Re: OT: Need your help in getting to 100 'fans' in Facebook

In article <OjpJnQQ$JHA.1248@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, cgaliher@xxxxxxxxx
says...

It is an interesting debate to say the least. Obviously I disagree with
you on that "most" businesses don't need access to facebook. There was a
time not too long ago that I heard techs say "most" businesses didn't need
internet access, and having it was a threat to their network.

Cliff - the most common threat I see is employees with access that does
not positively promote the business. What I mean is the employee that
doesn't need Google, MSN, Yahoo, IM, EBay, etc... in fact, MOST
employees at almost every place I have clients, in most vertical
markets, don't need "Internet" access at all.

Or that most
businesses didn't need a website because most people still got their
advertising through print/TV/radio and their information from traditional
media or CD-ROMs and 56k dial-up was just too slow to get "real"
information. The internet was a fad.

I've never held that position, I went paperless more than a decade ago
and have always found the value in a website and blog and other forms of
media, but I disagree that most employees at most companies need that
level of access.

Obviously today email is an essential communications tool and the SBS
"in-the-know" techs recommend direct SMTP delivery and not POP3. So an
internet connection, despite the risk, is necessary.

Allowing the Server an internet connection, with limited ports, filtered
and such is very different that allowing the "Network" internet access.

Equally, most
businesses benefit from having a web presence. I believe that having a
Facebook presence is beneficial to almost *any* business now, and that
benefit will become more evident as we, as a society, come to terms with how
to best use it. Equally, as that settles out, access to facebook from the
office, because it will become more integral, will also become more
necessary. It isn't a matter of if, just a matter of when.

I don't believe as you do - I can see letting the marketing department
manage a FB page or other, but I see no reason to allow common users
access to FB from inside most company networks. FB is a marketing tool,
like Linked-In, and others, but that doesn't make it necessary to the
Pharmacist, the Accounting department, the estimator, etc....

Your second argument is interesting as well, and although a tangent
from the
above, is intriguing enough that I'll embrace it and reply. Yes, there is
an "expectation" of access to these tools from the digital generation. At
the same time, I'm not sure I disagree with that expectation. Before the
PC, you'd do your job...and maybe if you were a workaholic or a high-paid
lawyer, you worked long hours. But once you left the office, you were gone.
You didn't have a cell-phone. You didn't have email. You *might* have an
answering machine. But if you went out to dinner, you were unreachable.
Period. Phones had cords, so if you were out doing yard work, you were
unreachable. You worked your time, you went home, and *maybe* got called in
to work if you were unlucky enough to be close enough to a phone that the
office had a number for. The work life and the home life were *very*
separate and distinct.

Fast forward to today. Even the average wal-mart sales clerk might get
called in. "We are really slammed, can you come work today?" or the
mid-level manager at Staples: "Hey, this is Bob. I can't seem to find that
TPS report? Do you happen to have a copy? Can you email it to me?"
And...because she carries a blackberry, she can. With mobile, email, VPN,
RPC over HTTPS, webmail, all prevalent now, even in SBS, the employees of
today all run the risk of their job interfering with their personal life far
more than 20 years ago. Is it so wrong that their personal life bleeds into
their work just a little?!? Sure, there is "some" loss in productivity in
the traditional sense, but I'd argue that there is also a gain in a
non-traditional sense. Companies can make a sale because *their* sales rep
is now reachable. A manager no longer has to wait until the next day to
compile numbers because he can get the information he needs even when
employees have gone home for the day. The slight loss is replaced in
unexpected gains elsewhere, making for a net-zero sum.

I don't see where you've shown my position to be wrong or limiting the
company as you describe - the person at home can still email the office,
can still check email from the office, can even remote into the office
if needed. What the person at the OFFICE can't do is check their
PERSONAL email on gmail or yahoo or some non-company server, they can't
FTP into their home porn collection, they can't send raunchy content
emails to people at the company from their external email accounts
(because of filtering), etc...

If you notice, you talk about the company being able to reach the
employee, and I'm 100% for that, also the employee being able to reach
the company - I'm stating that there is no reason to allow "personal"
use from work, it's always abused and it's always a threat.

Can the technology be abused? Of course it can, and IT still plays
a role
in mitigating such abuse. We install bigger, badder, better edge devices.
First there was the firewall, then the UTM, now most devices are log, proxy,
cache, and do a host of other things as well. And where we used to monitor
logs, now we feed the logs into an aggregator and we analyze "trends." We
see if there is a sever uptick to gmail or facebook, and we react
accordingly. Maybe that is defining a company policy, or maybe that is
passing the abuse of an existing policy on so an employee's direct
supervisor can address the issue. But I see that as the evolution of IT,
not as a reason to stay in the past.

I have yet to come in contact with a company that provides mostly
unlimited internet access to ALL/Most employees where the employees were
not abusing it, and where that abuse was impacting productivity and the
morale of the still hard working employees around the abusers.

My best example is of a medical group, running two shifts, falling
behind, ramping up to hire and start a third shift for claims and order
processing - they had been in operation almost 2 years and just could
not keep up. I had begged them to let me filter all internet access, but
they wanted to allow the employees to browse on "Lunch" and "Breaks"....

I installed the blocking software in Monitoring mode, not blocking being
done, and was able to show where more than 30 of the 100+ people were
seriously abusing the Internet connection, some were sending 800+ emails
per day to friends outside the company, others were browsing porn,
others ebay, others trading stocks, one person spent the first two hours
of their shift doing their online banking a couple times a week.... The
company policy prohibited such activities, but it was not enforced.

We took the information and sat down with the owners - as it turned out,
the wasted time was the amount of time they hoped to regain by adding a
third shift... We implemented blocking, took a performance hit for the
first week, less the second week, and after three weeks were were slowly
gaining until we had regained 30% productivity increase - and there were
also people fired, for continuing to break the policy, after multiple
warnings - I can't tell you how many of the good workers actually
thanked me for implementing website blocking and content blocking...

This is a typical experience for me - we see the same issue and increase
in productivity at Accounting groups, Law offices, Manufacturing
locations, Food Service, Assisted Living Centers, Paving/Roofing
companies, construction offices.....

Obviously you and I see things very differently, and I want to stress that I
respect your opinion. I just happen to strongly disagree with it.

We're good, I enjoy the discussion, but we seem to have clients in very
different worlds.

--
You can't trust your best friends, your five senses, only the little
voice inside you that most civilians don't even hear -- Listen to that.
Trust yourself.
spam999free@xxxxxxxxxx (remove 999 for proper email address)
.

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