For the first time ever, I’m working for a company that has an Exchange server, uses Outlook, and is pretty much that Corporate Windows thing. It’s a different world.
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\nMostly, I’m an individual guy. I mean, I work with publishers, but I use my own computers. My network is simple: peer-to-peer, nothing fancy. There’s no internal security or servers because, well, it’s mostly me. Sure, the kids come by and play games, but they’re not employees.<\/p>\n
The organization I’ve been hired into is a medium-sized business, about 400 employees, $80M in annual revenue.<\/p>\n
As part of my employment, I received a company laptop. It’s a Toshiba convertible, which means it can be a laptop or I can twist its screen around and use it as a tablet. Not an iPad tablet, but a Tablet PC, which is cool, but a feature I don’t use often.<\/p>\n
Because I still work mostly out of my home office, I use the laptop to access the company network through the Internet. It’s a nerdy thing called VNC, or Virtual Network Computing<\/em>.<\/p>\n VNC works like the old dial-up networks, but you use the Internet to connect with the mothership. Then using VNC software, I connect to the local network. That makes Outlook (Microsoft’s horrid email\/calendar\/scheduling software that I never use) happy, and it gives me access to the company’s network drives and all sorts of secret, forbidden information.<\/p>\n Just kidding.<\/p>\n I mean, I tried looking into those folders, but, well, “Access Denied.” And the IT guys won’t give me the master Admin password. Damn them for following the rules!<\/p>\n So the new tech things in my life are: Outlook for company email and VNC to access the company network. While I still sit in my office and write technology books, occasionally I have to spin my chair around, look at the Toshiba, and use Outlook to deal with company stuff.<\/p>\n Now, please don’t ask me any Outlook questions. Basically, I have no choice to but to run Outlook for their corporate email. (Well, I could access Outlook through the web, but no.) I’d prefer not to use Outlook. I’ve messed with VNC, but never used it for my own job, or had any reason to. I’ve also configured my Droid phone to access the Exchange server and get email. Glad I boned up on that. So it’s a different world for me, familiar but yet not what I’m used to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the first time ever, I’m working for a company that has an Exchange server, uses Outlook, and is pretty much that Corporate Windows thing. It’s a different world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[16,15],"class_list":["post-3223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-laptop","tag-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3223"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4185,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3223\/revisions\/4185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}