[mso] Why your admin gets grumpy. Was: Newsletter

  • From: "Greg Chapman" <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 21 May 2002 14:01:52 -0500

Interesting you should bring that up. Her (Dian's) Intranet solution is
the best one, in my mind, because of the limitations of out of the box
installs of groupware mail servers. So you as a user got fed up with
lots of fancy docs hitting your mailbox? Dian used to work with a woman
who did everything in MS Project and mailed the updated copy to about 50
people twice a day. All the users did think it was great (excepting Dian
who recognized that whis woman wasn't accomplishing a thing in her day
at work except for updating a complicated schedule sheet).

Well, the mail admins (myself and a couple other fellows) weren't all
that pleased about it. Each of those documents was about 5 megs large.
She sent it twice a day to that @50 people. Each person, then, had a
mailbox that grew by @10 megs per day because attachments, like the
messages themselves, are stored in the recipient's own mailbox. At the
server housing those mailboxes, diskspace was disappearing at the rate
of @250 megs per day just because of this one person. In effect, we
could only afford have this woman talking to our folks for about 3
months unless we did intrusive things like opening people's mail boxes
and deleting older copies of the file. She was every bit as bad as a
virus on the file system and we were going to go broke on disk space
just to entertain her, all because attachments in a groupware
environment multiply like little bunnies. I'm amazed that this comm
group you're talking about hadn't yet been smacked hard by the cluestick
for that kind of operation!

And, of course, if we had to open a mailbox and clear out some of this
stuff, two things were going to happen. First, we were probably gong to
hit something important (Sorry!) and, second, people were going to
glower at us for being network nazis.<sigh>

Nah, it's unreasonable behavior like this that makes your admin grumpy.
He's already slow because learning the changes to a dozen different
services this month is nigh on impossible. Consider how long it takes
you who are expert on one or two applications (which is not an unusual
state to be in) to learn those changes when the next vesrion comes
along. Multiply by 6 (conservative number) and apply to a human who also
is planning to upgrade everyone's desktop, rewire the ethernet, add two
servers to the production farm and is going back to school to keep her
certifications current. Somehow, they still find time to breed.<g>

Yep, if you're working with an Enterpise Mail System (Groupware),
consider where your customers (sometimes called users) can store a
single copy of that 5 meg file and teach them how to tell other people
to get there. You'll all be happier.<g>

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 James S. Huggins (MSO)
> Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2002 1:26 PM
> To: mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [mso] Re: Newsletter-making software!!
> 
> 
> 
> The parent company of my last company had a communications 
> department that would send out communications. They would 
> email Word and PowerPoint documents for EVERYTHING.
> 
> A 100 word notice was NOT sent in plain text. It was sent in 
> "fancy". Drove me nuts.
> 
> I like a well crafted printed piece as much as the next guy.
> 
> But, for me, if you want me to read it online, format it for 
> online (one column, top to bottom). If you want me to read it 
> printed, format it for printing.
> 
> And whichever format you use, do NOT report on the company 
> party and end the story with "a good time was had by all".
> 
> 
> James S. Huggins
>

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