That meeting earlier

So, our strategic partner came by and gave us the presentation at three. I wasnt sure how many of anyone would be there, but for the record, this was the final distribution of roles within the organization at the meeting:

• 3 assistant directors of information technology, representing Infrastructure(woot!), Strategy and Planning, and Customer Relationship Management
• 4 supervisory role managers, Deployment, PC lifecycle, Infrastructure Systems Engineering, and Infrastructure Network Engineering(my boss)
  
• 3 Systems Engineers
• 1 Customer support agent
• 2 Business applications interns, a Java dev and a Web dev
  
• 1 Business communications intern
• 1 Enterprise training intern
• 1 Enterprise Infrastructure Network Engineering intern (me)

Plus, from our partner:

• 2 Datacenter solutions archetects
• 1 VDI solutions consultant

So 16 of us and 3 of them, or 19 people in the room. If we'd had a CIO at the moment, i'd have had to invite 20 people!

I had to lead, despite being the absolute lowest rung on the organizational ladder, which as you can imagine took a bit out of me. When you're dealing with senior management, you have to remember that their time is extremely valuable, and so if a meeting lacks direction for even a minute, they likely have things they want to discuss with SOMEONE in the room, and so you have to keep things going. Lucky for me, my boss helped me out when I would stall for a second getting things started, and our strategic partner spent most of the time talking.

Overall, I learned a lot, everyone else learned a lot, and we got an idea of how to solve a lot of the problems present in our environment with a setup like this. We have some problems like an overall user culture of keep-things-on-the-drive, off-the-network, which creates data security problems, and also is brutal overhead if we get sued and need to provide our public records data to a company or individual. There's a big push for Disaster Recovery purposes to buy expensive laptops for all employees, which VDI can eliminate the need for. Two zero clients are way less expensive than a single laptop, so you can keep one on the desk and let the customer have one at home in case there's an inch of snow and our fair southern city shuts down.

The best part of all is that if we decide to go with Desktop Virtualization, there is very little work required from the network side, as almost all the infrastructure required is already in place, and we would only need to bring up a new environment for the VMware ESX host cluster.