iPad@Work: Don’t Blame The Players

>When the district sales managers of a luxury retailer logged into their corporate email accounts on shiny, new iPads for the first time, at the same time, cheers went up.

>But something else went down: the Lotus Notes server.

>Imagine all those iPads simultaneously downloading the full dump of Lotus Notes. Don’t point the finger at IT for this technical gridlock, not this time. The IT department didn’t even know about the iPad rollout until it was too late, and still had to deal with the fallout.

They hooked up to Lotus Notes & the IT Department didn’t even know it was being rolled out. _REALLY_?

If your IT department doesn’t even know that some rogue consultants had manage to either set up the Notes Traveler on their infrastructure or hook up a mobile device management(MDM) service like Good Technologies to their Domino servers then the whole team should be fired. You can’t blame Apple or iPad for creating a device that folks actually want to use, but you can put the blame on very bad decision-making and an IT department that appears to have its head in the sand rather than acknowledge that it’s customer aren’t very happy with the _status quo_.

The rest of this article is actually pretty good at explaining how Apple works with Big IT CO’s to help them prepare and plan for seamless integration. Apple alone has led the consumer market in provide BlackBerry-like integration and administration of their devices through MDM partners like [AirWatch](http://air-watch.com) and [Mobile Iron](http://mobileiron.com). And how there are actually plenty of good resources out there like Gartner and Forrester to help you figure out what the best practices are. The truth is that everyone from Dell to MacAffee have been throwing their hat into the MDM ring to try to get a piece on the iPad action.

I guess what really bugged me about this piece was that the author managed to find the most back water company running Notes and who’s IT department is so completely incompetent that they don’t realize everyone is walking around with iPads and that maybe some of them have found a way to get their email on it. Either that or the author has fabricated the entire scenario where Lotus Notes has a magical MS Exchange like service that users can turn on without any kind of infrastructure changes or firewall mods by at least __ONE PERSON__ in IT.

via [iPad in the enterprise: IT must stay ahead of the curve](http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/ipad-in-the-enterprise-it-must-stay-ahead-of-the-curve/145349).


Comments

6 responses to “iPad@Work: Don’t Blame The Players”

  1. It really doesn’t surprise me that an IT department didn’t know about a roll-out. The iPads were probably sold to some distant manager and the roll-out handled by the reseller’s sales techs who assured him “there’s nothing to worry about!”

    Managers who live in their own little worlds and get all pissy when you try to point out that the world is bigger than them should be strung from the rafters by their ugly polyester ties!

  2. Did you even read the article?! You’re blaming the IT department and saying they should all be fired, yet the article clearly states “The sales group had one condition: Don’t tell the IT department.”

    Fire the damn sales group’s manager!!!

  3. There is nothing I love more than commentors who will comment half way through the an article without ever reaching the end. They were told not to tell IT, but still needed access to the Notes servers… If you run an IT dept and don’t know who is accessing your servers as an admin, you SHOULD be fired.

  4. READ ON! Also can you please change your profile pic to a troll…

  5. Umm, if you read the article, in the 3rd paragraph it clearly explains that no one had connected their iPad to the Notes server yet – they did all together at the same time in big cluster launch.

  6. If your Notes server goes down because 200 people poll their mailboxes, you should be fired.

    This entire iT World article is troll bait and you fell straight in.