Why I love Microsoft. Zombie Notes

I am the head of the IT department, the company has approximately 300PCs. I live and work in Russia. It’s been quite a while that I myself have rarely been administering myself, I have no doubt that many Habrachelovs will put me in my belt, but on the other hand, does the MCSE, MCDBA status have an expiration date? (It seems there is: - (()
After reading a couple of days ago another article by a person who moved from Windows to Linux, which caused an extensive discussion, and decided to write why I choose Windows, or rather, why I like Microsoft solutions. I want to say right away that I really wanted to hear the opinion of the community precisely because I see that there are a lot of very qualified people in various fields. I really want a constructive dialogue and really do not want to offend anyone. In the article I will write why I choose solutions from Microsoft. Moreover, as can be seen from my activity, the area of ​​my concern is not limited to desktop systems, of course I am concerned about the entire IT infrastructure.

I’ll say right away: “No, no, I don’t get dirty money from Microsoft, although I would really like to!” All these are my true feelings, I confess right away that I am zombied. So, in order.

1. Advanced Solutions

In so many areas, with regard to IT infrastructure, Microsoft solutions are at the forefront. Many examples can be given. I love Exchange with its calendars, shared folders, outlook work on RPC.
I just cry when I see Office Communications Server! People! Have you implemented it? This is just a fairy tale.
I rejoice, using Sharepoint Server, it is much more convenient to store files on it than in shared resources. Here you and versioning and alerts about changes and web access and many other pleasures of life.
Finally, I enjoy life with the office. Yes, I’m a zombie, I haven’t tried anything else, but how convenient and easy it is to analyze data in Excel and then with three clicks make it look attractive, draw graphs and charts. We need to write a plan to the management - open Project and voila. After 30 minutes, both the plan and the Gantt chart with all the dependencies, responsible and progress. We need a quick network diagram - we take Visio and after 20 minutes we have a beautiful document where everything is clearly painted.

2. Integration

This is even more important than point 1, and explains why I do not just love Microsoft, and why I love only Microsoft. The bottom line is that Microsoft products are designed to coexist. For example, Exchange takes and stores all data about people in Active Directory, the client that works with it perfectly is Outlook from the office. Thanks to OCS, this same Outlook shows me whether the person who sent me the letter is currently available. If I am working on a document lying on Sharepoint Server, Word in a special panel will show me who the author of the document is and again I will see if it is available, and if necessary, call him with one click. Believe me, there are countless examples; it makes no sense to list, it’s better to write a few usage scenarios later. But the main idea is better together. Almost constantly Microsoft products, with the deployed infrastructure, they are friends with each other and get additional functionality. I can believe that some Documentum (I have never seen it) is significantly better than Sharepoint in terms of weight, but I’m sure that by implementing it I will lose significantly in additional functionality, ease of administration, and complicate my life in the future when new versions come out Software with new features. Therefore, first of all, I will look at Sharepoint and start thinking about something else only if its current capabilities are clearly not enough. simplicity of administration, I will complicate my life in the future, when new versions of software with new features will be released. Therefore, first of all, I will look at Sharepoint and start thinking about something else only if its current capabilities are clearly not enough. simplicity of administration, I will complicate my life in the future, when new versions of software with new features will be released. Therefore, first of all, I will look at Sharepoint and start thinking about something else only if its current capabilities are clearly not enough.
And having looked, in most cases, it turns out that the possibilities are quite quite and even more than that.

3. Personnel

By deploying the entire infrastructure on MS products, you get uniformity. The same approaches, the same equipment, and yes! Microsoft knows everything better than you. Sometimes it frustrates of course, I'm not a hopeless zombie, but as a rule this means that there is one way to solve the problem and it is the right one. And if so, the number of unique and organization-specific knowledge is greatly reduced. I don’t have to invent anything to publish Exchange through ISA, and if tomorrow I suddenly have one of the engineers serving the infrastructure, this will not be a thin spot. Exaggerating, it seems to me that MS specialists are monolithic, differ in their skill level. The same * .nix experts - everyone is blowing their own tune. Having 1209 different distributions, ways to solve the problem, and so on, they do not have a common point of view. For me, as for the boss,
Perhaps this is my mistake, but I think that in general, finding an administrator with an MS specialization is much easier than any other. In addition, since I myself understand these technologies it is much easier for me to select employees.

Summarizing the line under this section, I want to say that in the case of MS to me, as a leader, it is simple and clear how to "do the right thing." It sounds cynical and banal, but I just have to first put on and try on a solution from Microsoft and start looking at something else only if it does not suit me radically.

My life was such that during the crisis I had to cooperate extensively with an outsourced IT service company for small clients. Therefore, you constantly have to see how IT is organized by different companies and I must say that even where budgets are large, it is still very rare for the eye to be happy. There are a lot of illiterate administrators specializing in MS, hating users and only wanting everyone to leave them and let them play calmly. Why so - a separate conversation, I can write another article.

Examples from my life

Now a couple of examples of the possibilities of integrated infrastructure. I will write only about what we really use.

I come to work. Yes, sometimes I'm late. It doesn't matter, I'm a zombie, and I have a Windows Mobile phone. All mail comes to him, all meetings in him. Of course, all phones are able to synchronize now, but Win Mobile on my HD2 is very happy because I don’t look around :) I do not need to install any utilities on my Win 7, when I am out of the office, I get a list of contacts from AD in two pokes on the phone, without clogging up their personal address book, I don’t need to backup the phone - everything happens when synchronized, all the photos for the contact list are the same for the phone and office contacts. I predict that they will tell me: “Lamer, all the described functionality is on my Iphone / Nokia / ...” but I already described the reasons for my decisions. Microsoft will release another Office Communicator, will it have all the functionality on your phone? I'm not sure.
So, the mail is read on the way. Yes, I forgot to say my Outlook both at home and on the laptop is very friendly with the Exchange server. Everywhere I work with the same copy of my mail that is on the server, and at home and on the laptop I work with it through Outlook - this is more convenient than through the Web interface. We at the company actively use appointments, I see the calendars of our employees. Book a meeting room? In the Exchange shared folders are calendars for each of them, I can do it from anywhere. It’s scary to think that somewhere else they are running around and putting crosses on a piece of paper hanging near the meeting room. Current tasks to support people? After highlighting a separate address for technical support and 15 minutes of configuration, I see them all, with readiness status, with reference to the person to whom she is entrusted and the history of correspondence on the task. The boss came running and crying - the employee fell ill and an extremely important letter should come to his address - 2 minutes and the whole box of the employee has already been picked up. Someone deleted by negligence mail - centralized server backups. After all, all the mail on it and only on it. Do you need to organize one external address so that 5 secretaries read it and answer customers from it? - business for 15 minutes and it will not be a terrible distribution group, namely one single mailbox. Did the employee sit on another computer? Yes, even flew to America. All his mail and other mail services are available, unified and monolithic. No problems with organization address books. As soon as I see an excel phone book in some organization, I immediately starts to sausage.
If I wrote so much about Exchange, how much will I write about Office Communication Server?
After all, I treat him with special trepidation. So OCS. If you have never come across it, then roughly I would describe it as Skype for organization. Naturally, he is centrally administered, is friends with AD and other goodies. I immediately see all the statuses of employees, who is sitting and who is afk. I can send them messages. But he also makes friends with telephony. I will not write about the PBX with which it integrates in full - I got the Panasonic PBX. After establishing relations, in 2 clicks of the mouse in my office communicator, I configure the calls to come simultaneously to both the communicator and the phone. If I picked up the phone, my status on the device does not change. These are the disadvantages of incomplete integration. But I myself steer my calls - you need to run somewhere for a couple of hours, without informing the authorities - set up call forwarding to mobile, returned - disconnected. It is necessary that the phone rings immediately with the communicator - please. It is necessary that after 2 beeps - 2 clicks. Today I’m sitting at another computer in another room - you just need to remember to turn off the simultaneous arrival of a call to the phone on the table so as not to annoy colleagues and stick it into the computer on which the headset has been transferred. By the way, this is very true for companies where some employees do not have permanent computers and they "migrate". I forgot what the phone numbers of employees are - three letters from the name or surname or login and voila, then click the mouse. I immediately have the option to call a work or mobile phone. Any calls after climbing the Internet in search of a company - just copy-paste the phone number. If I work from home - often people don’t even notice it, I am still available by phone. Problems with telephony of remote offices and home employees disappear automatically. For fans - video conferencing. Any complicated routing? For example, from Friday evening, calls should be armed, and on Saturday from 10.00 the technical support duty engineer will go on shift - you need to transfer calls to his worker, and he can go to the client, then you need calls to come to his mobile, and after 20.00 calls again must come on guard, and on Sunday the scheme is the same but there will be a different engineer with a different mobile. And on Saturday morning, it may not be known which of the engineers will work on Sunday. Moreover, on Sunday he can go to clients by 10 already, but he should receive all calls to his mobile ... By the way, An absolutely real workflow is described ... Everything is set up in 10 minutes and people control the forwarding and the rules themselves, with the mouse, on the computer in a great interface. But before that I had to write big block diagrams, manuals with magic sequences of numbers that you need to press on the phone and hang it in front of the workplaces of employees and security.
By the way, I don’t remember writing or not, but presence statuses are available in all MS applications. And in the office and on the SP portal ...
After such massive advertising I must write, although this does not apply to this article ... OCS fully works only with its own telephone sets, of which 3 pieces literally stand like a bridge from clean crystal. In general, if you suddenly want to completely abandon your PBX - study this issue. I have most sitting with ordinary headsets and a communicator on a computer.

There are more examples, there are many, they are different. It's just that it takes a very long time to write, it's time to move on.

Why administrators need to love solutions from MS

Dear fellow administrators. Accept that for the most part you should provide a convenient environment for your users to work. You must be their friend, not your enemy. Let’s take two hypothetical administrators who love their users, work and grow at work, and do not play for days on end. My purely personal, and probably erroneous, opinion - the Hypothetical sensible administrator * .nix in a vacuum - will transfer all users to Linux, make it work in Open Office, install Unix on servers, completely steer it all from home, even from the phone, completely exclude it all downtimes and jambs, implements its "dream infrastructure" that performs all the basic functions and services for users, will sit and drink tea or write smart articles on the hub - that is, it will perfectly perform a "supporting function".
At this time, the sensible administrator of MS will arrange for a centralized update of the OS and antiviruses, take away from anyone the rights of admins, making sure that the applications continue to work, thus achieving an almost perfect functioning of the system, sometimes it will crash because new viruses crawled through or that no matter what, the user’s com started to slow down and tear down everything easier than figuring out why it was slowing down. But at the same time, he will give his users a bunch of additional ways to solve their problems, new features will attract him. His “dream infrastructure” is always in the future. Users will love it, because it will be easier and easier for them to live every day. His superiors will love him as a partner who needs to explain the goals and objectives of the company, because he offers good and smart ways to solve many problems.

And after some time it becomes clear that the scale of the tasks for the MS administrator is much larger and the tasks are more important and interesting. To collect all the stones - exaggerating, it's like assembler and 1C. In assembler, you write the perfect program for your needs, and 1C may be full of glitches, only it solves problems of a different level.

About something to keep silent dishonestly

Having finished with amenities, we’ll talk about tidiness and patterns.
1. MS is unstable, buggy, full of viruses and so on.
I would not say. Install WSUS, update antivirus centrally, and if possible, remove admin rights from users. I can’t say that in my practice there are no problems at all, though the specifics is that there are many users with administrator rights - but the problems are rare enough, you can live perfectly with this.
2. If something breaks on the server, everything is available to me up to the source, and there ...
MS infrastructure works well if it is managed by fairly competent people. Of course, it’s sometimes more difficult to understand what needs to be backed up and how to recover, of course, it’s psychologically easier and more understandable when you have all the mail in the form of separate text files in a directory with a user name on the server. But if you become a competent specialist, if before putting the system into operation and during operation you tried at least a couple of times to restore the system from backup on a new hardware - this problem is not a problem.
3. You are agitating here, but have you considered how much it costs?
Counted. I know how much it costs. But I don’t want to answer the question of whether I bought and so on, and not because I did not buy. Just the reality is that now 90% of software in Russia is stolen. I believe that it is very important to move forward and use the best, especially while there is an opportunity. If there is no way to buy - while you can live on a pirated one, it is only important to honestly show the business the opportunities that this software brings. If you have computers - typewriters - God himself ordered to think about free software, but if you have already shown the business how it can work more efficiently with the help of new technologies - the business (read the director) can often decide that to abandon them for free he is not ready. The benefits are often difficult to calculate, but sometimes it becomes obvious. Finally, if the director is stubborn or the business does not bring enough profit,

Conclusion
For a long time I just read Habr. But once again I really wanted to write here. And the first reason why I really wanted this is because I personally do not know an alternative way for an enterprise that uses quite a lot of complex IT services, except for proprietary software. At the same time, I see that there is a very qualified community that can prompt, guide, explain. I admit that as a professional, I do not see an alternative, but I would like to know her and, possibly, grow up professionally. I wrote this article in the sandbox, but the UFO rejected it and as a whole I understand why - apparently there are too many advertisements and pushes for the holivar, although I was just trying the opposite. But all the same, the desire to receive feedback from you turned out to be stronger than the annoyance of the beginning graphomaniac and laziness, and I went to people. Many thanks to haberchelovekom Stepan Ovchinnikov, who recognized the article as a whole fit and gave me wishes and comments on how to improve it, as well as an invite so that she still saw the light of day. I would be very grateful to competent opponents arguing their opinion.