[mso] Re: exe files
- From: "Greg Chapman" <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2003 16:04:10 -0500
>
> That's a debate that I'm sure they could enjoy.
>
Such administrative stuctures normally do. They exist almost solely to
defend their own presence or deliberately slow the rate of change to a rate
the corporation may comfortably absorb and rarely present actual fact based
data from which to make decisions like the one we're discussing.
> tables etc. But for 90% of their work, they use only the basics. For
> example, I doubt that many of them have ever written/recorded a macro!
>
If the only motivation to upgrade is the feature set, it's understandable
why they'd stay behind. But it's foolish based on the fact that support
(which is not merely a factor of getting someone at some entity to answer
your questions) for the current installed base erodes away...any
vulnerabilities or bugs with that version remain and, with time, have less
and less support thrown behind fixing a problem. I'm curious, intently, on
when and why they placed Office 2000 on these systems. I think the answer
might be illustrative.
> The corporate mind-set isn't much brighter however. Recently, they
> posted emailed their staff with lap-tops telling them not to
> log in, or
> open unknown emails as their was a major virus around. The
> trouble was,
> to read the e-mail, they had to open up outlook and guess
> what? ........
> the MSBlaster worm spread even more.
You mean, SoBig.f, of course. MSBlaster and its variants do not use email
(yet) for propagation. But you're quite correct; the basic assumption
collides with what they required of their users. I think that's even an old
problem. Along the lines of, "How do I notify MIS that the mail server is
down?" - "Send us an email and we'll look into it." It's good for a giggle,
at least.<g>
>The next week when, they had
> security guards on the door, handing out slips to all staff.
> Those with
> laptops were ordered to go immediately to go to room XXX to
> be checked.
Ahhh!! A quarantine!! Good move! And painful! Who'd have thought we'd be
reduced to that old response after all this time? And how did they handle
RAS and VPN clients?
> I'm not sure that for basic users, the equation is very
> difficult. Power
> users no doubt benefit from maintaining at least close to leading edge
> technology, but the drones can cope quite well with less
Oh, yes, I agree! But, like I said, if the main motivation is the feature
set then I'll stick by my claim that the thought process is flawed and may
even be non-existent. In this environment, feature set is a secondary
consideration in the corporate network to restoring system security.
Companies are claiming huge financial losses to security issues, especially
code exploits. This means the measurement has to be the cost for shutting
the business down for recovery vs. the cost of upgrading.
In the HR department, they'll be adding to the economic flame, too, when
they knuckle down and produce the results describing the cost of replacing
all those burned out geeks after the last round the clock for 3 days
patching/innoculation session.
I'm comfortable, at this time, with this position and would get behind any
executive who stated, "At the end of 18 months after the release of any
Microsoft product on which our workers depend (that's operating systems,
application suites and server environments), we will have in hand our plan
for migrating said software to the latest version. We will have in hand an
agreement with Microsoft on costs and support burdens and we will have in
hand a synchronous list of services/systems to terminate. Corporate finance
will have that data to work with as a guideline. Our goal is to reduce KBA
costs resulting from emergency repairs of these key computer activities by
XX%."
Eek! But you've got to pay if you wanna play!
Greg Chapman
http://www.mousetrax.com
"Counting in binary is as easy as 01, 10, 11!
With thinking this clear, is coding really a good idea?"
> -----Original Message-----
> From: mso-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:mso-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Colin
> Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2003 4:38 PM
> To: mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [mso] Re: exe files
*************************************************************
You are receiving this mail because you subscribed to mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx or
MicrosoftOffice@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To send mail to the group, simply address it to mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To Unsubscribe from this group, send an email to
mso-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word "unsubscribe" (without the quotes) in
the subject line.
Or, visit the group's homepage and use the dropdown menu. This will also allow
you to change your email settings to digest or vacation (no mail).
//www.freelists.org/webpage/mso
To be able to use the files section for sharing files with the group, send a
request to mso-moderators@xxxxxxxxxxxxx and you will be sent an invitation with
instructions. Once you are a member of the files group, you can go here to
upload/download files:
http://www.smartgroups.com/vault/msofiles
*************************************************************
Other related posts:
