So, your ratio of desktop support techs to users is 1:1,000 and you have THREE people doing servers? How many servers could you possibly have? I mean, even if you have 300 servers (one for every seven users), your server guys are only supporting 100 servers while your desktop guys support 1,000 desktops. This seems completely out of whack to me.
My employment contract says I'm exempt. My employer insists that if you need an hour or two off here and there, you have to either make the time up later or fill a form stating the number of hours you take off and your pay is docked at an hourly rate. However if you work over your hours you don't get any overtime pay. I wonder how legal that is.
It probably isn't and they don't care. Almost every employer I've ever worked for did exactly what your employer does. Be happy if they're not making you work 60 hour weeks for no extra pay.
Also bear in mind that, for the IT field, California has additional laws about who's overtime-exempt and who's not based on, among other things, salary and effective hourly rate. Relevant law is California Labor Code section 515.5. As of 2007 the effective hourly rate needed to qualify as overtime-exempt was $49.77/hour. SB 929 changed that effective 1/1/2008 to $36/hour, or not quite $75K/year in salary. Anyone in the IT field not being paid at least that amount is not exempt from overtime in California regardless of other qualifications (the exemption requires that all conditions hold).
IANAL, but it appears that this section means Systems Administrators can be exempt: (b) The exemption provided in subdivision (a) does not apply to an employee if any of the following apply:
(3) The employee is engaged in the operation of computers or in the manufacture, repair, or maintenance of computer hardware and related equipment.
The clause is obviously meant to apply to computer manufacturing workers, but it's written so broadly that it would also apply to Systems Administrators, Desktop support positions, Help Desk positions and so on. In fact, I've specifically seen software development positions that say they require desktop support. I thought this was extremely odd, but it now appears that it was a dodge by the employer to get around the new overtime law.
YOU had bargaining power because you had six offers. Maybe this is news to you, but not everyone gets six offers for every job. Talk to an autoworker in the Midwest or a construction worker on the West Coast.
The kind of shit that needs to be stopped is whiny, bitching, lazy bastards complaining about every little thing they don't like. This is why god (aka, man) invented the firing squad. To rid ourselves of people who think that companies not wanting to pay over time is "EXACTLY the kind of crap that needs to be stopped."
Yeah! Whiny, bitching, lazy bastards got rid of child labor, instituted the 40 hour work week, the minimum wage, made employers pay attention to worker safety and implemented Social Security.
Let's go back to kids working 50 hour weeks for less than minimum wage, while getting their arms chopped off in smoky factories. If they don't like it, we'll put 'em in front of the firing squad!
You would make a GREAT Secretary of Labor in the Bush Administration.
Maybe what's cheaper isn't always what's best for the company. It certainly isn't what's best for the employees.
You have five people who work from 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM every day of their work lives. They leave home at 7:30 AM and get back at 7:30 PM. That leaves 2 to 2.5 hours for their kids and maybe another 1/2 hour to an hour with their spouse. They still have all the issues of modern life - shopping, cooking, eating, paying bills, cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, laundry, etc. And they have a couple hours per night to do all that and spend time with their family.
So yes, your company might save a couple bucks by working five people an extra 10 hours per week. Heck, you can make them exempt and not pay them an extra cent. Maybe you'll be lucky and get five workaholics that don't care about being home or seeing their families. It's more likely that you're going to burn people out, piss them off and have them quit.
Or you can bite the bullet - knowing that you've got at least 10 hours of work per week, hire another person, and have a chance at a healthy, happy workforce.
Nah, screw that. People are an infinite resource to be exploited and discarded to make YOU more money.
Funny...I've worked as a salaried employee for 10-ish years, and I've never seen a manager who was reasonable about grabbing an afternoon off - unless you use PTO.
What? Your insinuation seems to be that unions led to the outsourcing of the steel and auto industries. There are no IT unions. Now go call Dell/HP/Microsoft/Symantec tech support. I'll wait. Outsourcing has nothing to do with unions.
It's funny - I've never known a company who *didn't* do it the way you describe. In other words, almost every place I've ever worked, salaried employees were expected a regular, 40 hour per week schedule, plus overtime. Any time off at all was deducted from PTO - period. EVERY company has it both ways with salaried employees.
And $70 to $80 grand is shit money for a Network Engineer in Silicon Valley. Try finding a decent place to live for less than $750,000 within 30 miles of Cupertino.
Just because they pay what *you* think is a decent amount of money doesn't give an employer the right to withhold pay for extra work. A lot of cities don't actually, you know, HAVE any other jobs. Is your position that we should let companies screw employees out of pay because the economy is bad?
Mod parent up. The whole problem is being expected to work 40 hours per week while not being paid a penny extra for overtime or on call work. In 12 years in IT, I have known precisely ONE salaried employee who was allowed to work less than 40 hours per week without time being deducted from her pay. ONE.
Thank you for the end of that post. It really seemed like you were building to the argument that filling out a timesheet is somehow worse than working 60 hours and getting paid for 40.
The problem with "exempt" work is that most companies expect you to work 50-60 hours per week, be on call AND be in the office at 8:00 AM every day "in case something comes up." If the "solution" is "get another job" try picking your head up out of the IT jobs paradise that is the Bay Area and look at Craigslist jobs in places like Cleveland or Sacramento. Other IT jobs don't exist.
The simple solution is that if you work, you should get paid. Period. Exemptions are an excuse to make you work for free.
Wow - there are lots and lots of ridiculously complex solutions here. I'm assuming this is a one time data transfer. How about this: 1. Make a copy of the database 2. Encrypt it with PGP Disk or TrueCrypt. 3. Put it on a DVD, Flash or external hard drive. 4. Meet the consultant, hand the data to her and tell her the password. Alternatively, courier the DVD/flash drive to the consultant and give her the password over the phone.
I'm assuming you can identify person and there isn't going to be some movie plot threat involving imposters who assume the consultant's identity by getting her face surgically attached to theirs in an effort to steal your data.
Appriver's spam filtering service (AppRiver.com) is your best friend. A couple reasons it's great: * AppRiver's spam filtering is extremely accurate - in the very high 90's. * AppRiver is a hosted service, so there is nothing to install, maintain or upgrade on your mail servers. As I recall, they went down for a total of an hour in two years of using them. * AppRiver pushes the spam message reading from you to the users. Every day, each user gets a single message from AppRiver listing all the spam it's caught in he last 24 hours. If the users find a good message, they click a resend link in the message and it's resent to their mailbox. They also have the option of requesting (with your approval) that all mail from a recipient be allowed through.
I worked with a 40 user company with e-mail addresses published on the web and I spent less than an hour a month working on spam filtering. I don't remember specific pricing, but I want to say it was $20 per user per year or less.
I'm not affiliated with them - just a happy customer.
You should check out http://rockettheme.com/ and http://joomlashack.com/ Joomla templates. Their templates look great and are easy to modify for your purposes. Plus, they're a lot cheaper than hiring a pro or putting out a mediocre design. Joomla is relatively easy to learn and customize.
Groove is Windows only, but works really well for sharing files among a small number of mobile workers and backing up individual laptop documents directories.
I currently have about 20 almost completely non-technical, 100% mobile workers using Groove to backup their data to my local server. To do this: setup a copy of Groove on the server and then setup a file sharing workspace in each person's personal drive. Setup Groove on each laptop and create a single directory where they'll store their documents. From the server's Groove install, invite each individual to their workspace and choose their documents directory as the sync folder. (I found it easier to do it for them, since it's a one time thing.)
What you'll end up with is a copy of Groove running on the server with 20 (or whatever) file sharing workspaces - one for each user. As you've read, when users have an Internet connection, changes will synch automatically. Groove passes through VPN, NAT firewalls, etc. so there's no need to open ports anywhere.
You can also create a file sharing workspace and share it among several different users. Synchronization is quick since it only sends document changes. It's also very reliable.
Now the caveats, issues, etc.
* Groove will not sync PST files, so I strongly discourage their use.
* Groove runs at logon, which slows down the boot time of PCs. Users on slower laptops (Pentium M 1.4 Ghz and below) notice the slowdown.
* The more data you sync with Groove, the slower it gets. Synching 500 MB or less in a workspace is generally OK, but approaching 1 GB may slow things down noticeably unless you're on a dual core PC with lots of RAM. I encourage people to only put documents in their synch folder they actually need to backup, as opposed to 20 copies of the same PDF they already have as an e-mail attachment.
* Groove 3.1 does not run as a service. I believe this is the same with Groove 2007, but I'm not sure. I have to leave it running on my server console and lock the server.
* I'm using Groove 3.1, which has been really reliable for 18 months. However, I've started to experience some instability on the server side over the last several months. When the app crashes on the server, I restart it and everything continues as normal. Laptop users almost never have stability problems.
* Groove will crash if you're running it on your server console and you logon with the same username to a non-console RDP session (Using mstsc.exe, as opposed to "mstsc.exe/console" when the console is already logged on). Basically, when you're already logged on to the console and you logon to a second, non-console RDP connection, Windows tries to load a second instance of the process. This crashes Groove 3.1. Not sure about Groove 2007.
* Don't synch the user's "My Documents" directory. It contains the "My Music" directory, which is where iTunes stores music. I guarantee you'll have problems with file/workspace sizes if someone tries to synch their iTunes music.
* When you install Groove on the server, put the Groove User data and System data folders on a drive with lots of space. If someone mistakenly synchs their music or photo collection, the Groove system data will fill up your C:\ drive. (The Groove user data and system data folders are application folders where Groove stores its internal data, not to be confused with the actual workspace folders.)
* Grooveclean will cancel a pending sync set, which you'll need if a user synchs an ungodly amount of data. (This has happened to me several times).
Groove is Windows only, but works really well for sharing files among a small number of mobile workers and backing up individual laptop documents directories.
I currently have about 20 almost completely non-technical, 100% mobile workers successfully using Groove to backup their data to my local server. To do this: setup a copy of Groove on the server and then setup a file sharing workspace in each person's personal drive. Setup Groove on each laptop and create a single directory where they'll store their documents. From the server's Groove install, invite each individual to their workspace and choose their documents directory as the sync folder. (I found it easier to do it for them, since it's a one time thing.)
What you'll end up with is a copy of Groove running on the server with 20 (or whatever) file sharing workspaces - one for each user. As you've read, when users have an Internet connection, changes will synch automatically. Groove passes through VPN, NAT firewalls, etc. so there's no need to open ports anywhere. The documents on the server are synched copies, so they're just regular documents that can be opened, backed up, etc.
You can also create a file sharing workspace and share it among several different users. Synchronization is quick since it only sends document changes. It's also very reliable.
Now the caveats, issues, etc.
* Groove will not sync PST files, so I strongly discourage their use.
* Groove runs at logon, which slows down the boot time of PCs. Users on slower laptops (Pentium M 1.4 Ghz and below) notice the slowdown.
* The more data you sync with Groove, the slower it gets. Synching 500 MB or less in a workspace is generally OK, but approaching 1 GB may slow things down noticeably unless you're on a dual core PC with lots of RAM. I encourage people to only put documents in their synch folder they actually need to backup, as opposed to 20 copies of the same PDF they already have as an e-mail attachment.
* Groove 3.1 does not run as a service. I believe this is the same with Groove 2007, but I'm not sure. I have to leave it running on my server console and lock the server.
* I'm using Groove 3.1, which has been really reliable for 18 months. However, I've started to experience some instability on the server side over the last several months. When the app crashes on the server, I restart it and everything continues as normal. Laptop users almost never have stability problems.
* Groove will crash if you're running it on your server console and you logon with the same username to a non-console RDP session (Using mstsc.exe, as opposed to "mstsc.exe/console" when the console is already logged on). Basically, when you're already logged on to the console and you logon to a second, non-console RDP connection, Windows tries to load a second instance of the process. This crashes Groove 3.1. Not sure about Groove 2007.
* Don't synch the user's "My Documents" directory. It contains the "My Music" directory, which is where iTunes stores music. I guarantee you'll have problems with file/workspace sizes if someone tries to synch their iTunes music.
* When you install Groove on the server, put the Groove User data and System data folders on a drive with lots of space. If someone mistakenly synchs their music or photo collection, the Groove system data will fill up your C:\ drive. (The Groove user data and system data folders are application folders where Groove stores its internal data, not to be confused with the actual workspace folders.)
* Grooveclean will cancel a pending sync set, which you'll need if a user synchs an ungodly amount of data. (This has happened to me several times).
* When you get past 20 workspaces, all synching a large amount of data, you may be past what Groove is designed to do.
The problem is that you're looking at Intel, whose low-end CPUs suck. Really? Because I just paid $140 for a Core 2 Duo 4400 that runs at 2.8 Ghz on stock cooling and voltage. It's as fast as any sub-$300 dual core CPU on the market. I wouldn't call that "sucking."
I'm also lobbyist - with the North American Pro-Obesity, Chocolate Loving Candy Manufacturers Association and we paid good money to have this bill passed so that Halloween will have an extra hour of daylight this year.
Record profits this year, my friend, record profits. You should have invested in manufacturers of chocolate, bon-bons and candy-bars.
So every user-created political ad on the Internet MUST have had something to do with the campaign it supports? Unlikely.
And really, I thought the ad didn't come close to living up to its hype. What's next? People getting all excited about a Fark photoshop contest of Chris Dodd?
You can't outsource security [e.g. oh look google is so much better at keeping our documents secure] any more than you can outsource responsibility.
Sure you can. There have been close to a dozen zero-day Microsoft Office vulnerabilities over the last year. These vulnerabilities are bring used to exploit machines and turn them into spam or Denial of Service bots. To combat this, you've got to roll out 3-4 Microsoft Office updates to every machine in your enterprise every month. No matter how efficient you are, there is a huge labor cost associated with running these updates. The chance of Office being hacked is infinitely higher than the chance of Google being hacked, and you'll never have to deploy a Google Office update to thousands of machines on a short time frame.
Why isn't this guy simply looking at Open Office, or hell the other free tools like AbiWord, Gnumeric, etc.
Because these are fat clients. You save on licensing costs, but not on deployment, maintenance or updates.
Not only are the google versions of the tools not nearly feature complete, but they're over the internet. Thus guaranteed to be sucktastically slow (especially when a lot of people use it) and very likely insecure in the end (hint: gmail has already had a few goofs).
I agree that lack of features is a big problem. I also have little doubt that this will be addressed over time. Same thing with the speed issue. I don't think now is the time for a hosted office suite, but I'm willing to bet they'll be good enough in the next 2 years.
Also, if you're just going to use AJAX based web tools, what does it matter what OS you run?
It doesn't, which is why Linux would be a better choice than Windows (when running hosted apps) given that it's more secure and less expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
So, your ratio of desktop support techs to users is 1:1,000 and you have THREE people doing servers? How many servers could you possibly have? I mean, even if you have 300 servers (one for every seven users), your server guys are only supporting 100 servers while your desktop guys support 1,000 desktops. This seems completely out of whack to me.
My employment contract says I'm exempt. My employer insists that if you need an hour or two off here and there, you have to either make the time up later or fill a form stating the number of hours you take off and your pay is docked at an hourly rate. However if you work over your hours you don't get any overtime pay. I wonder how legal that is.
It probably isn't and they don't care. Almost every employer I've ever worked for did exactly what your employer does. Be happy if they're not making you work 60 hour weeks for no extra pay.
Also bear in mind that, for the IT field, California has additional laws about who's overtime-exempt and who's not based on, among other things, salary and effective hourly rate. Relevant law is California Labor Code section 515.5. As of 2007 the effective hourly rate needed to qualify as overtime-exempt was $49.77/hour. SB 929 changed that effective 1/1/2008 to $36/hour, or not quite $75K/year in salary. Anyone in the IT field not being paid at least that amount is not exempt from overtime in California regardless of other qualifications (the exemption requires that all conditions hold).
IANAL, but it appears that this section means Systems Administrators can be exempt:
(b) The exemption provided in subdivision (a) does not apply to an
employee if any of the following apply:
(3) The employee is engaged in the operation of computers or in
the manufacture, repair, or maintenance of computer hardware and
related equipment.
The clause is obviously meant to apply to computer manufacturing workers, but it's written so broadly that it would also apply to Systems Administrators, Desktop support positions, Help Desk positions and so on. In fact, I've specifically seen software development positions that say they require desktop support. I thought this was extremely odd, but it now appears that it was a dodge by the employer to get around the new overtime law.
YOU had bargaining power because you had six offers. Maybe this is news to you, but not everyone gets six offers for every job. Talk to an autoworker in the Midwest or a construction worker on the West Coast.
The kind of shit that needs to be stopped is whiny, bitching, lazy bastards complaining about every little thing they don't like. This is why god (aka, man) invented the firing squad. To rid ourselves of people who think that companies not wanting to pay over time is "EXACTLY the kind of crap that needs to be stopped."
Yeah! Whiny, bitching, lazy bastards got rid of child labor, instituted the 40 hour work week, the minimum wage, made employers pay attention to worker safety and implemented Social Security.
Let's go back to kids working 50 hour weeks for less than minimum wage, while getting their arms chopped off in smoky factories. If they don't like it, we'll put 'em in front of the firing squad!
You would make a GREAT Secretary of Labor in the Bush Administration.
A strongly competitive market ensures that people will be able to find a new job.
What about the shit job market we're in right now?
Maybe what's cheaper isn't always what's best for the company. It certainly isn't what's best for the employees.
You have five people who work from 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM every day of their work lives. They leave home at 7:30 AM and get back at 7:30 PM. That leaves 2 to 2.5 hours for their kids and maybe another 1/2 hour to an hour with their spouse. They still have all the issues of modern life - shopping, cooking, eating, paying bills, cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, laundry, etc. And they have a couple hours per night to do all that and spend time with their family.
So yes, your company might save a couple bucks by working five people an extra 10 hours per week. Heck, you can make them exempt and not pay them an extra cent. Maybe you'll be lucky and get five workaholics that don't care about being home or seeing their families. It's more likely that you're going to burn people out, piss them off and have them quit.
Or you can bite the bullet - knowing that you've got at least 10 hours of work per week, hire another person, and have a chance at a healthy, happy workforce.
Nah, screw that. People are an infinite resource to be exploited and discarded to make YOU more money.
Funny...I've worked as a salaried employee for 10-ish years, and I've never seen a manager who was reasonable about grabbing an afternoon off - unless you use PTO.
What? Your insinuation seems to be that unions led to the outsourcing of the steel and auto industries. There are no IT unions. Now go call Dell/HP/Microsoft/Symantec tech support. I'll wait. Outsourcing has nothing to do with unions.
It's funny - I've never known a company who *didn't* do it the way you describe. In other words, almost every place I've ever worked, salaried employees were expected a regular, 40 hour per week schedule, plus overtime. Any time off at all was deducted from PTO - period. EVERY company has it both ways with salaried employees.
And $70 to $80 grand is shit money for a Network Engineer in Silicon Valley. Try finding a decent place to live for less than $750,000 within 30 miles of Cupertino.
Just because they pay what *you* think is a decent amount of money doesn't give an employer the right to withhold pay for extra work. A lot of cities don't actually, you know, HAVE any other jobs. Is your position that we should let companies screw employees out of pay because the economy is bad?
Mod parent up. The whole problem is being expected to work 40 hours per week while not being paid a penny extra for overtime or on call work. In 12 years in IT, I have known precisely ONE salaried employee who was allowed to work less than 40 hours per week without time being deducted from her pay. ONE.
Thank you for the end of that post. It really seemed like you were building to the argument that filling out a timesheet is somehow worse than working 60 hours and getting paid for 40.
The problem with "exempt" work is that most companies expect you to work 50-60 hours per week, be on call AND be in the office at 8:00 AM every day "in case something comes up." If the "solution" is "get another job" try picking your head up out of the IT jobs paradise that is the Bay Area and look at Craigslist jobs in places like Cleveland or Sacramento. Other IT jobs don't exist.
The simple solution is that if you work, you should get paid. Period. Exemptions are an excuse to make you work for free.
Anyone else see the irony in putting ANY sort of remote control system in airplanes after the series premiere of the Lone Gunmen had terrorists remote controlling an airliner and trying to crash it into the World Trade Center? Security will be no problem at all, because it's not like people have been able to hack into the Pentagon or Congress or anything. Remote controlling airplanes is just a really, really supergreat idea.
Wow - there are lots and lots of ridiculously complex solutions here. I'm assuming this is a one time data transfer. How about this:
1. Make a copy of the database
2. Encrypt it with PGP Disk or TrueCrypt.
3. Put it on a DVD, Flash or external hard drive.
4. Meet the consultant, hand the data to her and tell her the password. Alternatively, courier the DVD/flash drive to the consultant and give her the password over the phone.
I'm assuming you can identify person and there isn't going to be some movie plot threat involving imposters who assume the consultant's identity by getting her face surgically attached to theirs in an effort to steal your data.
Don't make it more difficult than it needs to be.
Appriver's spam filtering service (AppRiver.com) is your best friend. A couple reasons it's great:
* AppRiver's spam filtering is extremely accurate - in the very high 90's.
* AppRiver is a hosted service, so there is nothing to install, maintain or upgrade on your mail servers. As I recall, they went down for a total of an hour in two years of using them.
* AppRiver pushes the spam message reading from you to the users. Every day, each user gets a single message from AppRiver listing all the spam it's caught in he last 24 hours. If the users find a good message, they click a resend link in the message and it's resent to their mailbox. They also have the option of requesting (with your approval) that all mail from a recipient be allowed through.
I worked with a 40 user company with e-mail addresses published on the web and I spent less than an hour a month working on spam filtering. I don't remember specific pricing, but I want to say it was $20 per user per year or less.
I'm not affiliated with them - just a happy customer.
And in a month the guy would have had a 3G iPhone he could have tethered to easily and automatically via Bluetooth. He should have waited.
You should check out http://rockettheme.com/ and http://joomlashack.com/ Joomla templates. Their templates look great and are easy to modify for your purposes. Plus, they're a lot cheaper than hiring a pro or putting out a mediocre design. Joomla is relatively easy to learn and customize.
Groove is Windows only, but works really well for sharing files among a small number of mobile workers and backing up individual laptop documents directories.
I currently have about 20 almost completely non-technical, 100% mobile workers using Groove to backup their data to my local server. To do this: setup a copy of Groove on the server and then setup a file sharing workspace in each person's personal drive. Setup Groove on each laptop and create a single directory where they'll store their documents. From the server's Groove install, invite each individual to their workspace and choose their documents directory as the sync folder. (I found it easier to do it for them, since it's a one time thing.)
What you'll end up with is a copy of Groove running on the server with 20 (or whatever) file sharing workspaces - one for each user. As you've read, when users have an Internet connection, changes will synch automatically. Groove passes through VPN, NAT firewalls, etc. so there's no need to open ports anywhere.
You can also create a file sharing workspace and share it among several different users. Synchronization is quick since it only sends document changes. It's also very reliable.
Now the caveats, issues, etc. /console" when the console is already logged on). Basically, when you're already logged on to the console and you logon to a second, non-console RDP connection, Windows tries to load a second instance of the process. This crashes Groove 3.1. Not sure about Groove 2007.
* Groove will not sync PST files, so I strongly discourage their use.
* Groove runs at logon, which slows down the boot time of PCs. Users on slower laptops (Pentium M 1.4 Ghz and below) notice the slowdown.
* The more data you sync with Groove, the slower it gets. Synching 500 MB or less in a workspace is generally OK, but approaching 1 GB may slow things down noticeably unless you're on a dual core PC with lots of RAM. I encourage people to only put documents in their synch folder they actually need to backup, as opposed to 20 copies of the same PDF they already have as an e-mail attachment.
* Groove 3.1 does not run as a service. I believe this is the same with Groove 2007, but I'm not sure. I have to leave it running on my server console and lock the server.
* I'm using Groove 3.1, which has been really reliable for 18 months. However, I've started to experience some instability on the server side over the last several months. When the app crashes on the server, I restart it and everything continues as normal. Laptop users almost never have stability problems.
* Groove will crash if you're running it on your server console and you logon with the same username to a non-console RDP session (Using mstsc.exe, as opposed to "mstsc.exe
* Don't synch the user's "My Documents" directory. It contains the "My Music" directory, which is where iTunes stores music. I guarantee you'll have problems with file/workspace sizes if someone tries to synch their iTunes music.
* When you install Groove on the server, put the Groove User data and System data folders on a drive with lots of space. If someone mistakenly synchs their music or photo collection, the Groove system data will fill up your C:\ drive. (The Groove user data and system data folders are application folders where Groove stores its internal data, not to be confused with the actual workspace folders.)
* Grooveclean will cancel a pending sync set, which you'll need if a user synchs an ungodly amount of data. (This has happened to me several times).
Groove is Windows only, but works really well for sharing files among a small number of mobile workers and backing up individual laptop documents directories. I currently have about 20 almost completely non-technical, 100% mobile workers successfully using Groove to backup their data to my local server. To do this: setup a copy of Groove on the server and then setup a file sharing workspace in each person's personal drive. Setup Groove on each laptop and create a single directory where they'll store their documents. From the server's Groove install, invite each individual to their workspace and choose their documents directory as the sync folder. (I found it easier to do it for them, since it's a one time thing.) What you'll end up with is a copy of Groove running on the server with 20 (or whatever) file sharing workspaces - one for each user. As you've read, when users have an Internet connection, changes will synch automatically. Groove passes through VPN, NAT firewalls, etc. so there's no need to open ports anywhere. The documents on the server are synched copies, so they're just regular documents that can be opened, backed up, etc. You can also create a file sharing workspace and share it among several different users. Synchronization is quick since it only sends document changes. It's also very reliable. Now the caveats, issues, etc. * Groove will not sync PST files, so I strongly discourage their use. * Groove runs at logon, which slows down the boot time of PCs. Users on slower laptops (Pentium M 1.4 Ghz and below) notice the slowdown. * The more data you sync with Groove, the slower it gets. Synching 500 MB or less in a workspace is generally OK, but approaching 1 GB may slow things down noticeably unless you're on a dual core PC with lots of RAM. I encourage people to only put documents in their synch folder they actually need to backup, as opposed to 20 copies of the same PDF they already have as an e-mail attachment. * Groove 3.1 does not run as a service. I believe this is the same with Groove 2007, but I'm not sure. I have to leave it running on my server console and lock the server. * I'm using Groove 3.1, which has been really reliable for 18 months. However, I've started to experience some instability on the server side over the last several months. When the app crashes on the server, I restart it and everything continues as normal. Laptop users almost never have stability problems. * Groove will crash if you're running it on your server console and you logon with the same username to a non-console RDP session (Using mstsc.exe, as opposed to "mstsc.exe /console" when the console is already logged on). Basically, when you're already logged on to the console and you logon to a second, non-console RDP connection, Windows tries to load a second instance of the process. This crashes Groove 3.1. Not sure about Groove 2007.
* Don't synch the user's "My Documents" directory. It contains the "My Music" directory, which is where iTunes stores music. I guarantee you'll have problems with file/workspace sizes if someone tries to synch their iTunes music.
* When you install Groove on the server, put the Groove User data and System data folders on a drive with lots of space. If someone mistakenly synchs their music or photo collection, the Groove system data will fill up your C:\ drive. (The Groove user data and system data folders are application folders where Groove stores its internal data, not to be confused with the actual workspace folders.)
* Grooveclean will cancel a pending sync set, which you'll need if a user synchs an ungodly amount of data. (This has happened to me several times).
* When you get past 20 workspaces, all synching a large amount of data, you may be past what Groove is designed to do.
I'm also lobbyist - with the North American Pro-Obesity, Chocolate Loving Candy Manufacturers Association and we paid good money to have this bill passed so that Halloween will have an extra hour of daylight this year.
Record profits this year, my friend, record profits. You should have invested in manufacturers of chocolate, bon-bons and candy-bars.
So every user-created political ad on the Internet MUST have had something to do with the campaign it supports? Unlikely.
And really, I thought the ad didn't come close to living up to its hype. What's next? People getting all excited about a Fark photoshop contest of Chris Dodd?
You are less and less necessary every passing day, as the average employee picks up more and more computer skills.
Hmm...satire, or someone who's never worked with end-users? Tough call.
You can't outsource security [e.g. oh look google is so much better at keeping our documents secure] any more than you can outsource responsibility.
Sure you can. There have been close to a dozen zero-day Microsoft Office vulnerabilities over the last year. These vulnerabilities are bring used to exploit machines and turn them into spam or Denial of Service bots. To combat this, you've got to roll out 3-4 Microsoft Office updates to every machine in your enterprise every month. No matter how efficient you are, there is a huge labor cost associated with running these updates. The chance of Office being hacked is infinitely higher than the chance of Google being hacked, and you'll never have to deploy a Google Office update to thousands of machines on a short time frame.
Why isn't this guy simply looking at Open Office, or hell the other free tools like AbiWord, Gnumeric, etc.
Because these are fat clients. You save on licensing costs, but not on deployment, maintenance or updates.
Not only are the google versions of the tools not nearly feature complete, but they're over the internet. Thus guaranteed to be sucktastically slow (especially when a lot of people use it) and very likely insecure in the end (hint: gmail has already had a few goofs).
I agree that lack of features is a big problem. I also have little doubt that this will be addressed over time. Same thing with the speed issue. I don't think now is the time for a hosted office suite, but I'm willing to bet they'll be good enough in the next 2 years.
Also, if you're just going to use AJAX based web tools, what does it matter what OS you run?
It doesn't, which is why Linux would be a better choice than Windows (when running hosted apps) given that it's more secure and less expensive.