I have been working in the Newspaper Industry for 2 years now as an IT Systems Administrator. This is the first time I have worked full-time in IT and I LOVE IT! But as you all probably know... this industry isn't flourishing. Its quite the opposite. So far I have been involved in systems & processes that are close to 10 years old. Meaning, everyone here has been doing the same thing for 8-10 years with hardly any upgrades. Even as technology is doubling every few months, the newspaper industry is still stuck in 2003 Talk about FRUSTRATING! Ironically I'm actually pretty good with older hardware, repairs and work-arounds. Not to mention 90% of what I do is find work-arounds for everyone. I try to update what I can but we are still on old systems: Dell Optiplex computers Pentinum D 2 Gig RAM Windows XP Office 2003 Sybase databases Sun Servers (Unix) Java 5 & 6 Internet Explorer 8 Talk about huge security risks and holes! I try to get everyone on Firefox and Chrome, but still some people don't have a choice because some server web interfaces only run on Explorer and old versions of Java. Not to mention Windows XP will no longer be supported this year. We can't afford to upgrade 200 computers to Windows 7 or the newest Office. More security holes... Now Microsoft is auditing us and we are finding that our Office 2007 Enterprise doesn't cover all the installations we have. So now my project is to downgrade everyone from 2007 to 2003. I see a bad future if we don't start upgrading soon. Either the database we host will crash and die or we'll get infected by a horrible virus/malware/rootkit that crashes everyone on the network. Like most companies that rely on computers 105% if we miss even a day of work, they might have to close the doors. Its pretty scary and there is only so much one man can do. If you have any suggestions please share.
