For those of you who don’t know me and strangely some of you who do know me pretty well but just forget, I don’t work with Macs in my daily job I’m not a self-employed podcaster or media producer like the awesome Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline (yes it’s plug city on this blog!) but instead am imprisoned in the Windows dominated world that is the UK banking industry.

For security reasons and to avoid any debates about the company I work for I’m going to keep that one off the public blog,

So this post is a sort of ‘vent’ about all the things that get to me as a forced Windows user in the corporate world! I will admit I haven’t always been a Mac user, I even used to have a deep loathing for Apple, which I will admit was based in ignorance of the platform. I used to be a hard-core Windows user and knew my way round the registry pretty well, but I was always on my own machine not a corporate network where security policy reigns supreme.

Now don’t get me wrong, I completely agree with a stringent network security and management policy, especially on the Windows platform, but I think corporate IT sometimes really can go too far!

Accessibility

I’ll be blunt, my eyesight is appalling - I’m pretty much blind in my left eye and have a severe vision loss in my right eye (I could get into a whole post about the conditions I have but I think I’ll save taht for another day) which means that I need to be able to enlarge my screen to be able to see what I’m doing clearly.

On my Macs I can easily do this through the built-in Universal Access preference pane, the magnification works incredibly well and doesn’t cause any slow down or glitches with the normal operation of the system. Now you’d think with Microsoft being so big and so called ‘industry standard’ that this would be incorporated into their OS, right? Nope, instead the company has had to install a very expensive application called ZoomText, which to be frank is a buggy, slugish and bloated pile of excrement that is not even close to being fit for purpose.

It constantly ‘jams’ up and even causes havock with Java applications, which some of our key systems use for various tasks, meaning I’m consantly having to battle my system to get customers the information they want, my question to the developers of ZoomText: how is that justifiable both in terms of my own user experience and most importantly customer service?

On top of that, it took our IT department 3 months before they even installed it properly onto my system after joining, a further 3 weeks when I moved computers to reinstall the software because it can’t be done remotely and needs full admin rights with Internet access to activate, which the IT techs don’t seem to have both of at the same time

Finally, I have strong suspicions that no UAT (User Acceptance Testing) is done with new systems and applications whist ZoomText is installed, showing a clear lack of regard for their visually impaired users.

Lockdown!

I know that corporate systems need to have security controls, I accept that I can’t go in and change major sysetm settings, that’s just fine and dandy, but for the love of all things IT why can’t I do something as simple as change my Start Menu preferences, change my background, right click to copy and paste or add things to my desktop?

I’m trying to make my setup more productive for myself, so I have easy shortcuts to the applications I launch when I get into work, for example our call handling and transaction system, our processing system for accounts, my schedule system and the mainframe link (yes we still use a terminal for a fair few things, kind of makes me feel all geeky typing into this thing!) Why is that such a big problem? Of course it’s down to our IT department’s policy, but part of me questions the fact that it needs to be done for security on Windows?

Then there’s the huge minefield that is e-mail and sharing files, USB storage is disabled for good reason and colleagues at my level are blocked from having external email. The issue comes when we have monthly reviews to complete and projects we may be working on voluntarily (I have done the odd bit of design work for our department, for example) which we need to send information to our personal email, another restriction in place means that we can’t access work email from outside, though with a pathetic 15mb mailbox quota it wouldn’t last long for the typical PowerPoint / Photoshop document on top of the masses of email we already get. Thankfully they haven’t get blocked access to my iDisk yet, but I doubt they’d approve of it’s use.

Stability & Reliability

We’re using Windows XP at work, which is so much better than NT4 that we used up until the summer of 2006. The major issue I have with Windows in terms of stability is the way it handles an unresponsive application, as I mentioned above ZoomText causes havoc with one of our main systems, so I constantly find that crashing and locking out, it’s browser based so that means I have to ‘End Task’ the instance of Inernet Explorer that’s running it, which would be fine if it didn’t take down the rest of the web apps that are open at the same time.

I think the major issue comes with the way Windows manages, or rather doesn’t manager, memory. Our base machines have 512mb of RAM, these are AMD64 systems (fairly low end I’ll guess) but they’re running about 10 apps at the same time and a lot of these seem to be fairly badly coded, not a jibe at our IT guys because I know we had a lot developed by 3rd parties. It’s really frustrating when your system just freezes when you’re trying to arrange a big international payment, the process takes long enough as it because of all the regulations and required scripting, so having to wait while Windows comes back to life is really not helpful to customer experience.

In the end…

So I guess that turned into more of rant about my company’s IT systems, but we do use Windows so there we go, let me know your experiences with your Windows network?