You’ve probably noticed how a certain part of the IT industry [to quote Paul Thurrott: "Ahem"] goes into a feeding frenzy over the latest Microsoft and Apple release or device. Meanwhile, the rest of the IT world soldiers on in the trenches, dealing with variations of the same issues year after year.
And we wonder why you aren't salivating on your keyboard over Windows 7 or SharePoint 2010 or the latest iPhone. Why? Maybe it's because you're still dealing with such sexy projects as file server clean-up and organization.
Windows IT Pro author Eric Rux recently received an email message from an IT pro who is losing sleep over just that issue. He read Eric’s two-year-old article on file server organization and wrote:
“I’m just starting a new project where we will be reorganizing 80Gb of data on our File Server. The server is a mess, there are no security rights, schemas, nothing….The employees have been dropping files on the shared folder for more than 10 years.”
A quick scan of the web reveals there are as many opinions about how to organize as there are ways to organize, ranging from “put everything that hasn’t been touched in two years in a folder and call it ‘Old Files’,” to “Buy a copy of dtSearch and use it to create an index.” Eric’s article, “Let’s Get Organized,” offers advice and help that is, obviously, still needed.
Perhaps that’s a reflection on the direction the IT industry is going—that technology with bling and pizzazz gets more attention and money than technology that’s usable, reliable, and logical to administer. And IT pros are left having to (not necessarily in this order) patch and create work-arounds and tear their hair out. [Calendar reminder pops up about upcoming SharePoint 2010 briefing.]
Hey, gotta go. My dog is sick--he, uh, ate my router. Anyway, does your file server need organizing? Check out Eric's tips.
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