Antilogic wrote:That's fair. It's when that small office gets a bit bigger and hires sysadmins who write powershell and also have to comply with security relegation's that then have to untangle the 300 mini-excel macros that have been written over the last 15 years....
Lol! Yes, there is that - Legacy apps are much-beloved in offices all over the world, likely to many an IT pro's constant annoyance. That's a common complaint in practical IT environments.
Back in the "Wild West" days of teh interwebz, most regulatory requirements that we had to deal with centered around personal information concerning customer information and transactions, largely a matter of any credit-card processing and the like we had to do. (Government purchasing used special credit cards, back then.) Most of this originated with the big card companies, protecting their own label. (MasterCard, Visa, AmEx, Discover, etc.)
After 9/11 and the formation of the Department of Homeland Security, we came under "Critical Infrastructure" guidelines. This brought a whole new level of compliance crap that reached deep into the Operations environment, not just "what's connected to the internetz." Thankfully, we were able to escape most of those, but we still had to report, stay current, stay on the list, blah, blah, blah. Most of our other compliance issues came from other agency requirements that were already in place.
I guess the point is that these tools, though universally complained about by "real IT professionals" give a level of functionality to their users that can't be met, otherwise, in their current environments. As a business/office grows and can afford to hire such professionals, those poor IT guys have to figure out how to integrate those things or, worse, how to weed them out.
I guess part of the reason for my participation in this thread is that, as a non-IT'er, I really enjoyed the functionality and power that Office brought to me in a functioning, complex, work environment that often forced me to come up with "innovative" solutions around problems that would have otherwise been handled by an IT department, which we didn't have. I don't know of any non-IT professional who, forced by necessity, was not personally proud of their ability to create their own creative, working, solution to a problem using the tools that Office provided.
Even back in the day, before some of my friends became IT professionals, they were proud of what they managed to build using the Office environment. It was, and I imagine it still is, a topic of conversation from time to time.
It's like an Acolyte entering the inner mysteries of the Holy Sanctum, though. The mere Acolyte is awed by the revelation and newfound knowledge, but it pisses off the true Priests.