From the very late 1990’s up until the time I retired, I worked in an office. I chose a different career path that involved sitting in front of a computer doing things with other computers and servers for the British Healthcare system: the NHS.
Throughout my career in IT, I worked mainly in server support, however I was often called upon to provide input into designing systems (systems architecture) from a hardware and software perspective. This ranged from installing a piece of software on a user’s computer, to designing and building enterprise storage systems and virtual server farms.
Of course, there was also the bit where I just pointed third-party engineers at a room and made them tea whilst they built IT stuff.
Inevitably, software would be involved. Software as in an application. Whether it was an application to backup files and folders, an application for electronic canteen cash registers or applications to check levels of ferritin in the blood. they were many and diverse.
Looking at new stuff
As I mentioned in this post sometimes we would go and look at new bits of software, or hardware. Sometimes, if one of the team had ideas to improve an existing system (complying with the ITIL Continuous Improvement cycle, for those that are interested) we would look at new, newer or different makes of application. If we found something (or some-things) suitable, we’d research them and trial the most likely looking candidates. If all went well, we’d then have to write a white paper (to justify it), apply for funding and then wait for a go/no-go decision.
“Doing the research” entailed arranging to go and see stuff, or downloading and trialing software in a test environment. Eventually (and inevitably) there would be questions, some of which could be answered by FAQ’s, some of it by emailing the software authors, some answered directly by the selling company’s technical sales experts.
Questions would normally stay pretty much the same: how does this interact with x, how much bandwidth does this use, how much storage space/processing power does it require, can we devolve administration down to several levels – and so on, depending on the application.
There was always the question of support. Stuff breaks. Even applications, it’s pretty much a fact of life nowadays (although it didn’t used to!). There are always little quirky complex bits to do with your network, or how your user is going to use the applications that’ll warrant some support at some point.
And this was the point at which I used to get told off!
Just one thing…
During the research for an application, I’d always go and look at any support forums (if they had any). I’d also look at changelogs for the software application, and check the current version number of the software (usually, the higher the revision/version number is, generally speaking the more fixes have had to be applied). The main point I’d focus on would be the support aspect.
If we went to look at software (and if we had to go and look at it, it was probably quite the investment!), I would ask how many support calls they’d had for it over the course of a year. How many calls, how many emails etc. If the number was high, it would get “massaged” away by the sales people in an attempt to gloss over it.
But let’s face it, if you have a lot of support calls for an application, then your application is as buggy as hell – and you haven’t tested it properly! Which is what I used to say (and get reprimanded for mentioning). More often than not, my bosses would be satisfied by the amount of discount and dedicated support we would get. I just used to roll my eyes.
They’re crap, mate!
A good example of this was when we looked at some web filtering hardware to replace some older units. It was a fairly long process, spanning several weeks. We looked at software, we looked at dedicated hardware units. We had demonstrations. We had chats with the technical sales people.
We boiled the suitable candidates down to two in the end. We (as in I) also compared the support forum of one against the other. The software version (the more expensive option of the two) had very few support issues (their forum was mainly empty!), but the (very well known) hardware unit supplier’s forum was absolutely massive! In the space of one year, the forum had accrued over 8 million forum posts… but it was cheap.
I’ll give you one guess (I won’t) which one we bought. Yes, the cheap one.
And yes, it was crap, mate.
It happens now, too!
I still do the support research even now I’m retired. Even just for something as simple as a WordPress plugin.
Does it have a lot of support issues? If yes, chances are you’re going to come unstuck at some point.
So far, so good though, the philosophy is working well and there’s no-one to tell me otherwise now!