I have recently noticed a few limitations imposed on the machines and domain at school where I work which has since got me thinking about limitations imposed in the (few) workplaces I’ve been in and the many I’ve been told about first-hand where people are limited to various degrees by IT departments. While I understand decisions need to be made and it’s much easier to let nobody have power then to give everybody power it still irks me sometimes some of the little things that are done to prevent our own IT freedoms.

Warning: I work in IT and this is mostly a rant so stop now if you like.

Here are some recent examples I have encountered.

Blocking iTunes sharing

At school department where I work now it’s not possible to share iTunes libraries amongst co-workers or others in the department’s network. The setting is imposed centrally and cannot be overridden by individual employees. Because of this I’ve been forced to take other means and privately promote an application called SimplifyMedia to share music with others. I’m not sure if this has been successful for anybody.

The reasoning I’ve been told for this restriction is that music being shared is likely to not be legal and so a stance of “better safe and limit than use the application’s default settings”. My question is: is that the IT department’s job to impose limitations over use of iTunes with its default features?

I’m not speaking only about my current employer because this is an issue lots of IT directors have to deal with and organizations have to deal with. While general tampering should be restricted in order to preserve the working status of personal machines and network resources

General application installing limitations

Adam recently casually mentioned to me that he was unable to install OpenOffice on his desktop machine at the school where he teaches and (because of reasons I will not rant about right now) had to then spend time re-building slides created at home because of this limitation. It’s not right. Please, for the sake of the children!

Software lock-in (in my case, Outlook 2007)

Where I work we just got a huge lot of new 24″ iMacs for our labs and a few have been used to replace Windows desktops in the IT office. I was one of the lucky ones to get to start using and iMac so I rejoiced to ease my email/calendar workflow with Mail.app and iCal. I have since been urged to keep everything updated in Outlook 2007 on my Windows partition in order to allow for people to schedule me for meetings based on my free/busy information.

Okay, I have to say that with Exchange managing email, scheduling appointments for others is pretty neat but why can you only do this within Exchange?! Also, if I’m not in a position where people are often scheduling me for appointments may I please just use this other sync-able, integrate-able application on the Mac to manage my own calendar and, when the case comes, provide a thorough account of my availabilities to those who would like to schedule me for a meeting?

Adam just, as I was writing this email, reminded me of iTunes’ limitation to only allow iPhone syncing through Outlook if you’re on Windows. Why?! This seems like a situation where Apple would want to provide options not to use Outlook. Or, maybe it’s a secret strategy of Apple’s to make you angry at Outlook lock-in and to switch to Mac.

Please companies who make widespread desktop software (hrm, Microsoft) realize that people may not want to do things only how your software allows and would like to use other tools to get their work done. Also, please IT departments realize that not everybody works one way and people need freedom in choice of software.

I just wish there was a more lax policy around for things like this. That’s all. If the work is getting done, let people do their thing. Thanks.