The desktop management advisory guide
Strategic management advice, at the press of a button
Guide Desktop management isn’t easy. There’s a raft of expertise needed to help you juggle the various increasingly pressing demands of systems, users and budgets. And it’s rare that there’s one piece of advice that will help you tackle it all.
Sure, people can say "upgrade, downgrade, virtualise, go open source..." but it doesn’t really take into consideration the individuality of your situation.
Fortunately, help is at hand. Here at The Register, in our ever-growing attempts to make your lives a little bit easier, we’ve been developing a little tool that might just give you a leg-up.
The Reg’s new Desktop Advisory Guide, developed in conjunction with people a lot smarter than me, promises to give you some strategic and tactical advice about managing your desktop estate – and it’s all built around your unique situation.
Answer a few questions and we’ll dish the advice – a snapshot overview and detailed further reading to help you face your challenges and pitch for more budget, or tangible facts and figures to support a project.
You can try it completely free right here. ®
COMMENTS
Cloud
You can have your own "cloud" in your corporate intranet. Earlier this was called "client/server". What I say is that the "client" should be JavaScript based to kill all sorts of application distribution/updating issues.
And even that can have local storage with HTML5 or Google Gears. Certainly, lots of hassle to sync that with the cloud/server/corp. datacenter database.
Using a proper ISP like Deutsche Telekom or Vodafone you have less than 8 hours downtime per year for a private DSL line here. Alice is utter crap, though. Downtime is more 1 hour per day with them here in Teutonia.
@jlocke
So how do you get past the "what if you are in a location with poor/no internet coverage" or "someone went through the local fibre with a cat" problems?
Or for that matter the part where by being in the "cloud," you don't control your own data?
Cloud computing has too many problems yet...trust being the biggest, but reliability of both the providers and the network infrastructure are a very close second. I don't know about you, but where I live internet connections aren't 100% stable. There are easily 10 or more multi-hour outages a year. (Big time money for a corporation can be lost in that timeframe.)
And honestly, I don't trust Google or any of their ilk as far as I can throw a multi billion dollar vertically integrated megacorporate monopoly.
To each thier own, however...
Desktop Management Needed ??
a better strategy than dealing with Registry And DLL Hell is to move all the crap into the Browser using JavaScript. The only thing that must be updated then is the OS and the browser. Google Chrome has incredibly fast and can do serious JavaScript processing.
At least for all the database-based stuff there is no need for win32 applications any more.
Office Packages are bit different, as there are no really credible JS alternatives yet. Maybe you can live with something like Google Docs, but I doubt it. But Office or OpenOffice can be updated using either MS or Linux out-of-the-box updating mechanisms.
Certainly, don't allow users to store anything on local harddisks. Store all files on server disks you can manage/backup centrally.
