On Mon, 10 Nov 2008, Kate Harris wrote: > And this is where I'm hitting a problem; wise-assed > users and a problem with lots of personal files being stored on > company laptops (I don't just mean a letter to the local council; I'm > talking GBs of iTunes, movies, photos etc.) along with a culture that > people treat company laptops as if they were their own. While I see > no problem with a little reasonable personal use, 40Gb of movies on a > laptop including the odd little trojan on "funny" video clips is > causing problems for my desktop staff when they're supporting users > (especially when said users expect/demand that all of their personal > stuff to be copied onto any new machine they get during rebuilds).
The above activities are normal for people's "own" computers. How about looking at it from this angle, why do they have laptops rather than desktops and why do they take them home? If you give somebody a laptop that they are expected to take home with them then your are displacing their home computer and desktop. Much like if you give somebody a company car which they take to and from work you are implicitly/explicitly giving them permission to drive their family around in the weekends. An employee is forced to keep their laptop with them 24x7 is not going to get another just to watch their movies on and lug that about as well. If you want a "work only" laptop then make the machine inconvenient for using other than work ( crazy login authentication , random re-imaging, no Admin privs, etc ) and most people will stop doing it. Many will probably leave their laptops on their desks all the time since they don't' to any work at home ( these people might be open to "upgrades" to desktops ). Alternatively I've seen a few articles recently where the corp laptops run virtualisation and have a couple of images, one is the corp image and the other is the "home" one. -- Simon Lyall | Very Busy | Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/ "To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
