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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

Now that almost all non-tech-applications are web-based, is there any need for IT to admin your system like they used to?

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Well basically in the Windows world you have user management, files and printing, security/patching and then taking care of programs on the user's computers and infrastructure (servers, setting up a VPN etc.).

Depending on the organization, there are many non web-based programs that are run. Think about an engineering company. They'll probably have some sort of CAD like SolidWorks and something like Matlab etc.

Even if everything would be web based you still have to handle licensing/logins somehow. But yeah in theory the users need less hand holding because less stuff is actually installed.

Vast majority of the things you list seem like a very legacy way to do things.

If you have to list 'printers' to give an example then you know it might not be as relevant these days.

Any decent sized organization, even ones that don't have regulatory compliance to worry about, has to deal with the majority of things listed. My company has roughly 200 Macs in use, around 5% of the total endpoints in use. The admins who specialize in this have to worry primarily about patch management, application deployment, and security. Authentication is through AD, so any changes that might affect this have to be done carefully. And yes, printing is still a big deal.

> worry primarily about patch management

Don’t the OS and app prompt for their own updates these days?

You don't want the whole office to be out of work for a day because the last Nvidia update broke some professional software your techs are using. This lets you test the patch on some machines before rolling it out to your whole org.

Sure but users can decline them and never reboot

There’s no way an enterprise can follow the consumer cadence for patches and updates. There are dozens if not hundreds of custom apps that could break

Hoping for the best is not how compliance works.

I'm not being obtuse - but if you can't trust your employees to run the updates they're asked to, then what are you able to trust them with?

Your employees have deliverables. Maybe they're customer facing. Maybe they're not directly customer facing.

But the incentive structure may prioritize getting their deliverables done over doing patching at least in the short term. The corporate hierarchies for IT and their main organization might only have a common manager at the very top of the company.

They do, but people don't click on the "do the update" button so you need a way to force it for compliance reasons. And sometimes you want to withhold an update if it breaks an important app, etc.

I hate printers with every fiber of my being, but for certain companies they are unavoidable. We run our own fulfillment center rather than use 3rd party logistics, and there is absolutely no way we could operate without them. If the printers in the warehouse go down, then I have to explain why customers aren't getting orders fulfilled and we have hourly employees waiting for me to fix things. Not everyone works in an office.

That being said, if the printer in the office has issues I may not even hear about it for a month...

Usually in many organisations it’s a case of enforcing compliance across the fleet as opposed to actively administering the machines; enforcing browser profiles, software deployments and configurations, OS patch revisions, directory services integrations, that sort of thing.

But yes many computer workers effectively use their systems like chromebooks. Hell I’m in an operations role and aside from my terminal and mail client, I use my system like a glorified chromebook hah

Security.

Like VPNs, app store policies, user-creation, All of this needs a decent understanding of the OS and a config management system to implement it.

The problem with OSX is that most release change things, often in undocumented ways. Like breaking how AD integrates (thanks 10.6)

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