Promotion time

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Mackintire

2[H]4U
Joined
Jun 28, 2004
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Too tired to offer a story today... I'm sure the details on my career change back in 2011 are somewhere else on the forum.

Cliff notes:

  • Changed careers to be a full time IT guy back in 2011
  • Got into a med sized business at one step over entry level
  • After 6 months was told I was overqualified and greatly exceeded what I was hired for.
  • In the past 18 months I've Fixed/updated, All the domain controller/ switch architecture / print servers/file servers/ SAN/ Sharepoint/ SysAid/ Solidworks PDM/ Primary Management Server/ new building layout/ 40KVA UPS /12 ton Liebart AC deployment/semi-automated WSUS batchpatch deployment/numerous Group Policy automations
  • Produced 30+ new documents for all the above
  • Got promoted to Sr. Network Engineer/IT Support Engineer
  • Now responsible for the development network, 40+ server 500VMs 490 spindles with 2.2 PB of storage

Upcoming projects include:
  • Implement the new FTA, including groupboxes (dropboxes)
  • Company wide AV update (ESET 5.0)
  • New wireless AP upgrades Alcatel (Aruba units)
  • Add a redundant 10Ge uplink to the Production Network, by adding two new switches to the stack
  • Rebuild the Dev Environment with a 10Ge backbone (currently the dev network runs almost 18 ports worth of lagged ports through the production network which causes us issues including a lack of ports)
  • Exchange 2013/ Lyncs 2013
  • Company wide Office 2013 update
  • PGTR SNMP deployment and monitoring setup
  • Implement HA in the VMware enviroment
 
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I'm confused, are you asking us something or just gloating :D

Anyways, until I see a question.... Good work!
 
Congrats, sounds like you're doing good work. Is it worth rolling out Office 2013 / Exchange 2013 instead of Office 365? I don't know about a company your size, but my company (about 40k employees) finds a lot of benefit to Office 365.
 
wtburnette said:
Congrats, sounds like you're doing good work. Is it worth rolling out Office 2013 / Exchange 2013 instead of Office 365? I don't know about a company your size, but my company (about 40k employees) finds a lot of benefit to Office 365.
Click to expand...

Our conclusion was that since we already have Exchange, need/want the persistant chat room features in Lyncs 2013, already have sharepoint 2010 which has quality and document tracking addon's already in our infrastructure, an archiving system with legal hold and all the hardware to support it all; it made more sense to upgrade the current setup than to move everything into the cloud.

The yearly pricing between the two options is fairly close with our setup. That's keeping in mind that we would also have to migrate almost 2TB of mailstore and DB into the microsoft cloud.

That said, If I was setting everything up from scratch I'd probably have gone with Office 365.
 
It's impolite to masturbate in public. :eek:

Sounds like to took over from someone pretty clueless, or at least criminally lazy.
 
My manager was running a one man show and system architecture is not his thing. Most everything was contracted out or implemented by the data center on a "good enough" basis.

Requested functions were provisioned without usability or expansion being considered everything was designed from a minimal cost being the primary driver point of view.

The development environment I just inherited is somewhat the opposite. No cost hold bars implementation...stupid over spending and again no overarching design plan. Its a expensive piecemeal system that now has additional overhead in electricity and maintenance.
 
Mackintire said:
Our conclusion was that since we already have Exchange, need/want the persistant chat room features in Lyncs 2013, already have sharepoint 2010 which has quality and document tracking addon's already in our infrastructure, an archiving system with legal hold and all the hardware to support it all; it made more sense to upgrade the current setup than to move everything into the cloud.

The yearly pricing between the two options is fairly close with our setup. That's keeping in mind that we would also have to migrate almost 2TB of mailstore and DB into the microsoft cloud.

That said, If I was setting everything up from scratch I'd probably have gone with Office 365.
Click to expand...

Makes sense to me.

For my company the cost of the hardware (and supporting that hardware) was too much, compared to moving our 40k person company to the cloud. I've been extremely happy with it thus far, though I'm now just an end user of the tech since I moved to Security... ;)

EDIT: Oh and since we're gloating ( :D ), I work from home 2 - 3 days a week. Yesterday was gorgeous, so I did our team meeting conference call from my deck, where I was kicked back in shorts, sipping a cool drink. Nothing in the world beats telecommuting!
 
Mackintire said:
Too tired to offer a story today... I'm sure the details on my career change back in 2011 are somewhere else on the forum.

  • good work.
Click to expand...


If I've learned anything in my experience in the business world... not just at my own company, but when analyzing the structure of customers' companies being over qualified for your job is not a good thing.

Too often when working with customers I'm paired up with some entry level-ish guy who really knows his shit and is really smart. Then when I have to deal with their management they're big stupid heads (yes I said stupid head, so they can understand it). These people tend to be victims of the Peter Principle.

You seem to have done alot of grunt work which is good. I sincerely hope what I see in the majority of my experiences does not happen to you!

I do have a question for you in regards to Sharepoint. We had SBS2008 with an old version of Sharepoint. It was an absolute pain to invite external customers to the sites. Has this changed in newer versions of sharepoint?
 
jadams said:
If I've learned anything in my experience in the business world... not just at my own company, but when analyzing the structure of customers' companies being over qualified for your job is not a good thing.

Too often when working with customers I'm paired up with some entry level-ish guy who really knows his shit and is really smart. Then when I have to deal with their management they're big stupid heads (yes I said stupid head, so they can understand it). These people tend to be victims of the Peter Principle.

You seem to have done alot of grunt work which is good. I sincerely hope what I see in the majority of my experiences does not happen to you!

I do have a question for you in regards to Sharepoint. We had SBS2008 with an old version of Sharepoint. It was an absolute pain to invite external customers to the sites. Has this changed in newer versions of sharepoint?
Click to expand...

It's not any better in Sharepoint 2010. Sharepoint suffers greatly from being a collection of decent ideas stuck together with scotch tape and bubble gum. The good news is it appears that microsoft is going to eventually fix this turd a little at a time. 2010 was a step in the right direction. From what I've seen 2013 is another step in the same direction.

What you are looking for might be improved in sharepoint 2013, if only because Microsoft made a concentrated effort to unify the collaboration of data between different connectors in 2013. We work around that issue by using a juniper virtual firewall with a dedicated portal to our sharepoint server. So we can provide limited access to the specific parts of sharepoint we want via both permissions and via limited visibility from the external user's end.
 
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