When IT screw up

[draco664]

Just started a new job. Yay me.

The job is interesting. Intriguing even. I've learned a lot in just 9 days.

But, since the IT help desk here have, shall we say, a laid back attitude, things that I am used to taking hours at my other workplaces take days here.

So, for the first week, I'm using my boss' login account.

Fine.

Seven days in, I finally get my own network id and password. The one ordered a week before I started. Yay.

I log in, and find that I have no access to anything. I can't even see the public folders on the network.

So I call up the help desk and ask to get access. Rather than ask me all the individual things I need access to, he asks for someone's login who has the access I need, so he can just put me in all the same groups.

Fine, I give him my boss' login. (She is replacing her boss, who left, and I'm replacing her, so I need all her access rights)

We are all shocked when just two days later, my boss got an email saying that the request had been processed.

Only, now she couldn't access anything on the network for some reason...

Yup.

[lordlundar]

The good news: they did as promised. you and your boss are in the same permissions group.

The bad news: they moved your boss to your group instead of the other way around, which cuts both of you off.

[Eric the Grey]

I don't know which to shake my head at more.

* The fact that they took YOUR word for what access you need, and not required something from your boss

or

* The fact that they got it all backwards.

Here, when someone want's access, their boss/manager has to make the request, fill out forms, etc...


Eric the Grey

[Der Cute]

Normally, when a person is created on Active Directory, there is a person to "copy" groups from.

If you're doing a secretarial/admin job, and replacing J Smith, common practice is to give you almost all of J Smith's access groups. (Sometimes a few are withheld; if J Smith has been there for 120934398 years, responsibility has accumulated and so has access.)

You should have had your login/pw by 2 days (max) after you started. (try doing this for a person who needs to be background/accredited aka doctor) There should be a specific, outlined, papertrailed process for this - liablility and over-awarding access is bad. You should never ever have been able to say I used my boss's login, and I need his equal access. (see cumulative access above).

I'd rather under-grant and have people request and be awarded, than over-grant and have to take stuff away (and hear pouts/stompy feet).

If the IT dept is this wonky, you best keep a paper trail to cover your butt.

Cutenoob

[Magpie]

I worked somewhere where I couldn't get access until my boss e-mailed in a request. The e-mail forced you to keep you inbox down to a certain size (can't remember, but it wasn't that large) by not letting you send any mail if you were over this size. My boss received drawings from contractors (and employees who didn't know how to use the shared folders properly) all the time, and was over this size limit not infrequently. He had just come back from vacation when I started... It was most of a week before he could send the request.

[Der Cute]

I worked somewhere where I couldn't get access until my boss e-mailed in a request. The e-mail forced you to keep you inbox down to a certain size (can't remember, but it wasn't that large) by not letting you send any mail if you were over this size. My boss received drawings from contractors (and employees who didn't know how to use the shared folders properly) all the time, and was over this size limit not infrequently. He had just come back from vacation when I started... It was most of a week before he could send the request.

Which is convoluted, but technically correct.

It sounds like IT had decided: Not enough storage available at the time for people OR WE're too cheap to buy more storage. This would result in severely limiting email box quotas/sizes.
It's also normal practice to NOT let people email if they're over limit. Otherwise who'd listen?

But, If IT didn't take into consideration the email/attachment size problem, that's stupid.
One way around it is to have FTP - file transfer protocol - portals. External clicks on portal address, uploads file to bucket, tells reciever person to go check bucket, ta-da!
This wouldn't overload Exchange server...but users don't like that technique.

[Daskinor]

We moved from a Exchange 2000 servers to a 2007 server because the mail storage limitations on exchange 2000. (16gigs) Not because exchange 2000 was slow and had no modern features, like active sync. So they scraped the money together for a new exchange server but denied our backup upgrade request. So while we have a virtually unlimited database size on the server. We still need to limit the mailbox size because we can not backup the database if it gets much larger.

Cutently we are using an ATI-3 tape library Native 100gb storage. They make arrays now that have more then 6tb native storage.

[Eric the Grey]

The e-mail forced you to keep you inbox down to a certain size (can't remember, but it wasn't that large) by not letting you send any mail if you were over this size.

We have that in place for most users, but those who have a need for more storage, like HD personnel, and managers/graphics department who get a lot of, or very large attachments have unlimited.

I still get calls every once in a while about people who cannot send or receive, and who have cleaned out their inbox, and still cannot send or receive. Most often, they just need to clean out their deleted items folder, other times, they have to clean out folders.

What makes things worse, our IT dept won't support external .pst files, and a lot of people have them set up on their P drives. They archive there so it all gets backed up, but often cannot connect to them when off site. All we can do is say, "oh well..."


Eric the Grey

[Chromatix]

Heck, I have a 2TB disk array in one of my *home* machines.

[Magpie]

Which is convoluted, but technically correct....

But, If IT didn't take into consideration the email/attachment size problem, that's stupid.
One way around it is to have FTP - file transfer protocol - portals. External clicks on portal address, uploads file to bucket, tells reciever person to go check bucket, ta-da!

See, I don't know if IT took it into consideration. I do know that project managers would e-mail me drawings, instead of using the large document repository (not sure what it was called). This might have been due to them telecommuting (their network connection wasn't up to the job, they used to call me to get me to pull drawings, because their network connection was slow, and I could check and verbally describe three or four in the time it would take them to open one). They would also e-mail me pictures that were already in our document management system, instead of just telling me which drawing they wanted. My supervisor was no better.