Monitoring
Granger, Willowcreek using Ops Manager. Also looking at System Center Essentials. Microsoft’s charity pricing list is available here.
Smartsync Pro – email Nick for link to cheap pricing. It’s a utility that copies all local changes to the network and vice versa – very reliable file synchronization. According to Nick, it’s much more reliable than offline files.
As IT staff, the tendency is to want to lock everything down and control it all. Dean Lisenby from ACS challenged everyone to remember who your customer is and what is the cost of locking things down so much that it can hinder ministry. Locking things down may save some IT staff time, but at what cost? Consider a case by case scenario. Most users at most represented churches & businesses are local admins (ours included).
Big discussion about free reign vs. locking users down. Very different opinions, and very few notes because this was a good discussion. Nick says that IT tends to lock down users based on unfounded fears.
Good notes, Brett!
I wrote a blog yesterday while in the Roundtable about whether or not to allow users to login locally as admins. The link is http://ministry-it.blogspot.com/2007/09/local-admin-or-not.html. Please weigh in!
Also, here’s the link to purchase SmartSyncPro for only $25/seat (the entire link is required to get the discounted price): http://www.regsoft.net/purchase.php3?productid=43241&pc=1671Y
Blessings!
Nick
On the lockdown issue, we’ve found that in most cases, when a user gets admin rights on the box, spyware contamination isn’t far behind. And when we find spyware contamination, it’s invariably because the user had admin rights.
Since we got the Sonicwall and its spyware filtering, the spyware problem seems to have been (generally) taken care of.