So I started on the 17th - the next day after my final day at Viewpoint. I will admit I was so excited to get out of there, I kinda just left. After the exit interview, I didn’t really say goodbye to anyone. I did come back a few days later after the dust had settled and said goodbye. On to the new job - it’s a small office, and a small set of people. I was the 11th person hired. By the second week there, we had an office manager, and a CFO, making 13 people hired, 10 people in the office (one salesperson left for a much better opportunity, and the old DB Admin & Sys Admin were fired.)
The job itself is kind of hectic. Since it’s such a small office, not only am I working on a datacenter infrastructure, I’m also in charge of the office network (not a problem), and desktop support (ie fixing people’s mistakes with their desktops and laptops), which is not one of my most favorite things to do. The problem is that the datacenter part has been made a very small part of my job, because quite frankly they don’t have the resources to build out an infrastructure right now, and therefore no wokring with SANs, or setting things up from scratch. Nope. All out-of-the-window for now. So in a way I feel deceived, but because of the amount I’m getting in comparison to what I’m doing, I’m not going to complain.
However, dealing with some of the people and problems can be annoying. From the moment I got there, there were issues with the email system, because they went for one of the cheapest hosts I’ve ever seen - it was a web hosting with thrown in email for like $5/month…That’s cheap. It was also garbage - and during my first week there it went down 3 times in 5 days…The CEO then proceeded to yell at me on the phone telling me to fix it. Now mind you, this was how it was when I got there. So I didn’t feel that was very professional, but I let it slide that time, because of frustration. So I put something together in the office to get things going, and the situation improved greatly.
Since then, I’ve been cleaning stuff up, moving things around, trying to get anti-virus standardized on the desktops, and evaluating email / groupware systems. I’ve looked at GroupWise, Kerio, Scalix, Zimbra, and of course the veteran MS Exchange. I like GroupWise personally, and if I didn’t need Mobile syncing, I’d go with Scalix. Both of them are very good products. Zimbra isn’t bad - but is comprised of 95% open-source stuff, so why should I pay a yearly fee (which doesn’t go down) to use it? That’s what kills it, is the pricing. The NotifyLink that everyone uses - Scalix, Zimbra, Kerio for BlackBerry and sometimes other devices is $300/year/user, which gets very expensive very fast. That kills them for mobile. Kerio didn’t impress me at all…Easy to set up, but security looked like it could be a problem - everything ran as threads, all running as root. MS Exchange is the other one that’s “ok” – If you’re not managing it. Hosted all the way for that one.

And so that’s been my life lately. Kinda annoying, LOL. Oh, and then the CEO says that integration to salesforce.com would be wonderful - guess what, nobody does it. Someone did do it for Exchange, then got bought out and the product disappeared. So I don’t know what the heck to do with that.

Hopefully things will start to move now that I have email mostly done. Just some tweaks to the recommendations doc, and then it’s out of my hands.

I think the company has the potential to move upward, but it may take a while. We shall see.