Please talk to your IT staff

I would love it if people would consult their IT Professionals before making a purchase. I can’t say how many times I’ve seen things just fall into someone’s lap, and they are expected to make miracles happen.

Most people don’t seem to realize that IT Vendors are salespeople. Their one and only job is to sell you their product, whether you need it or not. Even if you need their product, their specifications sheets are horribly inaccurate most of the time. The minimum recommendations for hardware are usually less powerful than my cell phone, and every IT Professional knows that the software would never work in that configuration.

Also, when it comes to software/hardware you really need to read what the user communities are saying about the product before making the purchase. I have been burned by not doing this also. An example was when I purchases a D-Link WBR-2310 http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=470 . This wireless router has a horrible problem of it’s DHCP server dieing repeatedly and bouncing your wireless connection daily, needing a power cycle to get things back up and running again. Now, this was for a my home configuration so, it was an annoying problem at best. But if this problem were to happen in a production environment, I would go nuts trying to tell end users there is nothing that can be done for them. That someone would have to purchase a quality product instead.