Well another year has passed, and things are cooling down everywhere in anticipation of a well earned break for all. I’ve been talking to a lot of customers over the past month who are looking to make significant changes in the coming year, and the best piece of advice I have is to clean up first.

Every second site I’ve been on lately have had numerous accounts needing disabling, security permissions that have been added willy nilly on the go, with very little forward thought or planning. Now we all understand that the past few years have been tough and purse strings tightened, but a little maintenance now goes a long way come upgrade time, and will save you all a pretty penny. And please don’t forget that we have admin service accounts for that very reason, they are for servicing, not every day use, and there is no reason that an everyday user needs full admin privileges. I don’t and find it so much easier to keep track of changes, and avoid costly mistakes.

While you’re at it give your drives, share and backups a good look at too. Do you really need to be backing up those old user shares?? Why are you spending valuable money upgrading due to lack of disk space, when everything on those old shares was moved two years ago, and hey look it’s still here too ….. With the high price of hard drives caused by flooding in Thailand and an uneasy market driving the prices even higher, is now really the time to spend the big bucks.

As an example one of my customers has been backing up 120GB of OLD users data for the past two years, all of which was copied to the new employees share when they left. Now that is 120GB of data going across the network every night. 120GB of valuable storage space being utilised on their under resourced server. 120GB of now FREE space. So what were you saying about spending another $20000 to put in that new server, how about what you already have. Oh and the icing on the cake, next year when they do finally upgrade, well they don’t need to add quite as much space to that Terminal Server as they thought they did, and they aren’t going to pay for me to be onsite for an extra half a day whilst that data copies across.

That’s me for now, leaving on a high and dry note.
Clean up in the new year folks, and enjoy the added benefits.