Hacker News Reader

Comment by parennoob | Hacker News Reader

What the f--k is a "corporate baseline"? If it's some sort of pre-done corporatized software stack using some nonsense like IBM Tivoli ("provides Integrated Service Management software to help manage business value of your IT infrastructure" -- sounds like something generated by http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/live), that's where most of your problems lie. These are a pain in the ass for everyone -- people who have to use them and people who have to support them.

Trust your users. If you can't, educate them. If you still can't, get rid of them and hire smart people you can trust. Now you don't need fancy "desktop management".

View on HN

> If you still can't, get rid of them and hire smart people you can trust.

It's hard to believe, but IT is typically not in charge of hiring and firing the rest of the company.

I work with smart people...Lots of smart people who make critical components for computers. Trust me, you still need desktop management, with corporate standard images.

By corporate baseline, I imagine it's corporate standard image with the standard loadout of software (encryption, antivirus, office, etc)

Ha! If you have a userbase of thousands of PCs, or PCs & Macs, or PCs, Macs & mobile devices, you absolutely have to have a standard operating environment, for many reasons, and if you believe otherwise you have no business commenting in this thread. You don't need to use something like Tivoli, but you do need a standard desktop image, standardized software packages and a method to provision/deprovision machines, management/reporting software, some kind of license management scheme (to prevent over-installation of commercial software, especially stuff that uses a corporate license key rather than individual keys), anti-virus and security systems, a way to force full disk encryption, a method of dealing with Patch Tuesdays, a way to push standard browser configurations or proxy .pac files, and innumerable other things.

Believe it or not, most employees' job at most companies has nothing to do with computing. They use computers to execute some other responsibilities, but the computer is a tool and all they want is for it to be as easy as possible to use, and for it to "just work".

Even if you have a BYOD policy, you still need management around it for a lot of the reasons I listed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com