For quite some time we in the IT industry have enjoyed a great reputation as problem solvers, designers, creators, architects of peoples IT dreams, if you will. It’s not an easy job, it’s not a low skills job and you get to work around some very smart people.

That backfires horribly when you do something wrong because your coworkers will stand over your shoulder and make fun of you as you try to figure out if your boss was joking about you being fired if the email isn’t back in 10 minutes.

Ah, the joy of work in IT. Earlier today I got an IM telling me that our corporate email was down. One of the tasks for the week was to have Office Communications Server 2007 up and running. Yup, you’ve guessed it, they got bit by the Howard problem!

Now, its easy to point at people and make fun after the issue has been addressed. But seriously, at which point do you just break out the beatdown machine and let it loose on the people that have been responsible for hundreds of Exchange 2007 64bit boxes for well over a year? Even if I forgive that, at which point would it have been obvious that rolling out OCS on a 64bit server was going to fail? Would it have been during the documentation which should have been read? How about the lab deployment before going into production?

Still a no? How about some common damn sense, if you’re about to try to install a 32bit package and it prompts you for web components you should KNOW it’s about to roll up ASP.NET 32bit assemblies into IIS and blow it sky high.

The ultimate bringdown? How was the problem solved? Googled and found the Vladville blog post. Ooooooooffff. First, till the day I die or all these folks move on I get to hold it over their heads that “without me this global ISP won’t even be able to check email” and of course there is now a mandatory tshirt printing “I fail so hard at life that I use Vladville as a technical resource.”

Let the shaming begin..

Speaking of shaming, OCS 2007. Very cool, I’m a pretty big fan to be honest and they have even brought it down into the SMB land now, you can get a server license for about $600. And as impressive as that may sound, as I mentioned to Handy Andy earlier tonight, it doesn’t quite hold a candle to Messenger:

“its like taking what you and I are chatting on right now, throwing it into stone age, and asking for $10k in licensing and 3 dedicated servers.”

Got the little Communicator on my desk right now. It’s no MSN Messenger but comes close and beats MSN in the enterprise integration parts.

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