The parent company wouldn't happen to have the initials NAM and have stations all along the east coast from Maine to Florida, would it? If so, I worked at one of the Florida locations.
Here is one shining (real world) example of why an IT department or one person in charge of IT as a whole is good: 6 TV stations. Some have Active Directory, some do not. Every station does email differently. With different providers. All have VPN to parent company. Parent company installs application on a Terminal Server for all TV stations to access. Said application REQUIRES a valid email account for each employee. Parent company sends a request for email account server details for all employees and requires employees to change their email passwords to first initial, last name, 123 (ie: jdoe123),. Guess what, you just gave Bobby, the new guy in Master Control the local manager's password - oh, and the CEO and President of the parent company's email password! Hell, he's got EVERYONE'S password! Before you ask, no, the user's are NOT allowed to change their password or else it breaks the software running at the head office.
The above scenario would have been EASILY resolved using Active Directory, Domain Trusts and a single copy of Microsoft Exchange. I even offered to do the setting up of this configuration. The users would only need to remember ONE password - the one they log into their computer with. The scenario above ACTUALLY happened and I'm pretty sure - if I wanted to - I could log into and read, anyone's email who works for those TV stations today.
Not all engineers are cut out for making IT shine. Sometimes you really want a dedicated IT person managing things, especially when you grow to multiple locations.
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Excellent post. Besides the dis-joined networks, I would have thought you worked at the TV station where I was Assistant Engineer/IT.
The parent company wouldn't happen to have the initials NAM and have stations all along the east coast from Maine to Florida, would it? If so, I worked at one of the Florida locations.
Here is one shining (real world) example of why an IT department or one person in charge of IT as a whole is good: 6 TV stations. Some have Active Directory, some do not. Every station does email differently. With different providers. All have VPN to parent company. Parent company installs application on a Terminal Server for all TV stations to access. Said application REQUIRES a valid email account for each employee. Parent company sends a request for email account server details for all employees and requires employees to change their email passwords to first initial, last name, 123 (ie: jdoe123),. Guess what, you just gave Bobby, the new guy in Master Control the local manager's password - oh, and the CEO and President of the parent company's email password! Hell, he's got EVERYONE'S password! Before you ask, no, the user's are NOT allowed to change their password or else it breaks the software running at the head office.
The above scenario would have been EASILY resolved using Active Directory, Domain Trusts and a single copy of Microsoft Exchange. I even offered to do the setting up of this configuration. The users would only need to remember ONE password - the one they log into their computer with. The scenario above ACTUALLY happened and I'm pretty sure - if I wanted to - I could log into and read, anyone's email who works for those TV stations today.
Not all engineers are cut out for making IT shine. Sometimes you really want a dedicated IT person managing things, especially when you grow to multiple locations.