Expertise... (Not WoW)
There are, naturally, different levels of expertise when dealing with things like computers. I keep them working for a living, and I don't consider myself top of the heap by any means. What gets me, though, is the class of people who know just enough to be dangerous.
We have a handful at work. They're the people who espouse the virtues of non-Windows operating systems, not saying "well, I've really only worked with Macs," but rather "Linux/(other OS) is so superior and awesome and cleaner!" These people definitely know more than I do in some areas, as I work primarily with Windows. And yet, these are the same people who are most likely to break something. They start disabling services and tinkering with startup options. They install little monitoring programs and whatnot. All of these little tweaks make it twice as hard to diagnose a problem when they come and say something isn't working - which, for serious OS problems, seems to occur more often than with our regular users, many of whom would be hard pressed to change a registry key with written instructions.
Why oh why?
We have a handful at work. They're the people who espouse the virtues of non-Windows operating systems, not saying "well, I've really only worked with Macs," but rather "Linux/(other OS) is so superior and awesome and cleaner!" These people definitely know more than I do in some areas, as I work primarily with Windows. And yet, these are the same people who are most likely to break something. They start disabling services and tinkering with startup options. They install little monitoring programs and whatnot. All of these little tweaks make it twice as hard to diagnose a problem when they come and say something isn't working - which, for serious OS problems, seems to occur more often than with our regular users, many of whom would be hard pressed to change a registry key with written instructions.
Why oh why?
We took away admin rights from users and have a pretty strong policy about 'rogue' programs at my work.
ReplyDeleteSadly, the front-end system we use is made in such a way that it requires the logged in user to have admin rights on the computer in order to work. Cursory attempts to get around that have always failed. Some days, I wish I'd try harder at it (though changing the program's code itself is definitely beyond me, there might be some trick that would get around the permissions issue). On the other hand, our company-wide policies tend to be fairly lax. I'm not sure I could get away with making those changes even if I overcame the technical challenges with doing so.
ReplyDeleteWell that bites. A couple of times when we've had programs like that we resolve it in a couple different ways. First, if the program doesn't use the registry (kind of like how WoW is completely registry independent) and keeps all of its files in a particular folder, you can get away with granting the local 'users' group full file system rights to the applications folder and subfolders. Second, for systems that sprinkle files all over and/or have to have write access to the registry, we've had some success with using processmon (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx) to find and locate what files/reg keys a particular program is accessing, and thus give explicit write access to those files/keys. If as you said the culture is such that people would balk at not being able to at-will totally destroy their systems, thus wasting your time and the company money in lost productivity, then it may be a moot issue. I say this with all due sarcasm because I totally understand where you're coming from. In those cases I used to just keep notes and when my boss asked me 'hey why was John's PC down so much last month, his manager was complaining to me about how he's behind on his work because his PC is always down', I would just whip out the notes showing how he fubar'd his stuff on a regular basis. In lieu of direct evidence, pointing out that Stacey, who never installs anything because she's afraid to break her computer, has no problems... ever... you draw the conclusion. ;)
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