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First of all I have been using Spiceworks now for about 3 days now :D. So far I am loving it. Here is a little about how I got to where I am:

I started in IT in high school as an assistant to the Systems Admin. Worked with him for about 2 years doing the boring old stuff like setting PCs up, replacing bad hardware exc. After 2 years in college I got offered an internship at a manufacturing facility with an IT team of 1, so they needed some help. Of course I took it. So after a year of working as an intern (while going to college) my boss (the only other IT guy) decided that he was going to leave. He was a great mentor and taught me alot. He was going to be consulting me for about a month and a half, once or twice a week he would come in, and teach me as much about the facility as possible. I had a good understanding for the most part but there were things I had not dealt with. I got offered his position and now am the only IT person here. It has been 6 months now and I finally feel somewhat comfortable about where I am at and what I am doing. I do wish I could get someone else in here as an intern as it gets pretty boring not being able to work with anyone else who knows about IT. Anyone else here barely knows how to turn on a PC.

But anyway, any advice from anyone on any kind of topic? Software, policies, hardware, anything. I am still learning all kinds of things (Spiceworks for example). I am only 22 and am working full time while going to college online. I have found Pluralsight and will definitely be pursuing that. I would really like some info on how to truly manage the IT department and the users here.
Remember I am a newbie to alot of this stuff :smiley:

Thanks in advance…

25 Spice ups
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Document everything you do. Believe it or not, you will probably forget half the stuff you configure, and you’ll need it down the line when something goes wrong.

Depending on the size of your organization (which I’m guessing is pretty small), you may want to establish some basic change management procedures, a service catalog, and some service level agreements just to give people a set of reasonable expectations for your response time and what you can support.

Good luck with the position!

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Yup… I have learned that the hard way!!! We mostly document any changes we make because we have to. We have SOX controls in place. Have to make the auditors happy.

Yes we are fairly small 30-40 users. Thanks for the reply!

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Welcome!

-Document as much as you can as @jontanner mentioned.

-Build a test environment for anything you want to learn. Never test things in production.

-Backups. Make sure you are doing them (onsite and disconnected/offsite ones)

-Don’t be afraid to ask for help. You may need outside consulting or help at times which is normal.

Good luck!

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File permissions, might be a long term goal but it’s helpful to have everyone in a group and then assign permissions to anything based on group. It’s much easier to add/remove users from groups then to dig down through all the files and assign individuals rights.

This is the biggest project on my plate and I have found tackling one directory a week is a great break from the mundane even though it is even more mundane.

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Yes we had to tackle that project when I started so we are maintaining as of now… We use NTFS permissions reporter by cjwdev. Its a must have for doing file permissions in my opinion. They also have an AD info tool which is great.

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How big is your organization? Do most people have computers? Is email on site? What does your network consist of? Disaster recovery?
Just a few questions that could help more experienced (cough older) individuals here help guide you to even more success! Congrats on the job, I’m just a few years behind you. The IT department consists of my boss and I. I begin college on Monday and will continue to work… Glad to see someone was able to do this, it gives me more hope and makes me feel better about the decision to stay!
Best of luck!

1 Spice up
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Can’t stress documentation and strong backups enough. Since you are just getting started, you’ll go through trying a lot of things until you find the tools that work best for you. Consult the Spiceworks community. Read threads on topics you’re interested in. You may see a topic about a problem you are experiencing and can benefit from the community involvement.

I hear you about the clueless users. Take care to set your boundaries with both your users and management. Make sure everyone knows what your job duties are and are not. Once you give in on one thing, the users will expect it again and again. If you take it upon yourself to help a user learn something that they should already know, pretty soon, everyone will be coming to you asking for help on how to format a Word document, or save a file to PDF. It’s a slippery slope.

Or, if you decide to help a user by doing something for them, then they will expect it from that point on. Do not let them use you to do their jobs.

EDIT:

Oh, and welcome to the party!

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I am going to throw in patch management, make sure your systems, including 3rd party applications remain patched, especially java and flash.

Keeping these secure and up to date will save you many hours of heartache later if something went wrong.

Also be sure to subscribe to newsletters and patch info, so you can be informed of possible patch issues before you apply them.

Get in volved here in the community and your local spicecorps, learn from us, teach others and play your part in the community - you’d be surprised how quickly you can larn new things and you will also build up your own trust list of people whom you value the opinions of.

Don’t be afraid to ask us questions, we’ve all been where you are, some still are and others have been there many years ago.

Make sure your licenses are legit and up to date, for all applications, you don’t want to be the one who has to explain to the business why they owe (random) company 250K for 10 licenses.

7 Spice ups
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Also, welcome to Spiceworks Tyler.

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From school to my current and last jobs… doing the work is only 1/3rd of the battle. Documentation is the other 2/3rd. whether that be documenting in tickets, or in your knowledge base. You will forget after 6 months or 18 months, what special thing you might have done. Also, it really helps out the guy that follows after you. I speak from experience, as I am sure others do. Coming into a system as the soul IT guy, with tech from the early 90’s. Had to trace, everything myself and troubleshoot. Even had to crawl under the building to figure out where the copper and fiber came in, because no one knew.

Create maps of the building, for phone placement, printers, wireless AP’s, PC’s, etc.

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As others have already mentioned, there are plenty here that are great advices. I would like to add…

ASK QUESTIONS!!! In Spiceworks of course. There’s nothing wrong with that. Knowing where you want to take your position/career or where you want to go will help and determine how to proceed your career in the long run.

Otherwise welcome to the Spiceworks community. They are all behind you in helping you succeed.

3 Spice ups
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Now that you’ve started to play with Spiceworks, download a free version of PRTG and start to play with that. Learn how to set up proper monitoring of critical infrastructure. The free version will get you going, and then you can push for a paid version at your place of employment if it’s justified. Also it’s a great thing to know if you change jobs and they use it there.

There’s a lot of other solutions as well for monitoring, but that’s a great one that’s easier to get a grip on than say Zabbix or Nagios.

The goal here is to set up proactive monitoring and alerting so that you are the first one to know about a problem. Ideally you will see the signs before it becomes critical and can deal with it. Worst case, you get an alert before anyone else. You do not want to be picking up the phone being asked questions like “are we having issues with the server? Is the VPN down to the other office?” without already knowing the answer. At worst you want to be able to say yes it is, it’s been having an issue for the last 15 minutes, we’re already working on a resolution.

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Document everything.

Backup everything.

When in doubt, Google everything.

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Convince them to let you bring in a trusted subcontractor on a regular basis to assist and learn a little about the network and the business needs, because you do not want to be stuck not ever being able to take vacations or being able to leave for something because you are the only IT guy. That’s actually not just in IT jobs, but in any job.

3 Spice ups
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Learn Powershell

I found 'Learn Powershell 3 in a Month of Lunches" to be the best tech training book I’ve ever used. It also helps make Documentation/Change logs easier because you can easily put exactly what you did in the documentation.

3 Spice ups
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From many years of doing this my key advice beyond backups and documentation are these points:
Slow down:as a one man show it’s easy to get wrapped up in the excitement. Slow down and look at the whole picture before you act. Find and fix the root cause so the problems stay gone. Band aids are great to get people working but should never become the go to solution.
Be patient: teaching the people you support to use the tools you support them on helps everyone work more efficiently.
Learn to say No on a positive way: bad ideas show up all the time. Stop them early and replace with solutions the work for everyone. And don’t over commit yourself
Lastly never stop learning or asking questions. You’ve found spiceworks you have access to some very smart people. If you ask good questions you’ll get some amazing answers

3 Spice ups
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As they say in all the TV’s shows “Not in any particular order”

Backup

Document

SLA

Network monitoring

Inventory control

Helpdesk

Get these things right and the rest of the job will fall into place.

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@AdRem_Software

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Welcome! Remember users are always right and always lie. They did spill coffee in the keyboard…

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