CIO

What’s the Plan?

Having just been through another merger, we’re just now beginning to see things settle down following a big move day last week. During 15 years in this business, I’ve been through about a dozen office moves, mergers, etc., Earlier this year, I had one of my new staff members ask me what the plan was for bringing his office online with the rest of our Agency, and I had to chuckle since it always seems as if we’re making up as we go along.

I certainly don’t enter into these things without a plan, but I honestly don’t think that any two of these moves have been the same. There are certain things surrounding moves which happen every time, but it seems like the differences far outweigh the similarities. For example, the biggest issues surrounding our move earlier this year involved telecommunications and actually turning up the connections between sites. In last week’s move, the single biggest issues involved the physical move itself. We actually had two moves to deal with, first an internal reshuffling of our offices, followed by the move-in of nearly 45 people a week later.

There are certain things you do for just about every office move, and I’d probably put communications at the top of the list. One of the keys is letting employees know what’s happening and when, whether it’s about who will actually be moving their computers to what their new phone number will be. We’ve also assembled a pretty good team of people who’ve been through this a few times, and that doesn’t hurt either.

Finally – flexibility is critical. You can’t get too hung up on that whole planning thing. As much as you may want to have a certain phase completed at a certain time, you had better be prepared for changes and schedules that slip. There are a lot of things surrounding moves which you can’t control, especially the vendors. Things will get delayed. You just deal with it. That’s part of the plan.

Let the Users Decide?

One of the more interesting ideas I’ve heard floated in a while is that of letting our users decide what platforms they use. The idea surfaced again here in an article about how Gen Y will change some of our institutions, including IT. It’s an interesting idea, and there are days when I feel like it’s already beginning to happen to those of us in the Advertising business. Perhaps we’re a good barometer for this particular trend.

For us, the trend is most apparent with regard to PDAs and Smartphones. Almost from the beginning, we’ve been very liberal in terms of what we allow and support. In fact, we’ve simultaneously allowed the use of Blackberry, Palm (Goodlink), and ActiveSync devices on our systems. We’re soon eliminating support for Palm-based devices, but at the same time we’re going to be adding support for the iPhone.

At first we were concerned about our ability to support all the different devices, but I’ve found it more and more difficult to make this argument. Beyond the initial setup, and possibly the need to support a specialized server, we really haven’t been taxed in terms of having to support these devices. For the most part, we get involved during the initial setup, and the basics of configuring a device for Blackberry server or Exchange Activesync are pretty much the same from one device to another. We’re currently telling users they can use any device they want as long as it supports ActiveSync (soon to include the iPhone), and we only limit Blackberry’s because of the licensing costs.

The issue becomes a whole lot trickier when we begin talking about computers and applications. We’ve always had pretty clear lines dividing our PC users and our Mac users. We’ve also had some pretty clear rules dictating who gets laptops. The applications we use have generally been even more defined. When new employees walk through the door we never asked them if they would prefer to run Outlook or Lotus Notes. Exceptions to these standards have been few and far between. It just seemed to make sense for us to standardize on the products we support.

However, I’ve seen the cracks beginning to appear in these areas too. The Macs are beginning to find their way into areas traditionally reserved for PCs. It’s usually been the result of moving an employee between departments, and not feeling that it was worth the effort to take away their computer just because they were switching departments. I still think it makes sense to standardize on hardware platforms for purposes of support, but I do think the day is coming in when we’re going to find ourselves facing some real battles over which platform we expect an employee to use.

While our software platforms have been more rigid, there is one excellent example of letting the users dictate our software choices. A few years ago, our Creative users decided they wanted to make the change from Quark Xpress to Adobe Creative Suite. IT was definitely involved in the process of switching, but the switch itself was definitely dictated by the end users.

This will be an interesting trend to keep an eye on, and I do think we may be seeing it impact our industry sooner than others.

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

How Connected Should We Be?

I’m writing this in a moving car on the way to my son’s lacrosse game. It’s about a 1-hour drive, and I’ve already communicated several items to my IT staff via e-mail, activated 3 new users on our Office Communications Server, and begun writing this post. Needless to say, my wife (and driver) is getting very little of my attention, and that’s probably not fair.

I think it’s fantastic that we have the capability to do what we do from remote locations, but I think we have to be very careful not to go overboard. I spent last Thursday evening in the Charlotte airport, communicating with co-workers who were literally on the other side of the globe. It was a scenario in which 5-years ago, these questions would have gone unanswered for days - we actually accomplished something in about 5 minutes.

We have to do what we have to do sometimes. In my current situation, which is overloaded with time-critical projects, it seems like these tools are invaluable. On the one hand, we can walk out of the office confident that we can still be productive in a moving vehicle. On the other hand, we can’t lose touch with the people sitting next to us in the car.

That’s why I’m making this a short post.

Paperless Workflow

In addition to our current acquisition-related projects, and our implementation of Microsoft Unified Communications, we’re also in the midst of another project which began late last year – implementing a paperless workflow system into the heart of our day-to-day operations. While paperless workflow isn’t really an IT project, it definitely touches upon several IT systems. It’s really not even fair to try to discuss the scope of this project in a blog entry, but I’ll try to summarize it.

At the heart of our paperless workflow system is Adobe Acrobat, accompanied by WebDAV servers at each of our office locations, allowing our users to collaborate electronically on a job from start to finish. Since we’re using the WebDAV servers for storage of the PDF files, we’re not cluttering up our user’s mailboxes with multiple versions of a job.

We’re using some Microsoft software – Exchange (e-mail) and SharePoint to traffic and schedule the job through the Agency. The two systems work very well together to provide notification of status changes on a project. SharePoint was perhaps the biggest surprise we encountered during the early stages of the project. I briefed our Studio Department on SharePoint one day late last year, expecting a lukewarm reception to a Microsoft product from some of our most hardcore Mac users. It turns out they had been looking for a way to schedule jobs electronically, and the next day I was shocked to find them tearing down their scheduling whiteboards. Just like that, SharePoint had become a mission critical application. They loved the way that status changes in the SharePoint schedule automatically kicked off e-mail alerts to the entire team.

Other aspects of the project got more into some IT hardware. Gigabit Ethernet capabilities finally made it possible for our Mac users to effectively work off a file server rather than constantly moving files from the network to their local hard drives. This provided a huge benefit to collaboration for our Creative teams. It did change things significantly from an IT perspective, as we begin to move away from large hard drives on our local machines and need more storage on the Creative servers.

We also added more LCD monitors to our inventory in order to facilitate working electronically. Not having a physical piece of paper to review and markup meant that more of this work was being done on screen. A small investment in monitors has added up to huge gains in productivity.

It’s certainly not an insignificant project from an IT perspective. I find myself spending quite a bit of time explaining the complexities involved in making all these systems work reliably, but it does seem to be working. We’ll probably be spending most of the rest of this year getting this implemented in all of our offices. In light of everything else we have going on; it’s just another part of a very busy year for IT.

Growth and IT

How do you handle growth? This is a question that’s really been troubling me over the past couple of weeks. For many of us, the day-to-day issues of running IT are pretty straight forward. We keep our existing “stuff” running, and occasionally we introduce some new “stuff”. For years, that’s what I did also. Occasionally, we’d get a little larger, adding an office every once in a while. That presented different challenges, but it was always manageable.

Our current growth feels different. Despite adding some locations over the past 10 years, we’ve hovered in the 150-200 employee range for much of that time. We’ve now jumped to about 260 employees, and we may be heading to 500 employees much fast than I ever envisioned. Furthermore, if that happens, it will probably mean a doubling of our existing locations – from 7 offices to somewhere between 12-15 offices.

What does all of this do in terms of IT and Telecomm support? The typical small IT Agency, which is large enough to require IT support, comes with an IT “Jack of all trades”, and there’s a limit to how many of those types an Agency needs.

At some point, you’ve got to start thinking about what a larger IT Department should look like. I think we’ve reached that point, so I’m thinking about it a lot. How many IT people would be required to support 500 people in 12-15 different locations, keeping in mind that we support 2 different platforms (Mac and PC), and that we also support telecomm. I’ve always felt like 35 was the point where an Agency needs in-house support, I think that number is a pretty good starting point for determining a support ratio in this business. I also think you can increase that number as you get larger, gaining some efficiency of scale. So let’s say that a 500 person company could get by with a 50-1 ratio - that means 10 IT people.

The next question is how to apportion those 10. Personally, I think an organization of this size should move to a formal help desk environment, which could be centralized in one location, or even split between several locations if geography dictates it. How many help desk personnel? What about the rest of the IT positions? An organization of 500 probably justifies a few specialists of some type – perhaps a telecomm manager, a network manager, a DB specialist, a graphics systems manager, etc., I guess those jacks-of-all trades might come in handy after all.

Unified Communications Implementation – Update

We’re making excellent progress on our Microsoft UC implementation. To date, we’ve rolled out Microsoft Office Communications Server and in our main office, and we’ve begun testing with the Communicator and LiveMeeting clients. In addition, we’ve nearly completed the migration to Exchange 2007 and we’re in the process of removing Exchange servers from our remote sites. This week we’re rolling out OCS Mediation servers to our main office and two remote locations. These servers, along with soon to be installed gateway servers, will be the connection between our Exchange server and our phone switches. We’re probably about 2 weeks away from tying it all into our existing phone system.

I’m currently in the process of presenting an overview to our users in order to prep them for what’s ahead. We’ll be doing formal training for the system around the middle of June, but for now I’m just laying some of the groundwork and giving employees an idea of what’s ahead. One of the big reasons we’re deploying Microsoft UC is to facilitate the connection of new phone systems into our existing system. Secondary to that is our plan to once again implement Unified Messaging – this time through Exchange 2007, and also to provide presence information via the Communicator client.

One of my great fears is that I’m introducing too much too fast, and some of the items I didn’t mention above could also take off on us. In addition to those features mentioned above, we’ll also be providing chat capability, the ability to easily redirect phone calls to other numbers, and additional conferencing capability through LiveMeeting. I’d like to roll these items out following the initial implementation of UC, but I know that some of my users will begin to play with them on day one. Other than LiveMeeting, which is a separate client I can choose to leave uninstalled for now, many of the features mentioned above are built right into Communicator.

I’m also a bit nervous about Microsoft’s Mac support. We’ve only recently received an update to Messenger for the Mac which works with OCS 2007, and we’re currently searching for a LiveMeeting client. I’m concerned that LiveMeeting on OCS requires a client and does not provide any web-based conferencing capability. That being the case, it’s not necessarily the end of the world, because out intent all along was to use this primarily as an internal conferencing system. We use Acrobat Connect as our conferencing system to the outside world. However, it would be serious limitation if LiveMeeting didn’t provide a way to include our own Macs.That would hurt.

Here We Grow Again

We’re getting bigger again. Eric Mower and Associates has just combined with another agency here in Syracuse. We’ll be adding 43 people to our current staff of 80 in this office, and they’re moving into our offices around July 1^st. Good news for the agency – significant challenges for IT.

Space is going to be a huge issue. Squeezing another 40 people into our existing space is not going to be easy, and we’re going to be using some spaces which have never been used for offices. Wireless seems like a convenient solution, but we’ve never felt that wireless was a good option for our Creative staff, and that limits our options in terms of who can occupy any wireless offices.

The space issue also presents another possibility – telecommuting. We’ve discussed telecommuting in the past, but we haven’t really done much of it. On the other hand, many of us in the company can and do work extremely efficiently from home. Working from home has been a way of life for those of us in IT for several years. Many of our other users have also become quite adept at working from home, and we’ve even introduces a handful of IP phones in the past couple years. All of this makes me wonder if perhaps we shouldn’t step this up a bit as we’re squeezed for space. Telecommuting is tough for our Creative and Account Service staffs which tend to need more face-to-face interaction, but we have others, including myself, HR, and Accounting Directors who might actually be able to share an office and work from home on the days we’re not in.

Communications is always a challenge, and what’s going to make this really interesting is our ongoing implementation of Microsoft’s Unified Communications system. Having this happen in the middle of that implementation is going to be challenging, however it also presents opportunities to utilize the new systems to actually speed up the integration. Prior to the move in date, we may utilize the Communicator client to provide chat and voice connectivity with our new co-workers.

Like I said – the integration will offer significant challenges, but that’s nothing new in this business. We’ll figure it all out, and I’ll fill you in on the highlights.

Exchange 2007 Migration

I’m sleeping better at night. We’re in the middle of a major project, part of which involves consolidating way too many e-mail servers onto a single Exchange 2007 server. We never really planned to end up with as many e-mail servers as we did, but through a combination of growth and acquisitions, we somehow ended up with 6 of them servicing about 200 people. It was way too many servers for the number of users, even in a multi-office environment. We’re in the process of fixing that now, moving all of our users onto Exchange 2007. Prior to making this move, our primary server was running Exchange 2003, and the hardware was becoming shaky to the point we held our breath every time we restarted it.

I’m a big fan of Exchange. We’ve been running it since Exchange 2000 was released, and I’ve watched it become stronger with each subsequent release. This thing is a workhorse, and it’s been incredibly reliable over the years. When we have had issues with it, we’ve found Microsoft’s Exchange support to be more than equal to the task. As a result, we’ve had a solid track record of providing e-mail service to our employees.

While it’s probably a bit early for me to be singing the praises of Exchange 2007, what I’ve seen so far has proven to be incredibly useful. First, we had to move our storage databases off local storage and onto our shared iSCSI storage after we rolled out the server. (Our EqualLogic box arrived after the Exchange box.) Moving the databases was something which would have terrified me with prior releases. In fact, I’ve never even considered doing it. With Exchange 2007, we simply utilized the wizard and moved all of our databases on a Friday evening. We finished the DB moves in about an hour, and most users never even noticed an interruption in service.

Currently, we’re in the process of migrating our user’s mailboxes onto Exchange 2007. We’ve completed the move for 3 of our offices, and we’re in the process of moving 4 others. In the past, this type of migration meant a Saturday in the office moving mailboxes. With Exchange 2007, I literally do sleep through the moves. We schedule the moves overnight, and when we start the following morning everything is finished. Out of approximately 120 mailboxes moved so far, we’ve only encountered errors on two moves, and neither prevented the mailbox from moving. When they arrive in the morning, our users don’t even realize they’ve been moved.

There’s much more to Exchange 2007 than moving databases and migrating mailboxes, but so far I’ve been impressed. One of the other reasons we moved onto Exchange 2007 was the addition of Unified Messaging. That’s the next step in our implementation, and since that service is new to Exchange 2007 I’m prepared for some growing pains. However, when I consider the pain we’ve experienced with telecomm voicemail systems over the years, I’m actually looking forward to bringing this service into Exchange. Regardless of how that implementation goes, I’m sleeping better these days knowing that the foundation of my e-mail services is in good shape.

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.