Today was the first day on the job for WindowsCIO. There's pros and cons, obviously... (and I'm not including the things I've talked about before, like the fact that it's infinitely more likely that Sr. Management will listen to him.. this is just the stuff that happened on Day One....
Pros:
Appears to have some technical savvy and geek quotient, even if it is Windows-centric. It's entirely possible he reads this blog. (Not that this would change anything I write, as anyone who knows me knows)
He asked for an iMac for his desktop, and so seems willing to at least attempt to branch out into slightly unfamiliar territory for him, which is good given my previous worries about paths of least resistance
He had no problem getting that "I don't put firewall holes in, period, but you are the CIO, so if you direct me to put a hole in, I will, but I'm going to want the Get Out Of Jail Free card documenting that you asked for it, so if and when it comes back to bite us in the ass, I point your way and say 'He made me do it.'"
Cons:
One of his first complaints was about "why couldn't he just click on a name in the mail application and get all their contact info. If we had a real mail system...." (insert vision of me miming a .45 in my mouth here)
Is also getting himself a Dell ... I'll take bets now on - two months from now - how much work is getting done on one machine versus the other
Is going to use Entourage instead of the Apple Mail application. He's an Outlook user, so I guess he's used to risking his entire mailbox's messages in a single bigass database file. Good luck with that, it's not supported, you're on your own, have a nice day.
My greatest hope is that over the next couple weeks, I'll have something else to call him online other than WindowsCIO. Maybe, "NewCIOGuy" or something. I'll have to see evidence of the disappearance of the Windows-centric nature I was previously afraid of, though. The iMac was a start, but it seems almost superficial given the presence of the Dell and the "real mail system" comments.
Pardon me while I cross my fingers here.
We have a "real mail system" at work. It's down for maintenance for about 3 hours in the evening about 3 days a week. It very politely tells me that "There is no replica for that mailbox on this server."
I had a lot of experiences like this at my last job. One thing I learned was to choose your battles carefully.
And, if you're using IMAP I found that Mail.app works better than Entourage (though in all honesty Entourage actually isn't that bad. The mac group at MS is fairly clueful.)
Well, sure we know that Mail.app works better, but that's something I guess he'll have to learn on his own (since he used Mail.app for a while and then got disgusted with it).
Maybe (and I know I'm dreaming here) with a sexy iMac on his desk (assuming it's a new 17" one, and not a rev A indigo one :) he'll be overcome with the beauty and simplicty of the environment and decide that when he gets his dell that it's far too ugly and cumbersome to get any work done on.
I do Have a rev A on my desk and I've been trying to get something nicer because when I use my "real" machine (kde/gnome/windows) it's horribly ugly and clunky compared to the glory that is os/x...