Why I love Microsoft. Zombie notes

I am the head of the IT department, the company has about 300 pcs. I live and work in Russia. I myself have rarely been administering for quite some time, I have no doubt that many Habracheloveki will plug me in my belt, but on the other hand, does MCSE and MCDBA have expiration dates? (It seems there is: - (()
After reading a couple of days ago, another article of a person who moved from Windows to Linux , which caused an extensive discussion, and decided to write why I choose Windows, or more precisely, why I like Microsoft solutions. I want to say at once 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 areas. 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 work, the area of ​​my concern is not limited to desktop systems, of course I’m worried about the entire IT infrastructure.

I will immediately say: "No, no, I do not receive dirty money from Microsoft, although I would really like it!". All this is my true feelings, I confess at once that I am a zombie. So, in order.

1. Advanced Solutions

In so many areas with regard to IT infrastructure solutions Microsoft at the forefront. Many examples can be given. I love Exchange with its calendars, public folders, outlook work on RPC.
I just cry when I see Office Communications Server! People! Have you implemented it? It's just a fairy tale.
I enjoy using Sharepoint Server, it is much easier to store files on it than in shared resources. Here you have both versioning and notification of changes and web access and many other pleasures of life.
Finally, I enjoy life with the office. Yes, I am a zombie, I have not tried anything else, but how convenient and easy it is to analyze data in Excel and then with three clicks to make it look attractive, draw graphs and diagrams. You need to write a plan for the management - open the Project and voila. After 30 minutes, both the plan and the Gantt chart with all dependencies, responsibilities 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.
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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 created for co-existence. For example, Exchange takes all data about people and stores it in Active Directory, a client that works fine with it is Outlook from the office. Thanks to OCS, the same Outlook shows me whether a person who sent me an email is available at the moment. If I work on a document that lies on the Sharepoint Server, the 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, will call it with one click. Believe me, there are a multitude of examples, there is no point in enumerating, it is better I will write several usage scenarios. But the main idea is better together. Almost always, Microsoft products, with the deployed infrastructure, are friends with each other and get additional functionality. I can believe that any Documentum (I have never seen it) is significantly better than Sharepoint by the mass of indicators, but I am sure that by implementing it I will significantly lose additional functionality, ease of administration, complicate my life in the future, when new versions will be released 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 not enough.
And having looked, in most cases, it turns out that the possibilities are quite sufficient and even more so.

3. Frames

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 makes me sad, of course, I’m not a hopeless zombie, but as a rule it means that there is one way to solve the problem and it’s the right one. And if so, then the amount of unique and organization-specific knowledge is greatly reduced. I do not need to invent anything to publish Exchange via ISA, and if one of the engineers who serve the infrastructure suddenly leaves me tomorrow, it will not be a subtle place. Exaggerating, it seems to me that MS specialists are monolithic, they differ in skill level. The same specialists in * .nix - everyone is dudit in his own tune. Having 1209 different distributions, ways to solve a problem, and so on, they do not have a common point of view. For me, as for the boss, it means that the likelihood is high that if my engineer leaves and I take a new one, the organization will be waited by restructuring and other perturbations.
Perhaps this is my fallacy, but I believe 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.

Summing up this section, I want to say that in the case of MS I, as a manager, simply and clearly understand how to “do the right thing.” It sounds cynical and banal, but I just have to first put and try on the 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 the company on outsourcing IT services for small customers. Therefore, we constantly have to see how IT is organized at different companies and, I must say, 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, who hate users and dream only of getting everyone behind them and let them play in peace. Why so - a separate conversation, I can write another article.

Examples from my life

Now a couple of examples of integrated infrastructure capabilities. 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 the meetings in it. Of course, all the phones are now able to synchronize, but Win Mobile on my HD2 is very comfortable because I don’t look around :) I don’t need to install any utilities on my Win 7, when I’m out of the office, I’ve got a list of contacts from AD on my phone, without clogging up their personal address book, I don’t need to backup the phone - everything happens by itself when synchronizing, all photos for the contact list are the same for the phone and office contacts. I foresee that they will tell me: “Lamer, all the described functionality is on my Iphone / Nokia / ...” but I have already described the reasons for my decisions. Will Microsoft release Office Communicator? Will it have all the functionality on your phone? I'm not sure.
So, mail is read on the way. Yes, I forgot to tell my Outlook both at home and on the laptop is perfectly friendly with the Exchange server. I work everywhere with the same copy of my mail, which lies 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 in the company actively use the appointment of meetings, I see the calendars of my employees. Book a meeting? In the Exchange public folders there are calendars for each of them, I can do it from anywhere. It is terrible to think that somewhere else they are running and putting crosses on a piece of paper hanging near the meeting room. Current tasks to support people? After allocating a separate address for technical support and 15 minutes of settings, I see them all, with readiness status, with reference to the person to whom it is assigned and the history of correspondence on the task. The chief came running and crying - the employee became ill and an extremely important letter should arrive at his address - 2 minutes and the head of the employee had already picked up his entire box. Someone, through carelessness, deleted mail - centralized server backups. After all, all the mail on it and only on it. It is necessary to organize one external address so that 5 secretaries read it and answer clients from it. - business for 15 minutes and it will not be a terrible distribution group, namely one single mailbox. The employee sat on another computer? Yes, even flew to America. All his mail and other mail services are accessible, uniform and monolithic. No problems with the address books of the organization. As soon as I see a phone book in Excel in some organization, I immediately begin to sausage.
If I have written 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 an organization. Naturally, it is centrally administered, is friends with AD and other buns. I immediately see all the statuses of employees, who are sitting and who are afk. I can send them messages. But he is also on friendly terms with telephony. I will not write about the PBX with which it is integrated in full - I got the Panasonic PBX. After establishing relationships, I set up in 2 clicks of the mouse in my office communicator so that calls come to both the communicator and the phone at the same time. If I picked up the phone on my phone, my status in the communicator does not change. These are cons of incomplete integration. But on the other hand, I myself steer by my calls — I need to run somewhere for a couple of hours, without letting the authorities know — I set up redirection of calls to my mobile, I came back and turned it off. It is necessary that the phone rang immediately with the communicator - please. It is necessary that after 2 beeps - 2 clicks. Today I sit behind another computer in another room - I just need to remember to turn off the arrival of a call to the phone on the table at the same time, so as not to irritate my colleagues and plug it into the computer on which I moved the headset. By the way, this is very important for companies where some of the employees do not have permanent computers and they “migrate”. I forgot what the telephone numbers of employees are - three letters from the first or last name or login and voila, then click with the mouse. I immediately have the option to call on a work or mobile phone. Any calls after the lasagna on the Internet in search of the company - just save the phone number. If I work from home, people often do not even notice it, I am still available by phone. Problems with the telephone installation of remote offices and home staff disappear automatically. For lovers - video conferencing. Any complicated routing? For example, on Friday evening the calls should be armed, and on Saturday from 10.00 the duty engineer of technical support takes over the watch - you need to transfer calls to his worker, and he can go to the client, then you need the calls to come to his mobile, and after 20.00 calls should come to the security, and on Sunday the scheme is the same but there will be another engineer with another mobile. And on Saturday morning it may not be known which of the engineers will work on Sunday. And on Sunday he can go to customers by 10, but he should receive all calls to his mobile ... By the way, an absolutely real scheme of work is described ... Everything is set up in 10 minutes and people rule the redirection and the rules themselves, with a mouse, on a computer in a great interface. But before that, it was necessary to write large block circuits, menuals with magic sequences of numbers that you need to click on the phone and hang it in front of the workplaces of employees and guards.
By the way, I do not remember whether I wrote or not, but presence status is available in all MS applications. Both in the office and on the SP portal ...
After such a massive advertisement, I am obliged to write, although this does not apply to this article ... OCS is fully functional only with its own native telephones, of which 3 pieces literally cost them like a bridge of chivous crystal. In general, if you suddenly want to completely abandon your PBX - study this question. Most of me are sitting with ordinary headsets and a communicator on my computer.

There are examples and more, there are many of them, they are different. It’s just a very long time to write everything, it’s time to move on.

Why admins need to love MS solutions

Dear comrades administrators. Accept what you most need to 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 not played all day. My purely personal, and certainly erroneous, opinion - A hypothetical intelligent * .nix administrator in a vacuum - will transfer all users to Linux, make you work in Open Office, install Unix on servers, and steer everything from home, even from the phone, completely exclude all the downtime and shoals, implements its "dream infrastructure" that performs all the basic functions and services for users, will sit and drink tea or write smart articles on Habré - that is, perfectly fulfill the "supporting function". The bosses will love him as a subordinate who does his job well, which simply does not need to be touched and that's all.
At this time, an intelligent MS administrator will establish a centralized update of the OS and antiviruses, remove from whom it is possible, admin rights, having the applications continue to work, thus achieving an almost perfect system operation, sometimes it will happen as a result of a new job because new viruses have crawled through or because that in spite of everything, the user began to slow down and pull down everything easier than to figure out why he is slowing down. But at the same time, it will give its users a bunch of additional ways to solve their problems, it will be lured by new features. His “dream infrastructure” is always in the future. Users will love it because it will be easier and easier for them to live day by day. The bosses 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. That is, it helps to create additional competitive advantages for the company.

And after some time it turns out that the scale of the tasks of the MS administrator is much bigger than the larger one, and the tasks are more important and more interesting. To collect all the stones - exaggerating, it is like an assembler and 1C. On the assembler, you write the ideal program for your needs, and 1C may be full of glitches, only solves a different level of problems.

About the fact that silent about dishonest

Having finished with pleasures we will talk about nagging and patterns.
1. MS is unstable, buggy, full of viruses and so on.
I would not say. Put WSUS, update centrally antivirus, if possible, take admin rights from users. I will not say that in my practice there are no problems at all, although the specifics are such that there are many users with administrative rights - but problems are rare enough, you can perfectly live with this.
2. If something breaks on the server, everything is available to me before the source code, and there ...
The MS infrastructure works well if it is managed by quite competent people. Of course, sometimes it’s harder to figure out what needs to be backed up and how to restore it, of course, it's psychologically easier and clearer when you have all the mail in the form of separate text files in the directory with the user name on the server. But if you become a competent specialist, if you even tried a couple of times to restore the system from a backup on a new hardware before putting the system into operation and during operation, 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 whether I bought and so on and not because I didn’t 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 possibility to buy - as long as you can live on a pirate one, it is important to honestly show the business the opportunities that this software carries. If you have computers - typewriters - God himself told you 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 give them up for free he is not ready. Benefit is often not easy to count, but sometimes it becomes obvious. Finally, if the director is hard-nosed or the business does not bring enough profit to bear these “optional” expenses, and you are simply afraid to be under attack - is it not better to look for a new good place, and not to abandon good products?

Conclusion
For a long time I just read Habr. But once again I really wanted to write here. And the first reason why I wanted it so much - because I personally do not know an alternative way for an enterprise that uses quite a lot of complex IT services, except as proprietary software. At the same time, I see that there is a very qualified community here that can prompt, direct, clarify. I recognize that as a professional, I don’t see an alternative, but I would like to know it and, perhaps, to grow professionally. I wrote this article in the sandbox, but the UFO rejected it and I generally understand why - apparently a bit too much advertising and jolts to holivaru, although I was just trying to do the opposite. But all the same, the desire to get feedback from you turned out to be stronger than the annoyance of the beginning graphomaniac and laziness, and I went to the people. Many thanks to habrachelovek Stepan Ovchinnikov, who recognized the article as a whole fit and gave me suggestions and comments on its improvement, as well as an invite, so that she still saw the light. I would be very grateful to competent opponents to argue their opinion.