Consumer Tech: an IT Nightmare 533
snydeq writes "Advice Line's Bob Lewis discusses the difficulties IT faces in embracing the kinds of consumer technologies business users are demanding they support. 'Let's assume the consumerization of IT is the big trend many think it is. But using consumer tech in a business environment is a very different matter from being satisfied with consumer tech in a business environment. One of IT's legitimate gripes is that we're often asked to turn consumer-grade technology into business-grade technology with a wave of our magic wands. On top of the intrinsic technical challenges, there's this: IT doesn't have anything that even resembles a methodology for performing the business analysis we need to figure out what it means to put consumer tech to productive day-to-day use.'"
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Very True (Score:4, Informative)
Spending more for SLC vs MLC? sure. Ditto, for the network gear. But don't kid yourself... "enterprise" drives are no less failure-prone than their Best Buy Brethren. Nowadays, they're *all* crap.
Really? With Seagate Barracuda LP drives I had a 95% failure rate within a year. (Different batches of drives in different servers in different data centers, FYI.) With Seagate Constellation ES I've seen 5%. Now granted, the "enterprise" drives shouldn't even have that high of a failure rate, but they are a LOT better.
Re:Not many people want you to support consumer te (Score:3, Informative)
Why do I have to support your purchase?
You're asking why you have to do your job?
Re:Not many people want you to support consumer te (Score:5, Informative)
iPhones fully support exchange activesync, with remote wipe and everything.
In the mail settings, you add an account, and tap the first mail type in the list "Exchange"
Feed it your email address, then password. Done.
It uses the encrypted outlook web api (Same as the web app in a browser would over https) so works on the internal wifi as well as outside on 3G.
Employees are warned about the remote wipe feature, both in the employee handbook and directly when I'm asked if they can get their mail on their phone.
Users can even log in to web mail and perform the remote wipe and remote password reset features on their own, including from home, and most importantly whenever they need it.
Otherwise it has been one of the more simple non-windows devices I've had to support on a windows network. :P
I come from a Linux/Mac background as well, which doesn't translate the best to running a windows domain. I'm the reverse equivlant of the ditsy windows admin installing x11 and gnome on all the servers so he can remote admin them
The less I have to do to dig deeper into the windows world, the better.
Most android devices are basically as easy, but usually also ask for a username instead of extracting it from the email address for the first try.
Only two people with android ever had mail problems, both solved by removing and re-adding the mail server entry.
I'm just thankful the CEO is no longer using that blackberry... BES was hell!
Re:Can't say i'm suprised (Score:4, Informative)
Then your exchange servers are broken or your IT shop is clueless. iOS uses ActiveSync, which is designed to connected to Exchange servers (it's licensed from Microsoft). Of any Microsoft products, this has to be one of the easiest to configure and maintain that I've seen and that's saying a lot.
It's also completely worthless from a security standpoint. No encryption. You have to expose parts of your Exchange infrastructure to the Internet as well (Yes, you need to do that to do OWA over the Internet also). Since good security practices teach us that if you expose a system to the Internet, *eventually* you will get hacked.
Good For Exchange (GFE) at least provides on-board encryption for email/calendar/contacts, unlike ActiveSync. And you don't need to expose your servers to the Internet to provide services. Then again, GFE is crappy software.
Anyway, if you think ActiveSync is a viable solution then your corporate environment is either unconcerned or unaware of the serious security issues posed by it. Hmm...does that mean your IT people are clueless?
Re:Apple has jumped the shark (Score:5, Informative)
> Wow, how much do you have to pay for an Android developer licenses to do the same thing? $100. Shocking.
Try $0. Android owners don't have to play "Mother, May I?" with Apple and jump through hoops to run our own apps on our own phones. We can install our own .apk files anytime we feel like it. If you want to publish on Android Market, it's $25.
Re:Very True (Score:3, Informative)
the most common "failure" is due to how the drive firmware handles bad sectors
- a "enterprise" drive passes the bad sector info to the controller to allow it to remap and also use it as a predictive failure indicator.
- a "consumer" drive remaps internally and depending on the firmware it will try to recover the sector an in general hang/timeout on I/O while doing this
When a Raid controller sees the drive hang/timeout on I/O it is considered a "failed" drive. While people will argue that all it takes is a reset and the drive is good to go - it puts the array in a degraded state which puts data at risk and also reduces the array's performance - and don't forget to count the $in someones time dealing with it.