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Supporting Creative (Part 2)

When I first launched this blog, I pitched IT in the Advertising business as being unique. I also stated that much of that “uniqueness” was due to supporting Creative. Now that I’ve been writing this blog for several months, I’m beginning to wonder if the people we support are truly unique or not. The last time I discussed this topic, I also promised to talk about the differences between the typical IT person and the typical Creative person. I guess it’s time to take a crack at doing just that.

IT people and Creative generally don’t think alike, with IT people tending to be much more logical and Creatives being much more, well, Creative. I guess we could get into the whole right-brain, left-brained thing, but the bottom-line is that we tend to be different. Generally, this doesn’t cause many problems, and in fact we seem to work pretty well together.

There are many users in Creative who just don’t have that troubleshooting mentality when they encounter an issue. A simple example - when a document doesn’t print, try printing a different document, or try using a different printer. Over the years, we’ve found that many of our Creative users do catch on to these relatively simple troubleshooting steps we ask them to take, and now many of them have already tried these things before calling us. The part of this I wrestle with the most is whether they’re really any different from any other department we support in this respect.

However, I do think there are definitely IT types who don’t thrive in this environment. I’ve had IT guys over the years who are outstanding in what they do, but who just don’t have the personality to survive in this particular business. The problem comes when we try to hard down to lock things down, and to force too much structure on our users. It’s probably a whole lot easier to do in a financial environment. I can think of one IT person who struggled in our environment, and who is now thriving in an engineering company.

I’ve also found that you can find ways around the personality issues, but it’s only when you have options available to you because you’re growing. One of the things we’ve done in the past is to move folks who don’t thrive in the desktop support role into backroom IT roles as Systems Administrators. Keep them in the server room where they have less interaction with the end-users.

When I think about supporting Creative due to the personalities involved, I’m just not sure they are all that different from Account Service or other non-Creative departments. I keep coming back to the bigger issues and differences stemming from supporting Creative, and that’s the Mac-PC thing, and the file sizes they routinely deal with. Those issues outweigh by far any personality-type differences

Apple’s Acceptance by Corporate IT

As I mentioned in my previous post regarding the iPhone, the level of general buzz surrounding Apple really seems to be at an all-time high. At the same time, Microsoft seems to be hitting all-time lows with the news stories we’re currently seeing about Vista and Windows 7. As a result, I think we’re going to see some significant inroads by Apple into mainstream IT over the next couple of years, and their market share is going to continue to increase until something changes. I’m just not sure that I see anything significant changing in the near term, so it’s going to be interesting seeing just how large that market share will become.

I think the biggest issue facing Apple is going to be how they handle this growth and whatever inroads they do make into corporate IT. A good example of what I’m talking about is a tool such as Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager. This is comprehensive tool for the deployment, management, and updating of systems across our network. It’s a great tool. Other than some 3^rd party tools, Apple has no equivalent product, but these are the types of tools we need in a corporate IT infrastructure. I realize that 3^rd party tools can fill this void, but the problem with them is that they can breakdown when the systems they support are upgraded. I’ve seen this happen over and over again in both the Microsoft and Apple worlds. It makes sense to me to use Microsoft support tools to support Microsoft OS’s, and it would make just as much sense to use Apple tools to support Apple OS’s.

I suppose we can go with 3^rd party tools in the interim, but I think this is an area which Apple needs to address. If they don’t they’re simply going to reach a point where they’re not going to gain significant ground into corporate IT. Adding Activesync to the iPhone is certainly a step in the right direction in terms of providing this type of support. It will be interesting to see what, if any, tools might begin to appear for desktop and server support.

iPhone Mania

Holy cow! Is anyone else’s e-mail inbox filling up with news items about the imminent changes to the iPhone? Before Noon today, I received 4 different news articles and newsletters featuring headlines and stories about the upcoming announcements which are still a week away. I can hardly wait for next Monday afternoon to see what the actual announcement itself will bring. The buzz Apple manages to create surrounding their product announcements is truly something to be admired.

Yes, I do think the iPhone will make some significant inroads into corporate IT as a result of the upcoming changes, chief among them the addition of 3G and Activesync. We’ve already got between 5-10 employees with iPhones, and they’re already using them to hit Exchange via Outlook Web Access. For us, connecting them via Activesync makes a lot more sense, and it should add some significant security features such as the ability to perform a remote wipe. However, we are an ad agency, so what makes sense for us might not make quite as much sense for other industries.

Frankly, it will be much more interesting to see what happens in those other industries. Will corporate IT be as willing to accept iPhones on their systems? I’m guessing they won’t be as receptive as we are, but I’m also well aware of how difficult it is to say no to the CEO.

Virtualizing the Ad Agency

Virtualization seems to have taken the IT world by storm, and those of us in the Advertising business are along for the ride. I’ve been playing around with virtualization myself for over a year now, and I only see this becoming a bigger part of our business in the future.

It starts at the desktop level, where personally I’ve been running VMware’s Workstation product on my personal laptop. I’ve been running Vista for over a year now, and during that time Workstation has provided me with a convenient copy of XP for those apps which didn’t behave on Vista. The reason I ultimately chose VMware’s product over Microsoft’s desktop virtualization was that it included support for USB devices.

Even more important for those of us in the Agency business at a desktop level, are the possibilities for desktop virtualization the Mac side. Once again, we’ve opted to go with VMware’s Fusion product on our Intel-based Macs. We’re currently struggling with two problems on our Macs which have proven difficult to solve. We’re not huge fans of Microsoft Entourage as an e-mail client, and I could probably devote an entire rant to Microsoft’s decision to drop support for Outlook on the Mac side. We’re also experiencing problems with Mac access to our SharePoint sites. SharePoint works with Safari and Firefox, but as one would expect with a Microsoft app, it works much better with Internet Explorer. We’re hoping that both problems will be solved by actually providing our Mac users with access to Outlook and IE through VMware’s Fusion and a local copy of Windows on their machines.

On the server side, we took the plunge into VMware last year, purchasing ESX Server. We’ve gone fairly slowly in terms of virtualizing our infrastructure, but we’re currently running a SharePoint server, two utility servers, and two development servers as VMs, and we’ve become totally sold on the technology. As a result, we’ve added a second box in order to utilize Virtual Center to aid in the management and to provide load balancing. We’ve also added shared storage via our EqualLogic iSCSI SAN. It all works great, and the possibilities it provides us are endless. If there is a downside, this stuff is expensive, and VMware’s product line and licensing are pretty confusing, and that could give them a problem down the road as Microsoft’s Hyper-V product continues to mature.

We’ve got big plans for virtualization in our Agency. In addition to what we’re doing already, we’re considering virtualization for both high availability and disaster recovery. While we’ve been warned not to virtualize some things, such as domain controllers, Exchange server, and SQL server, we do feel that we can employ a virtual copy in a high-availability or disaster scenario, especially in cases where we maintain the data on a separate platform. We’re also going to explore the possibility of creating a “remote office in a box”, providing us with a quick solution which we could use in acquisitions or the opening of new offices. Our remote offices require a fairly basic setup, and it’s one which we think could be completely virtualized.

We’re going to continue on the path to virtualizing both our servers and desktops. We’ll also be taking a long look at Microsoft’s Hyper-V product. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Supporting Creative

This is another of those interesting issues I mentioned in my first post, and one that I argued makes our industry unique from an IT perspective. Today, I’d like to discuss some of the issues which surround the support of a large Creative contingent.

While I’d like to keep the discussion centered mostly on the people and work, I do think it is worth mentioning that part of the discussion also relates once again to the PC vs. Mac thing. Since the Creative users are all on the Macintosh platforms, they sometimes perceive that IT support is more geared towards the PC side of the house. Because the size of our company dictates that our IT personnel be “jack-of-all-trades”, we’ve never really had the luxury of hiring pure Mac support specialists. We also haven’t ignored the Mac in our hiring of support personnel. Of the 5 people working for me today, 2 of them came from publishing backgrounds where they actually performed Mac support. We also made a point of sending one of our most recent hires off to the remote office he now supports with a Mac PowerBook under his arm. Even though he wasn’t a Mac guy, the users in that office took it as a very good sign that he was willing and able to support the Mac platform. It took them a while to realize that he was spending a lot of his time on a Vista virtual machine running on Parallels, and in the meantime he actually did learn to support the Macs. Gaining the trust of the Creative users is paramount in supporting them, and actually having Macs on our support people’s desk goes a long ways in building that support. One of the big problems in supporting Macs is finding qualified people. Windows support people are a dime a dozen, and it can be difficult finding good Mac support people who are also willing and able to support the PC.

Another side of this issue which I’ve become more sensitive lately is the perception that IT hates the Mac. I’ll be the first to admit that we have some very entertaining discussions/debates amongst our IT staff regarding the PC vs. Mac battle, but unfortunately some of these debates have spilled over into our discussions with the Creative employees. When I started hearing from Creative that “IT hates the Mac”, I decided it was time to talk to my personnel, and to ask them to be careful what they said. That’s not necessarily an easy thing to ask – it’s a little too much thought control for my liking, but I felt that we needed to be careful about the perception we were creating. The funny thing about this is what the Creative staff isn’t hearing. Those internal IT discussions are just as frequently gripe sessions about Microsoft as they are about Apple, but our Mac users never hear us having those discussions. One of the nice things about having a larger staff of IT people, is that we get an opportunity to discuss these things amongst ourselves. This is one of the things mentioned most frequently when we’ve acquired new offices with existing IT personnel. Typically, these IT people were the only one in their office, and they never had anyone else who truly understood some of the issues we face. Finally being able to discuss some of these things with their peers is a big deal to them.

Obviously there’s more to supporting Creative than just the Mac vs. PC issue. The potential clash between the typical IT personality and the typical Creative personality is probably the single biggest issue, but I’ll leave that one for another day.

The Mac is a Wonderful (and Secure) Platform

I’ve already received one e-mail from a reader pointing me to a blog post refuting the claims of security issues with the Mac . I suppose I should take some consolation in the fact that I’m not getting slammed harder for my first Mac vs. PC post, but I also think the above post helps point out the bigger issue. The argument has become so heated, that sometimes even the good points tend to get lost in the extreme spirit of the debate.

First of all, let me begin by saying that I’m not a security expert. Please refer to my first post for a better understanding of the realities of what I do. At this level of IT, we have to be something of a jack-of-all-trades, and I probably know just enough about security to be dangerous, but the same can probably be said about a lot of specialized IT subject matters. We know enough to get by. In my case, that knowledge has been good enough to get me through 15 years in this job without suffering from any major system outages or downtime to virus outbreaks. I think we’ve done a pretty good job so far, but I’m also not naïve enough to think that any of my systems are invulnerable, and I would never make that claim.

I had misgivings about going “negative” in last week’s post about Mac vs. PC, and in hindsight perhaps the article about the Macbook Air hack deserves greater scrutiny. I’m going to try to avoid this trap in the future. I think there are plenty of positive reasons to choose both platforms. The Mac is undoubtedly a very secure platform, and it’s become even more so in recent versions of OS-X. The fact of the matter is I don’t lose a lot of sleep worrying about my Macs getting hacked. However, is there really anything wrong with pointing out flaws where they do exist, and perhaps letting Apple know that for those of out here in the trenches – security does matter?

Should the negatives come into play in this discussion? Certainly they should. Any time we make a big decision in IT we try to weigh the pros and cons of several options, so the negative factors are something we must consider. The problem with being negative in this discussion is that you’re immediately perceived by the other side to be a “basher”. I can assure you that is not the case with me.

My bigger point in terms of the Mac vs. PC debate is that the argument itself has become too bitter. Case in point being the article at the top of this post – the writer is obviously a big fan of the Mac platform, and I certainly have no issue with anyone having that opinion. However, when you start writing about the “prejudices of an idiot public” and “Microsoft’s criminal actions against its customers”, you run the risk of losing me. I’m simply not willing to go that far in supporting either platform, and personally I think it’s going too far. I also think it’s too bad, because the article itself makes some genuinely good arguments, but when the author goes over that edge into what I’d call extremism, sometimes those good arguments tend to get lost on me.

There are some things I would like to see both Microsoft and Apple do differently. For now, out of fear of inciting either group I’ll avoid those topics. I will save them for a rainy day, because I do think those topics are worthy of discussion.

I’ll say it again. I have plenty of good reasons for purchasing Macs. I have plenty of good reasons for purchasing PCs. Perhaps outlining those reasons would make good topics for my next couple of posts.

Mac vs. PC - Round 1

It’s about time that I got around to this one, and if any of you have been wondering which side of the argument I might come down on, you might be disappointed to find out that I sit firmly on the fence on this issue. I’m a firm believer that both platforms deliver on their particular strengths, and both are outstanding tools which are helping us all to become more productive. If I didn’t believe that, why on earth would I have spent the past 15 years purchasing and supporting both platforms?

However, don’t mistake my middle of the road stance for a lack of conviction, because I do have some very strong feelings about the issue itself - in fact, I have a huge problem with the argument itself. I’ve never seen a real definitive study of our industry, but I would suspect that somewhere around 75% of advertising firms operate the same way that we do, supporting both platforms. Of the remaining 25%, I would venture to guess that the majority are Mac-only shops, with a small handful of PC-only shops.

I’ve heard all the arguments. “The Mac is a toy.” “PC’s crash all the time.” Take your pick, because you can find plenty of people out there willing to scream that their favorite system is the best, and the other system is garbage.

The latest round of Mac ads certainly don’t help, and I cringe every time I see them. Yes, they’re clever. Yes, they sell computers. But are they accurate? In my opinion they’re not even close to the truth. Apple, as well as most of the Mac evangelists, are still making arguments against Windows 98. Sure, they talk about Vista in the ads, but if you want to discuss stability and security, it’s difficult to deny that Windows has improved considerably.

I’ve been running Windows servers for over 10 years, going all the way back to Windows NT. The platform has been remarkably stable. Have I seen blue screens - certainly I have, but they have been few and far between. I have Windows servers which have run for years without anything other than a reboot for updates. At the same time, I’ve also seen plenty of my Macs crash - perhaps even more frequently than our PCs. I’ve heard the argument that the reason our Macs crash is because they’re working harder than our PCs. It’s not easy pushing around all those graphics files. No, it’s not, but by the same token it’s not easy doing what an Exchange server does - and they don’t crash. Earlier versions of Windows have been full of security holes, but here’s an interesting article on Mac security which appeared today - http://www.crn.com/hardware/207000418.

Even in writing this, and attempting to defend one platform, I find myself falling into the trap of bashing the other. That’s not my intent, but it’s nearly impossible to avoid the trap. The Mac has proven to be a superior machine for working in a graphics intensive environment. I’ve seen the benchmarks, and these machines truly are tuned for doing what they do best. I would not even begin to entertain the thought of switching.

I buy Macs. I buy PCs. I take the attacks from both sides personally. If the Mac side is correct, then I must be foolish for purchasing PCs. If the PC side is correct, then I must be foolish for purchasing Macs. The fact of the matter is, both sides are wrong. Both platforms serve their purpose, and they serve it well. I woudn’t even compare this argument to Ford vs. Chevy. It’s more like arguing that sports cars are better than pickup trucks. They serve different purposes, and they both do their job well.

I’m sure I’ll return to this topic again and again, and I welcome your opinions no matter where you sit on the issue. I’m going to try to take the high road and avoid bashing one platform in defense of the other, but I also plan to speak openly about the shortfalls of both systems. We’ll see how it goes.

Office (and File) Moves – Part 2

Perhaps the single biggest issue we encountered during our office move last weekend had more to do with moving files than it did with bringing a new office onto our network. Furthermore, this particular issue was one which we’ve encountered before, and it was also one for which we didn’t have a readily available solution. In a nutshell, we ran into major problems attempting to move or copy Mac files from a UNIX server onto our new network and a Windows server.

I’ve run into this problem in the past, and it’s never fun. The problem lies with the ability of Macs to use characters not allowed by Windows, characters such as the slashes, bullets, and parentheses. When you run into hundreds or perhaps thousands of filenames extending deep into many levels of subfolders, it’s not an easy thing to clean up. Attempting to move or copy the files from one platform to the other results in either failure or truncation of the original filenames, neither of which is an acceptable outcome.

In our company, I’ve been lucky enough to have a Studio Department which has recognized this issue and taken steps to correct it. When IT has attempted to police this problem in the past, we’ve met with limited success. When the policing effort comes from within, as is the case with our Studio Department which is made up of hardcore Mac users, the other users tend to listen. As a result, we’ve pretty much eradicated the odd characters internally, and this hasn’t been a huge issue for us – which may also be the reason I didn’t think of it prior to this move.

What I wish I had done was send our Studio folks in ahead of our move to explain our internal processes, especially regarding the file naming conventions, and to encourage a general cleanup of files prior to our move. If we had done this, we would have had about 30 days to prepare, and we could have at least had the current jobs named correctly and ready to move onto our new systems. The solution we ultimately came up with involved maintaining the old network, connecting their old server to a Mac and a PC in a common area. We asked the users to do the cleanup of the filenames, and then utilized USB flash sticks to move the files onto the new network.

In any case, it was a valuable lesson re-learned, and just another one of those issues we can sometimes take for granted when we live in a cross-platform environment.