A rant about IT issues

[redrabbit29]

I don't know about you but we still on a routine and regular basis have IT issues.

Week-to-week there are things like:

- Teams isn't working today
- Issue with bandwidth
- We are migrating software packages
- The phone system is a bit bad today
- Problem with Office templates
- Platform XYZ is unavailable for maintainance
- Microsoft word always just takes about 30 seconds to open a document
- Any spreadsheet which is more than 3 rows long has issues
- Teams crashes

Plus of course just random things that break such as a mapped drive suddenly disappears. Your email signature just disappears, etc...

Part of the issue may be that I work in the public sector - maybe private sector is better?

I also wonder, is this a UK thing? I've worked a lot with other countries like Germans, Dutch, US and they all just seem so much more organised, professional etc in the way their organisations are run.

Yet here we are in 2021 and systems are basically just thrown together and break on a daily basis.

It's been a stressful day so far!

[bigpriest]

redrabbit29 said:

I don't know about you but we still on a routine and regular basis have IT issues.

Week-to-week there are things like:

- Teams isn't working today
- Issue with bandwidth
- We are migrating software packages
- The phone system is a bit bad today
- Problem with Office templates
- Platform XYZ is unavailable for maintainance
- Microsoft word always just takes about 30 seconds to open a document
- Any spreadsheet which is more than 3 rows long has issues
- Teams crashes

Plus of course just random things that break such as a mapped drive suddenly disappears. Your email signature just disappears, etc...

Part of the issue may be that I work in the public sector - maybe private sector is better?

I also wonder, is this a UK thing? I've worked a lot with other countries like Germans, Dutch, US and they all just seem so much more organised, professional etc in the way their organisations are run.

Yet here we are in 2021 and systems are basically just thrown together and break on a daily basis.

It's been a stressful day so far!

I'm in NHS - our IT is provided by Local Government and I don't suffer any of those issues so it's just you

[rastapasta]

yeah same here in mainland europe. Access is junk most days, outlook not much better, internet is poor. those raspberry things to connect to the servers are junk. all halfarsed.

[manracer]

redrabbit29 said:

Part of the issue may be that I work in the public sector - maybe private sector is better?

I think, from experience, this could be a bigger part of the issue than you think.

I joke of course (a little),I too have some of them issues too.

[cavey76]

While not a complete defence we are in the midst of an evolution of IT from all on premise, ie in your businesses dingy IT cupboard or data centre to "The Cloud"

So your IT wonks maybe struggling moving these applications & services from one place to another. Saying that if you are public sector, God Bless you're likely to have to accept it for a while yet.

Spoken as a man who can't stick O365. I think it was Einstein that said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. Its evident he didnt live in the time of O365!

[Jinx]

MS teams has a global problem this morning - so not your ITs fault. Drive mapping losing mapped drives - again is a MS windows issue (though it is better since the 2020H2 update - this may not have been rolled out to you yet).
Can't help with the other problems though as I use my own kit whilst working from home (so only have myself to blame for any issues).

[P-Jay]

Not just you, MS are having one of their 'days' unfortunately and being that it seems like EVERYTHING is a part of 365 / Azure these days, they do seem to give the impression of a lot of small issues rather than one bigger one.


Could be worse, our phone system is now Teams based, I'm a 'Microsoft Partner' and even I hate it.

[Magnum 475]

Your issues can be summed up in a single word: "Microsoft". Sadly, everyone just buys Microsoft and accepts all its problems, issues, general quirks, and proprietary standards. There are better options available - some cost more, others are open source. Some organisations have woken up to the fact that there are better options than MS, some haven't.

[wiggy001]

redrabbit29 said:

I don't know about you but we still on a routine and regular basis have IT issues.

Week-to-week there are things like:

- Teams isn't working today
- Issue with bandwidth
- We are migrating software packages
- The phone system is a bit bad today
- Problem with Office templates
- Platform XYZ is unavailable for maintainance
- Microsoft word always just takes about 30 seconds to open a document
- Any spreadsheet which is more than 3 rows long has issues
- Teams crashes

Plus of course just random things that break such as a mapped drive suddenly disappears. Your email signature just disappears, etc...

Part of the issue may be that I work in the public sector - maybe private sector is better?

I also wonder, is this a UK thing? I've worked a lot with other countries like Germans, Dutch, US and they all just seem so much more organised, professional etc in the way their organisations are run.

Yet here we are in 2021 and systems are basically just thrown together and break on a daily basis.

It's been a stressful day so far!

I thought we might be colleagues until you mentioned "private sector".

[sociopath]

bigpriest said:

redrabbit29 said:

I don't know about you but we still on a routine and regular basis have IT issues.

Week-to-week there are things like:

- Teams isn't working today
- Issue with bandwidth
- We are migrating software packages
- The phone system is a bit bad today
- Problem with Office templates
- Platform XYZ is unavailable for maintainance
- Microsoft word always just takes about 30 seconds to open a document
- Any spreadsheet which is more than 3 rows long has issues
- Teams crashes

Plus of course just random things that break such as a mapped drive suddenly disappears. Your email signature just disappears, etc...

Part of the issue may be that I work in the public sector - maybe private sector is better?

I also wonder, is this a UK thing? I've worked a lot with other countries like Germans, Dutch, US and they all just seem so much more organised, professional etc in the way their organisations are run.

Yet here we are in 2021 and systems are basically just thrown together and break on a daily basis.

It's been a stressful day so far!

I'm in NHS - our IT is provided by Local Government and I don't suffer any of those issues so it's just you

I've done a fair bit of work with NHS IT, and can say IT in the public sector is very hit and miss, depending who supplies your services, and if they're useless or not. Many are competent, many many more are a complete waste of space.

[JakeT]

The MS 365 service is one I hate. Used to be with a company that used box/slack with exchange for email.

Then teams and sharepoint took over. MS are very good at crap communication platforms. Skype was a great example, as was Lync.

Even with a gigabit of bandwidth, the experience is poor. OneDrive is slow to open and close documents, teams can do funny things, and sharepoint is a bit of a maze to me.

I’m sure for companies it makes sense, as it’s one package per user. It includes an office license, and I’m sure for some enterprises stops them having to mess around with windows license keys too, but I do not like it. Heck, my personal machine still uses Office 2010.

[TheGuru]

cavey76 said:

While not a complete defence we are in the midst of an evolution of IT from all on premise, ie in your businesses dingy IT cupboard or data centre to "The Cloud"

So your IT wonks maybe struggling moving these applications & services from one place to another. Saying that if you are public sector, God Bless you're likely to have to accept it for a while yet.

The organization I most recently worked for was using 2017+ hardware with Windows 7 and locally installed Office 2010, with local file servers. Lightning fast.

As with most organizations they moved to Office 365 and although still installed locally, everything is just that much more sluggish due to reliance on cloud services and authentication/connections etc. plus many organisations haven’t quite got their network bandwidth sorted out, let alone applications

[Gman20]

Public sector IT takes a lot of flack generally, but actually its not all that bad. Everyone knows how deep thier pockets are and they've got relatively simple requirements so what they get tends to be adequate but perhaps a bit over priced.
It is the really big project stuff with really complex requirements where they can sometimes get taken for a ride.
In the private sector you get a much bigger range. There are those organisations that will to spend extra, and get it right who will be better off than you, but there will be an awful lot of other organisations who will squeeze every penny with thier IT, either through necessity or by choice and try to do everything impossibly cheap, this usually results in it being an absolute pile of st.

[loudlashadjuster]

Most IT things work most of the time. The big difference between orgs in which things seem to work more often, and those where things are flaky, is the quality of the people and the leadership which allows them to do what they need to do.

I've worked in both types, and in the flaky corner things are as you describe. Often a simple thing like having a crappy machine image that is misconfigured or poorly optimised leads to the things like apps taking long to open, random pauses, thrashing discs etc. and this has an impact on almost everything else, even SaaS services as the underlying protocols are hamstrung by the poor setup of routing, group policy conflicts, or some other voodoo. One very large UK oil company was like this. Embarrassing, really, considering the resources they have at their disposal.

Often this is the result of lots of legacy decisions without any high-level mandate to properly maintain things, and/or money not being spent, or being spent in the wrong areas. Troubleshooting, say, an SAP report that's taking hours due to some undocumented black hole in a firewall config is no-one's idea of fun and often takes more skill and time than L1/L2 resource have to give, so things just get ignored/accepted and resentment and frustration builds.

Conversely, my current employer is, I think, pretty good. We have a very effective provider who have been given a clear mandate in terms of security and performance expectations by us, a decent budget (this isn't as important as you might imagine though), and use (mostly) high quality personnel. Our on-premise and clouds apps generally work very well, most of the time, and we have managed several major transitions without any significant service degradation. As an example, we were able to react to covid almost overnight as our underlying architectures were capable of handling the move from 80% of staff at their desks to 100% working remotely with only a few configuration and licensing changes.

The problem is how can you move away from the crappy end of the spectrum? Same as anything else; good leadership, accepting that big change (and the short-term pain that goes with it) is necessary, and probably no small amount of cash, given how crusty many enterprise IT setups are.

I think the main problem with large orgs where poor IT is just a fact of life is that so many people working there have no idea what good looks like, and those that do are not often in a position to to anything significant about it. Even if they are, they present some numbers to the board and are promptly told to go away and reconsider.

[sociopath]

The problem with IT is if it's working finance won't pay for upgrades as it's "working fine" and if it stops working,finance won't pay for upgrades as IT need to "get it working properly first".

Similarly if a business is going through a good period IT doesn't need updating does it, and if times are tight the business can't afford to upgrade the IT.

Basically IT is screwed.

[bangerhoarder]

Wait, you’re not on of my users are you?!

From the other side - Windows and Group Policies can be such a mindfield of slight misconfigurations, optimisations, scripts with a syntax error in them, Windows Updates, cloud integration, redirection, VPNs and slow internet connections, etc. Not making excuses - often it’s the human element of the setup that’s at fault - but it gives some idea.

O365 issues haven’t caused us too many issues over the last year, despite a heavy reliance on Teams. It is sluggish, quirky, sometimes doesn’t match between admin configuration and user experience, but we can’t complain for what we pay.

[mike9009]

It's odd. I work for a privately owned company. The spec of machines come at two levels, but all Dell laptops and all run the same Microsoft software except for some bespoke packages. We 'seem' to get most issues from the bespoke packages whether CAD packages, data managers or MRP systems, their updates always seem to be buggy.

Never had global issues with Teams or O365.


Conversely, a good friend works in the NHS and a local uni. Their IT systems are dire. Machines running all different OSs, some no longer supported. All machines different spec, moving to home working has been challenging to say the least with many employees using their own devices to work. Some trying to work on phones, as the kids were home schooling on their laptops.... Been a nightmare by the sounds of it. Not sure how secure everything is either.....sounds like a right mess and probably difficult for an IT provider to manage effectively.

[buggalugs]

MS product reliability has definitely taken a downturn these last few years. The cloud stuff is a constantly moving target. You need to do a quick job and the admin page takes 60 seconds just to load or errors out. Feck it try again later. Oh they’ve moved that option anyway. On Windows, updates that break things feel like a near monthly occurrence now whereas they used to be quite rare at least in my memory. You get updates for updates now. Those recent Exchange updates that borked the server unless you followed a certain procedure. Updates that bluescreen the box if you have a Kyocera printer, WTF.

Anyway it keeps us in a job

[eps]

buggalugs said:

MS product reliability has definitely taken a downturn these last few years. The cloud stuff is a constantly moving target. You need to do a quick job and the admin page takes 60 seconds just to load or errors out. Feck it try again later. Oh they’ve moved that option anyway. On Windows, updates that break things feel like a near monthly occurrence now whereas they used to be quite rare at least in my memory. You get updates for updates now. Those recent Exchange updates that borked the server unless you followed a certain procedure. Updates that bluescreen the box if you have a Kyocera printer, WTF.

Anyway it keeps us in a job

Yep - the replatforming of everything to Azure hasn't helped with this.

[Blown2CV]

teams was down globally yesterday