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I'm one of two guys handling ~100 employees, of which roughly 10 are full-time PHD scientists and another 40 or so of engineers and other highly skilled support staff. The remainder work in a retail setting or as educators for our camps. I have Windows, OSX, and Linux running on dozens of systems that we personally manage.Rhymenoserous posted:
Simplification is good, but not at the expense of pissing off your users. Asking someone to change the way they do things to make your job easier is an easy way to make them hate you. I usually try to stress the benefit from the user's perspective, focusing on things that will improve their workflow and quality of life. If I tried to tell a senior researcher that we were switching everyone to windows half of them would walk out and not return, regardless of any perceivable benefit.
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Sep 4, 2015 19:36
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go3 posted:okay thanks i actually enjoy learning about the edge cases where these things make sense He's right too - it really is just that being able to run unix software packages is worth the extra time and energy of supporting a mac ecosystem. Perhaps it's because we're in astronomy but most of the software we use for reducing images and dithering massive images without losing information is command line only unix stuff. I'm slowly driving our userbase towards more centralized management but due to the previous IT manager most of our folks don't trust us to manage their systems. It's alright - I don't blame them at all, but it does make utilizing some of the time-saving automation tools more difficult. I work really hard at the fine art of supporting the needs of our user base without being a total pushover. I will stand my ground when someone comes to me with a bullshit reason for a big change e.g  "give me an external IP because someone needs to connect to my server for X software" "How about instead you tell me what the use case is, who is connecting, and why we can't have them use a VPN connection" "Oh yeah that sounds way more reasonable!"Of course that last line can also be "Because of semi-good reason A and terrible reason B". Disagreements happen but I'm usually careful enough when I'm explaining my reasoning to someone as to why I think my way is best. Smart people need smart explanations or else they will immediately do 5 minutes of googling and prove you are full of poo poo. Much better to admit when you don't know, but explain things you do know to people on a level they can relate to. I have highly technical users that I go to for help on certain things, then I have users that can't figure out power switches. It all boils down to communicating effectively.
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Sep 4, 2015 23:48
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McDeth posted:Is it a one-off case? If so, then I'd say you have the ideal solution. There's no reason to go out and spend abhorrent amounts of money on some virtualized solution or equipment for this one guy to be able to use Indesign from home. Unless you're expecting to scale out I honestly wouldn't worry about it. If so, the only real answer is GRID/Shield (somewhat joking here). Um, install enterprise volume licensed Windows 7, after DOING EXTENSIVE DRIVER RESEARCH. HP's are the devil and some of their newer systems don't have Win7 driver support natively, you need some third party thing. Sometimes there will be drivers listed as windows 8 only that may work in 7. Given that it's your only system and you may not have volume licensing... Go through the list of installed applications and uninstall them all, one by one?
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Sep 10, 2015 22:37
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