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What do you guys use for team chat and project planning? I'm suddenly going from a single senior admin do-it-all type, to having two employees under me. I'd like to start off on the right foot and get to using a means to track projects/to-do-lists, as well as chat as we're a telework heavy office. Right now I'm leaning towards slack for chat/discussions, and asana for project planning (both being free really helps). Anything I'm missing with regard to options? Cheap/free is absurdly helpful due to our procurement process (not due to lack of money, mind you, just slowness with getting ahold of anything).
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Aug 31, 2015 01:08
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NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:That's weak.
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Aug 31, 2015 02:35
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Yeah, I don't really see any reason not to turn down people who want to use Macs in a Windows shop unless you use published apps or VDIs. That's basically unsupportable.
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Aug 31, 2015 05:27
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We acquired another financial institution that used all macs and it was a bit of a challenge to convert them. Luckily they only had two branches, so there were not a lot of people with any clout post acquisition. We just set them all up on boot camp to get them on windows. Believe it or not the hardest part was dealing with the examiners. Even though they booted exclusively into windows, we had to replace the computers because we couldn't prove we were patching macosx. It was dumb.
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Aug 31, 2015 05:51
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Walked posted:What do you guys use for team chat and project planning? a local devops group i'm part of uses slack and i have to say it's fantastic the free version limits the amount of integrations you can use, but the group got around that (sort of) by writing a bot to hang out in the slack and do stuff (parse urls, notify on meetups, etc)
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Aug 31, 2015 05:57
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Internet Explorer posted:Yeah, I don't really see any reason not to turn down people who want to use Macs in a Windows shop unless you use published apps or VDIs. That's basically unsupportable. As long as you clearly define where IT department support ends and user responsibility begins, having Macs in the environment isn't bad. These days you can run win7+office 2013 in a vm on a mac with barely any slowness, and of course published apps. If an employee has been using Mac their whole life and is going to be more productive on a Mac then they should have one IMHO. Just make sure they know they need to fix their own keychain.
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Aug 31, 2015 21:29
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NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:As long as you clearly define where IT department support ends and user responsibility begins, having Macs in the environment isn't bad. These days you can run win7+office 2013 in a vm on a mac with barely any slowness, and of course published apps. If an employee has been using Mac their whole life and is going to be more productive on a Mac then they should have one IMHO. Just make sure they know they need to fix their own keychain.
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Aug 31, 2015 23:42
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adorai posted:You are still required to patch the machines on your production network. A compromised mac is still going to be a hazard to the network. It needs to be on an untrusted vlan if you aren't supporting it. So patch it what's the problem? I feel like most patch management solutions can do OS X at this point. The RMM we use does, I know KACE and altiris do in theory...
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Sep 2, 2015 00:24
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or just tell special Mac snowflakes to get hosed this isnt hard
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Sep 2, 2015 02:07
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NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:So patch it what's the problem? I feel like most patch management solutions can do OS X at this point. The RMM we use does, I know KACE and altiris do in theory...
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Sep 2, 2015 02:35
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I'm OK with Macs if the business is totally cloud-based, web-based whatever and the endpoint literally doesn't matter. Teleworkers or a billion small offices all over the world using Google Apps, Dropbox, and Salesforce? Sure go loving nuts, as long as you don't bitch to me about anything. Setting up a Citrix server so that your users can use the Mac in the office as a loving dumb terminal to access a Windows environment (on a Citrix server also located in office) to use all-Windows business software (I'm not speaking in the hypothetical, I'm still trying to decomm this loving server after 5 years), is loving dumb as poo poo. Pants on head retarded, both from a user standpoint and financial standpoint, never mind the admin time wasted. In short, generally speaking, gently caress Macs unless you A) need special software that only runs on them or B) have a completely agnostic software environment i.e. web based.
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Sep 2, 2015 08:48
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but.... my user really needs this special software called boot camp IT ONLY RUNS ON MACS! (this was a legit request) 
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Sep 2, 2015 12:16
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I know I'm not a small shop admin, but wanted to stop in for Mac chat. I support about a dozen Mac users in the local office I cover. Dell business class machines running corporate windows images are fully supported. Mac's are allowed as long as they can: 1: Make a half assed business case for one, or be high enough up the chain it doesn't matter 2: Understand IT provides limited software support for Mac and ZERO hardware support. 2 notable Mac requests worth sharing in over 10 years of doing IT. The only 100% valid request I ever got was from a UI developer. A product we sell runs in a *nix environment and he needed Adobe whatever to do his job. Mac OSX was the easiest environment where he could use his Adobe products to do his job and rebuild/test our product. Request Approved, 4K+ Mac Pro tower purchased. (this was a while ago). The most ludicrous Mac request was from a Project Manager who lives in Visio and MS Project. He really wanted a Mac because he liked the way they looked and 'wanted to learn Macs'. I told him that Visio and Project are Windows only ordered him a nice Dell. Has anyone else noticed that the higher up the chain, and the more money someone makes the more they think the company should pay for stuff? We had a Sr. Exec who REFUSED to buy his own cell phone, even though we're BYOD and everyone else buys their own hardware.
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Sep 2, 2015 19:32
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To be fair if my employer aren't going to give me a phone then as far as they are concerned I don't have one. I'm going to carry a personal and a work iPhone for as long as I can't smoothly separate the work and personal poo poo on a single device.
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Sep 2, 2015 20:21
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Thanks Ants posted:To be fair if my employer aren't going to give me a phone then as far as they are concerned I don't have one. I installed Nine on my phone for my work Exchange account, and it simply doesn't sync outside of work hours unless I'm on call.
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Sep 2, 2015 20:29
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I was more getting at the phone part as I still get a lot of calls. I need control of routing to different voicemail boxes based on the number dialled etc. so I don't get work calls on my days off. I'm sure we will get there one day. It's the sort of thing I think a lot of people solve with Google Voice, but we don't have that here.
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Sep 2, 2015 20:37
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Man you guys really hate Macs. Except for skipdogg you're my bro.
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Sep 3, 2015 02:34
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Just took over an office. 15 servers, 50 users, and the subnet mask is 255.255.224.0. ugh. why. also I've had so many idiot problems because I keep typing 255.255.255.0 by mistake.
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Sep 3, 2015 02:37
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I really don't get the Mac hate here. Well, I mean I understand it, but what kills me is that we're supposed to be helping end users directly here and because this is the SMALL SHOP ADMIN THREAD, that usually means having to do stuff that you wouldn't otherwise have to deal with if you had a job at a >100 person company's IT Department. For example, I loving loath Apple. I hated dealing with their smarmy, uppity piece of poo poo sales & support people and hated when their overly complicated, under-ventilated over-priced iMacs ALWAYS had a part die to heat exhaustion. I hated having to call in to their stupid, loving bullshit corporate stores and make stupid loving appointments 3 days out just so that one of their genius retards could diagnose an obviously bad hard drive and tell me it would take 3 days to fix. But then I grew a pair, went on-line, looked at how loving easier their products are to disassemble, and literally made a 4 day turnaround job a 20 minute fix. So unless you're dealing with something you literally can't repair, saying that you provide ZERO hardware support to your users in a SMALL SHOP is basically telling your end users to go gently caress themselves. /rant McDeth fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Sep 3, 2015 |
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Sep 3, 2015 17:09
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McDeth posted:Ya, I really don't get the Mac hate here. Well, I mean I understand it, but what kills me is that we're supposed to be helping end users directly here and because this is the SMALL SHOP ADMIN THREAD, that usually means having to do stuff that you wouldn't otherwise have to deal with if you had a job at a >100 person company's IT Department. Normally I think its because in a small shop, you actually most of the time know all of your users or at least have a good idea which ones are the utter cunts that insist that a macbook pro loaded up with boot camp running a windows application is somehow "better" than a purpose built workstation. In almost all cases they are completely wrong, and just want to be "mac different" (the user in question wanted to run a program, optimized for pc that connects to sciency equipment with a RS232 port and ECP)
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Sep 3, 2015 17:19
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SneakyFrog posted:Normally I think its because in a small shop, you actually most of the time know all of your users or at least have a good idea which ones are the utter cunts that insist that a macbook pro loaded up with boot camp running a windows application is somehow "better" than a purpose built workstation. Ah, well gently caress him/her with a pointy cactus then. I guess I'm 'fortunate' in that the company I work for is 100% Mac and therefore purchases equipment and software with the caveat that it is 100% mac compatible.
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Sep 3, 2015 17:21
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I think the issue most of us have is that Apple doesn't give a poo poo about us. They don't offer any easy to use tools to manage macs in a small business (limited budget) domain. WSUS is my windows example of this, or just active directory in general, or group policy, or, well you get it. Buy windows server and you have all those tools at your disposal. Buy Mac server and you have a file server that can let your users use time machine if and when they want. They will frequently change and break things that are business essential with updates (which again, you can't easily manage), thinking about SMB protocol here. They flat out broke SMB2 a few versions back, and gently caress you if you had a Windows 2008 or older file server. Oh, you have a nice EMC nas? Too bad Finder can't index SMB or NFS shares. Hope you have a server to run Acronis Anyconnect to reshare your NAS as AFP. Mac users tend to take their computer to the Apple store without contacting IT first, which results in lost data and more work for IT. They also love to use odd ball 3rd party programs that are incompatible with anything else. I spent 5 hours yesterday converting Yojimbo files to OneNote after we fired someone. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in a small shop, dealing with macs is just a lot of added headache for higher priced machines that offer zero advantages over a Windows computer. Sorry, that went a bit ranty... Gerdalti fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Sep 3, 2015 |
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Sep 3, 2015 17:23
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McDeth posted:Ah, well gently caress him/her with a pointy cactus then Most of my primary users are extraordinarily entitled millennials. Example: My last new hire. My users work with huge 3D data sets and often have to demonstrate them in the field to customers, so they basically have to have a huge battery, a great screen, and sufficient horsepower to push eh... around 20 GB of xyz points and be able to visualize them SMOOTHLY. Hence most of my mobile workstations cost eh... around 4800-5200 each. These are pretty much standard issue for the field engineers. apparently they are utterly insufficient due to the lack of a 4k screen. On a 15 inch laptop. yes i know its "smoother" but loving hell. Sorry I'm bitter. Kid is barely out of school, rolls in 25-35 mins late every day, immediately goes to breakfast for half an hour, maybe puts in an hour before lunch, and spends more time in conversation than working. sigh... /personal rant over.
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Sep 3, 2015 17:31
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I love Macs. I work at a middle school that has a bring-your-own-technology program for the kids where the parents buy laptops or tablets and send them to school with the kid so they can use it for research and schoolwork. At the beginning of the year we set up everyone's machine that wasn't here last year. Macs invariably take about a third of the time to set up and require far fewer steps, which is insane because we use Microsoft services for pretty much everything. If every kid's parents bought them a Mac I would be the happiest of campers; unfortunately, not everyone is rolling in the dough so we get a lot more crummy $300 Windows laptops.
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Sep 3, 2015 17:31
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McDeth posted:I really don't get the Mac hate here. Well, I mean I understand it, but what kills me is that we're supposed to be helping end users directly here and because this is the SMALL SHOP ADMIN THREAD, that usually means having to do stuff that you wouldn't otherwise have to deal with if you had a job at a >100 person company's IT Department. when youre manpower and money limited as small shops are is it even more important to standardize on equipment and avoid special snowflakes like Macs
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Sep 3, 2015 17:37
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McDeth posted:So unless you're dealing with something you literally can't repair, saying that you provide ZERO hardware support to your users in a SMALL SHOP is basically telling your end users to go gently caress themselves. I want to respond to this, because I'm the guy that provides Zero hardware support to Mac users. I don't work in a small shop, but along with my normal tasks I provide local support to a small satellite office of about 50 people where there are quite a few Mac users which is somewhat like supporting a small shop. Dell, HP, Lenovo and other business orientated hardware sellers offer onsite support for their products. We buy ProSupport and Accident coverage. If a screen breaks, a motherboard dies, a hard drive fails they will either ship me the replacement part, or send a local technician to replace the part for me. If a 2 year old Dell battery dies, I just order a new one and plop it right in. Apple has no such offering. If someone wants a Mac the support options are call Apple Care on the phone and mail the entire laptop back to them for depot service, or make an appointment at the Apple Store, drive to the mall, wait around for a while and drop it off to be repaired and picked up who knows when. I'm not doing that. If they want the Mac, they can take time out of their day to deal with that bullshit if it comes up. I don't get paid to go to the Apple Store, it's a waste of my time. You can't even replace the battery on them yourself anymore and if they drop it, guess when they have to buy a new one out of their department budget. I don't feel this is telling my users to go gently caress themselves. It's giving them options. They can get a 100% IT supported Dell business class laptop of their choosing. We don't limit them to any particular configuration or model. It just has to be ProSupport eligible. I have folks that choose massive 17" Precision Workstations, and folks that have 12" Dell Ultrabooks, all comparable hardware wise to everything Apple offers. By doing so they get full IT support from hardware though application level issues. If they choose to get a Mac I don't support the hardware or underlying Mac OSX operating system. The Mac versions of our software applications are 'best effort' support. The user gets to make the choice, which I feel doesn't not qualify as telling folks to 'go gently caress themselves'. It's more of a "If you just have to be a unique snowflake, here are the conditions of using a Mac in our environment".
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Sep 3, 2015 17:50
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OK so this is exactly the point I was making originally - don't flat out say "no", clearly define what the expectations are from IT vs. expectations from the user, and let the user choose. If working on a Mac is going to make them more efficient then let them do that. As an IT admin it's not your job to decide what will make the user more efficient. You give recommendations based on your experiences and let the user decide. At least that's how it's been at most small orgs I've worked with. So for example IT responsibility * Software updates - the stuff like SMB breaking happened with a "major" release (like I think from 10.8 to 10.9). So IT dictates what you update to in that regard. Smaller updates control with RMM or get a Mac server if you have budget. * Hardware procurement - you buy it, order applecare for it etc. * Initial configuration - install admitmac/centrify if needed, office, vmware fusion + throw your windows image on there as a vm, antivirus, management tool, bind to domain * Network side stuff - I'd say best effort on making sure printer/MFPs are Mac compatible, file shares are accessible. User responsibility * Anything hardware related, on them. You can give them a loaner PC until they get their Mac to the mall to fix. * Anything that doesn't "just work" in Mac environment, on them. They have a Windows VM for stuff that requires Windows. * Obviously desktop-level backup falls on the user just as it would with Windows
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Sep 3, 2015 18:22
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skipdogg posted:12" Dell Ultrabooks supremacy
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Sep 3, 2015 18:23
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Ah, this make much more sense now. I didn't mean to call you out specifically, but as somebody who is in the unfortunate situation of HAVING to use Macs and nothing BUT Macs for my end users, I was having PTSD remembering back to my times of having to deal directly with Apple support. I envy you because it sounds as if you have a reasonable IT Policy. Our CEO has such a hard on for Steve Jobs and all things Apple that I literally have to vet any non-Apple purchase through him to make sure that it meets with Apple's "aesthetic look and feel." The only time I convinced him not to buy Apple was after we purchased 10x 27-Inch Apple Cinema displays and within 2 years 8 of them had bricked themselves. I guess being burned to the tune of $8,000 changes the way you feel about your idol. I went out and researched monitors and came back with the Dell Ultrasharp line of monitors. They are way cheaper than Apple, have a real warranty and are generally loving awesome. The purchase was denied. Why? Because they are Dell and Dell is cheap (his opinion). What he doesn't know is that our entire back end is built on Dell servers that have been 100% loving awesome and we've never had an issue with. If that doesn't exemplify working in a small shop then I don't know what does. #ITPTSD
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Sep 3, 2015 18:40
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McDeth posted:I literally have to vet any non-Apple purchase through him to make sure that it meets with Apple's "aesthetic look and feel." Holy loving poo poo. that honestly sounds like a level of hell below mine.
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Sep 3, 2015 18:42
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SneakyFrog posted:Holy loving poo poo. It's actually really easy; I just buy Apple for literally everything. Our IT "budget" has to be at least double that of an equivalent business as a result. Fortunately we're still pretty small (<50 employees) so I don't have to spend much time dealing with Apples bullshit. McDeth fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Sep 3, 2015 |
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Sep 3, 2015 18:54
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McDeth posted:It's actually really easy; I just buy Apple for literally everything. Our IT "budget" has to be at least double that of an equivalent business as a result. if you don't dress up like an apple tech support guy, start every sentence with "well.... Actually..." and wear outlandishly hip spectacles I will be very dissapointed.
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Sep 3, 2015 18:59
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SneakyFrog posted:if you don't dress up like an apple tech support guy, start every sentence with "well.... Actually..." and wear outlandishly hip spectacles I will be very dissapointed. I would punch my own face
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Sep 3, 2015 19:25
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Crossposted from the Enterprise Thread, but we are a small shop: Fuuuuuck I was hired a year ago as a sysadmin. The guy previous to me only was there a couple months, but he decided that everyone should have Windows 7 Enterprise since we had license keys for it in Microsoft VLSC. They installed Win7Ent on 60 workstations. We aren't even using any of the features. Now we are going through a Microsoft SAM audit and discovered we never had licenses for them. We are going through the process of downgrading all the workstations back to Pro, but Microsoft is telling us this: quote:You have indicated that this product would be removed. Uninstalling a product is not an approved means of gaining a compliant status. To remedy this shortfall an order must be made. Please place an order within the next 2-3 weeks. Are we stuck with buying $17K of Windows 7 Enterprise licenses? Should we get some legal experts involved or make a good faith effort to explain that a former employee made a huge mistake?
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Sep 3, 2015 20:53
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Just to let you know, microsoft doesn't care. You will be making a purchase. Now how much of a purchase is kinda what's in the air. Cultivate a decent relationship with your Microsoft contact and you may be able to lessen your pain. Best case use it as the biggest IT hammer in your arsenal against management for allowing noncompliance.
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Sep 3, 2015 21:03
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McDeth posted:I would punch my own face Thread title for any thread in this forum. I posted earlier about deploying O365. Where do I get the installers from? I can only find a bunch of cab files that are downloaded by the OCT, which are the 'click to run' variant.
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Sep 4, 2015 04:55
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I figured I might ask here because this one has me stumped. I'm working in an organisation with around 70 users and as many laptops. A few users are having issues because certain group policies are just not applied to certain workstations. It looks like the default polices at the root of the domain are visible but all user polices under an OU are invisible when the user logs into the machine. I've verified the user is in the correct OU and the machine is in it's correct OU, and when the user logs into another machine they get their policies just fine. Group Policy Modeling shows that the policies should be applied, but Group Policy Results shows they are totally ignored. They don't even show up in "Denied GPOs" Nothing shows up in the Event Logs and I get the same result no matter what DC is handing out the policies. Any ideas?
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Sep 4, 2015 06:30
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Swink posted:Thread title for any thread in this forum. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn782860.aspx Enterprise licensing only (e.g. I don't think you can do this on the Business plans).
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Sep 4, 2015 08:03
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frogbert posted:I figured I might ask here because this one has me stumped. Check the local machine policies, they are applied before the domain ones.
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Sep 4, 2015 13:10
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Swink posted:Thread title for any thread in this forum. Thanks Ants posted:https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn782860.aspx Nopers. You can do this for other versions. Swink you will want to use click to run. Here's what you do 1. download click to run http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36778 2. edit the xml file that's in there. then run it setup referencing the xml, once with /download to download to local path you specify, then once with /configure to actually install. Now since you are not using ProPlus you need to change the PRODUCT ID value. What do you change it to? Depends on what you have. Here's the reference: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2842297 So for example if you are on Business Premium, you need to use O365BusinessRetail. HOWEVER that won't install everything for you as a business premium user, because you also get Lync and Lync isn't part of O365 Business Retail install. So you would need a second product ID for lync. So your config file will look like this: code:That's all the config you do here. Everything else you manage over GPO. The other thing to note is this won't uninstall existing Office versions for you. So you'll need to make a script that uninstalls the old version of office, and then runs clicktorun. Dans Macabre fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Sep 4, 2015 |
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Sep 4, 2015 15:53
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