Creating and managing GPO's

@planet_jeroen, I don’t see the license cost being an issue in your 2 situations or am I missing something?
Even with valid licenses, a reinstall might occur. It’s the sysadmins job to have that covered so other personnel can switch to another machine or have a (very) limited downtime (at least not in terms of ‘sending them home and call back when the computer has been fixed’.)
BTW, a distribution option like FOG would be very nice to have to cover such a situation.

Yeah … the sysadmin needs licenses or evacuate an employee from their workstation to get access to windows.

In fact I think you are in a very fortunate bubble, since you deal with users and not with lusers :smiley: Jokes apart, usually our mean customer isn’t very fond of IT and/or technology and doesn’t care even when we try to explain the situation, because “I pay you to deal with this stuff that I cannot understand and neither I want to”.

Small customers simply accept Windows downtime as part of Windows itself, because any other alternatives for them are not acceptable (they are spending lots of money in Office licenses, even if they use maybe the 2% of the functions it has and probably LibreOffice would be much more than sufficient for their needs, but since “all the others do it with Office, why I should do differently” is the main excuse); let alone spending money for something infrastructural for 3/4 PCs. We have a customer with more than 6 PCs and we forced them to get a NAS for their data, since for years they managed their files on the C: drive of their machines without having a single working backup for their stuff; then they suffered robbery and someone stole their entire PCs.

If they get a ransomware, usually they don’t understand the implications, they only say “I cannot open my files anymore”. We have to explain what it really means and that we were too good to take 2 different type of backups for their data even if they didn’t bought us a NAS for their backups; some of them don’t even understand the importance of backup: one of them said to us “you should have said clearly that backup was so important” after loosing all theirs data; we replied with “we wrote you that at the beginning” and finally he replied “I thought your email wasn’t so important back then”. When reminded of the fact that their data would have been completely made useless if we didn’t have the backups, this doesn’t even move them to think better of their (poor) technology behaviour: “it seemed a valid invoice to me” “but did you ever had any contracts with this ‘Quiche Inc.’ company?” “No, not once”.

We have ads company as customers that requested us a quotation for 5k€ on a new Mac for a single person, but refused to accept the quote for a new server for all their 50+ users (and they were just stopped for a couple of days because their 8yrs old Mac-mini server was malfunctioning) “because 4k€ are too much and were not budgeted…”.

You seem, again, in a fortunate bubble, where people use their brain to understand that if they have to wait hours before starting their jobs because of system updates, something is wrong. You are working with people with a technical (in the sense of IT) understanding and they have precise issues and needs, which are completely different from small customers where the main and only issue is to spend less money possible. Even spend a recurring yearly sum to have a “support contract with assured updates” seems like swearing to the gods to them.

I’m sorry; I completely understand your point of view as a technician; not all the customers are technicians, though, so they cannot understand half of this discussion and are still convinced that they are right not following any advice from professionists (and sometimes they also paid the consultancy :smiley: ).

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I live on the other end of the spectrum, where you are not allowed to provide services without being certified, and every tech needing his certifications up to date for his role. ISO-land.

That means IT managers, and they would get fired for downtime. Customers pay for services, not for payed IT labour, and we offer a solution that is signed off on before it is implemented with SLA’s even for internal services. Not sure it’s fortunate, but makes that the scenario you describe is only seen at vey small and sortof old-fashioned companies. Hipsters are in the cloud :stuck_out_tongue: (untill the regular consumer internet connection dies)

But yeah, being liable for data loss, downtime, not meeting SLA’s and target response times, we are forced to work different or close shop. That being said, I just left a company that sounds much like what you described, but they resisted change for the last 15 years and are the exception in a way.

Thats why I didnt understand at first why it would be so hard to just bill another license and make it a term of service that a proper OTAP procedure is in place so you have a staging and testing area, and thus your RSAT machine. But yeah, if you have to argue to even get a cabinet instead of a spare desk, and a patchpannel instead of spaghetti, I think I would experience a system shock when I would tag along for a day with you :slight_smile:

A post was split to a new topic: How to import GPOs?