Agreed. Fortunately this is easy to prove to anyone with a brain. My favorite 'use standards" story: I was brand-new admin of a small biz and was told to pick between 10 used Gateway DX466's or 10 Compaq's of same CPU power. I chose Gateway. Not long after I needed to upgrade the RAM on the Gateways to accommodate Win95. All these Gateways were the *identical* model.
....on the outside... I ordered 10 sets of identical RAM, but it only worked in 7, because the motherboard P/N was different enough that they weren't same-same! They physically dropped in, but no boot and only troubleshooting on my own (Gateway was no help) did I find out "hey, some of these aren't EDO motherboards!" (or some such thing). It was only afterward I discovered gateway was a "motherboard of the month" club where the same model might have quite different components. Never have that issue with Dell, IBM, HP... What's fine for one or two doesn't always scale well to 1,000! David Lum // SYSTEMS ENGINEER NORTHWEST EVALUATION ASSOCIATION (Desk) 971.222.1025 // (Cell) 503.267.9764 From: Erik Goldoff [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 2:53 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: WSJ Reporter thinks IT departments should allow users to install whatever This is not a new perspective ... every so often some 'journalist' expresses their opinion that IT should yield to the fact that we should support whatever the end users want .. the names change, and sometimes some of the specifics, but all are myopic with regards to the risks and costs of allowing this to occur. At a minimum following standards helps to save the companies $$$ by limiting costs, not even considering security issues and the cost for outage Erik Goldoff IT Consultant Systems, Networks, & Security ________________________________ From: Jonathan Link [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 5:13 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: WSJ Reporter thinks IT departments should allow users to install whatever Discuss: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703567204574499032945309844.html I believe this is more an indictment of the low quality of journalism nowadays. It's little more than a rant on his employer's IT policies. In no instance does he discuss the measured effect of IT policies might have within an organization. He makes vague allusions to the productivity gains users could acheive if allowed to use any software they felt necessary to do their job. Near the end of the article he does finally discuss some of the valid reasons for constraining users ability to install shiny new software in order to be more "productive." ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
