[Pmwiki-users] a plea to all custom skin makers

Neil Herber nospam
Sat Jan 15 17:19:03 CST 2005


At 2005-01-15  03:49 PM -0500, Tom Holroyd is rumored to have said:
> > > Many would argue that this is an IE 6 problem, and I agree.
> > > But telling that to my clients working in government agencies
> > > where the IT department has locked down all of the PCs,
> > > preventing the installation of even so much as a browser
> > > plugin doesn't do me any good.
>
>No, really, tell them to stop using IE.  They need to complain to
>their IT people.  Until the problems in IE are fixed, which won't
>be for a LONG time, they should not use it, period.  Any IT
>person worth his salt should recognize that IE is part of their
>problems, and forcing people to use it is just going to create
>more work in the long run, from viruses, worms, trojans and
>buffer overflows, not to mention beautiful websites that can't be
>rendered properly.  Installing Firefox or something, and deleting
>the IE icon from the desktop, will automatically get rid of a
>huge hole in their infrastructure.  In two years as a sysadmin,
>I've had one machine completely trashed, and two others infected
>with worms (one had to be taken back to the IT dept. and
>reformatted there!), simply because the users were using stock MS
>installs, and downloading things with IE.  Since I forced (by
>policy, of course) all my users to browse with Firefox, I have
>had zero (0) problems.  And my website looks good, too (well, I
>didn't pick the colors, but that's a different story).  :-)

Tom

In the case of my client, IT has completely locked down the desktop 
machines. Users cannot install anything. I appreciate your admonition to 
convince them to use what we both know is a better browser, but let me 
explain my position in more detail.

For one of my projects I am trying to use a Wiki to share information with 
a government commission and a UN agency. If you think I have a snowball's 
chance in Hades of convincing the IT departments of those two bodies that 
switching browsers is a good idea (so that they can view my Wiki), you are 
dreaming in technicolor! Even my client had to go cap-in-hand to IT to 
allow him to install QuickTime on his desktop machine.

For many years I was a die-hard Mac user, and I eventually had to buy a 
Windoze server and laptop just to put an end to the inevitable 
finger-pointing that resulted when anyone had a problem with anything, be 
it a website, a Powerpoint presentation, a Word document, or a PDF. "This 
doesn't work because he created it on a Mac!", they would say. I stopped 
that dead with "Funny, it works on my Dell Laptop when I connect it to a 
share on my NT server ..."

A paid-by-the-hour consultant who persists in telling clients things they 
don't want to hear may have the moral high ground, but will also have a 
very light wallet. I have to choose my battles very carefully, and fighting 
IT over browser choice is about as hopeless a battle that I can imagine. 
No, that's not true. I could try to convince them all to switch to Macs!  ;->

PS: Both groups used to use Macs extensively.


Neil

Neil Herber
Corporate info at http://www.eton.ca/
Eton Systems, 15 Pinepoint Drive, Nepean, ON, Canada K2H 6B1
Tel: (613) 829-4668 




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