Today the company that purchased us last year sent out an email to everyone in our company. It seems they are moving our print servers over to their servers. While this is not a big deal the email they sent out was not only hard to understand but wrong. Their instructions were very hard to understand for even us in IT let alone secretaries, scientists, clerks etc. They actually expected people to know what the old print server was so they could relate it to a new one.

Then they included an excel file with the old printer network path in one column and the new printer network path in the other. The problem was in the spreadsheet, they did not use the fully qualified name for the print server!!! Since we have not fully moved over to their domain, none of these network server names would work... NONE!

So our users started calling their help desk and ours asking why it was not working... DUH! So one of our IT guys had to spend hours creating correct documentation to explain it correctly to our employees and then send it out via email. If only one of the 1,500 IT people at our new company would have tested these printer network paths or have gotten someone here to, there would not have been an issue.

Update on 5/15/2008

Another awesome feature of moving to their new print servers is that print jobs that use to start immediately, now take 5 minutes or more to print! I've even heard of print jobs taking 2 hours!!! How is anyone supposed to get their work done? I guess the jobs have to go all the way to India and bad.

The company that bought us June of 2006 uses a product called Managesoft to manage software updates etc. But it seems that the only way it works (or the only way the 1,500 IT people here can figure out) is if any authenticated user is an administrator on anyone's machine!!! WTF??? You have got to be kidding me!!! So now, all I need is the name of a computer (convientatally located on the asset tag on the front of the machhine) and I or anyone else at our compmany can get to any drive they choose and do what every they want. How is that for security??

Today our new company sent down from the corporate office the head of one of the “towers” in the IT department. Tower is just another word for department, but maybe they like it better because it makes it sound more powerful. I’d rather call it a well since that is what feels like working with them. Anyway, the purpose of the visit was to introduce us to her tower to see if we would want to work there once our new company is complete with the dismantling of our IT department.

This person is in charge of the public facing ecommerce web sites. I have to first say that our company web site is currently written in ASP.NET. She told us that they are working on a new site written in J2EE, so at this point I lost all interest. She touted this as a great improvement from their current site written in a mix of ASP, JSP and others.

My interest did peak when she mentioned that they do code review (all coding, architecture and design is done in India). I am big on this especially with offshore coding. I asked her who does the code review since they don’t hire software engineers (in the US). She told me “Knowledge Specialists” did the review. I had no idea what this title was and inquired more. She explained they were knowledgeable in the subject and could have been software engineers in the past or might be taking classes. I could not believe what I was hearing!

I told her that usually code reviews are done by peers or senior software engineers, not beginners or programmers that have not coded in 10 years! I also said that most code I have seen from India or have heard about from offshore is horrible. She brushed me off and said that their code has gotten a lot better. Better from what???

At the end she asked if anyone had questions and I said I did… at this point my boss rolled his eyes and got worried. In the near future, her team is going to basically shut down our web site and roll our 3,400+ products into their site. I asked her if she has ever looked at our web site… she replied no. I could not believe this either.  I further told her the reason I was asking was that our site was written by about 1.5 people (non senior level software engineers) and looks better, is easier to use, is faster and has more features than their site written by an army of people offshore.

The reason I brought this up is that more and more of our customers are using our web site and are use to our site that comes up in milliseconds (their site comes up in about 20 seconds) not to mention the ease of use and am worried that they will not be happy when moved over to theirs. Again, my comments fell on deaf ears. Too bad.

Microsoft has wrapped up development of two major products, Windows Server 2008 and the Service Pack 1 update to Windows Vista, CEO Steve Ballmer told financial analysts Monday.

"Both products have released to manufacturing today, which is good news," Ballmer said.

Ballmer highlighted a few big corporate deployments of Vista, including at Continental Airlines, which is in the process of upgrading 10,000 systems.

"We think we are turning the corner in terms of enterprise deployment, and Service Pack 1 will be a huge boon," Ballmer said.

Microsoft will begin distributing Vista SP1 via Windows Update in mid-March, according to a Microsoft blog post on Monday.

Microsoft is due to formally launch Windows Server 2008 on February 27 at an event in Los Angeles.