disk space, processing capacity
etc)
Thanks for the insights.
- no
problems.
<snip>
