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The first quarter of 2007 will be remembered in the annals of history as “that time when life sucked for IT”.

There’s five critical issues going on, right now, all at the same time:

1. IE 7 rollouts. Legacy software breaking and certificate problems. Here are a couple of posts I just picked off our NTSysadmin forum:

Right now, when a user uses IE6 and goes to a https website that does it’s own certificate (like ours) it comes up and gives them the option to view the certificate then install. Then no more issues.

But with IE7, NOOOOOOOOO, it blocks the content and maybe, perhaps it’ll let the user through if they beg, but maybe it won’t.

Other than removing IE7 off all the machines (which is the current solution), is there any way for IE7 to trust us? I even did that http://domain/certsrv and installed the certificate manually (which works with IE6) but it won’t freaking work with IE7.

And

We have another problem. Users opening an Access database can’t open it because it is “untrusted”, even though it’s on the Network. The only work-around I have so far is to tell IE7 not to automatically detect the intranet (it doesn’t anyway) and select the other three boxes manually. PITA.

2. Vista. Well, enough said. If you deploy Vista broadly right now as an IT manager, you’re a masochist. But you still have to deal with some guy in the organization (inevitably, the CEO), who insists on installing his own version.

3. Office 2007. See 2 above.

4. Exchange 2007. Unless your Exchange server is already 64-bit, you’ll need to get a new server. Plus the migration issues themselves.

5. Daylight Saving Time. Some may characterize DST as a “mini-Y2K”. No, it’s not, it’s worse than Y2K. At least with Y2K, everyone had the runs for the year leading up to it and were prepared. DST has hit American IT over the head with a two-by-four. Here at Sunbelt, we have had buckets of work to do for the transition — updates to SalesLogix, Exchange, SQL 2005, Office, Java runtime engine, etc.

Even I had fun with this. If you run Outlook off of Exchange and applied the the DST patch before your IT department patched Exchange, good luck getting Outlook started. And then see if everything’s off by an hour in March.

Here’s an example from my Outlook calendar: I have a number of birthdays in my March calendar. Every one of them is now a two-day birthday, because they run from 1 am to 1 am, instead of 12 to 12. And all my meetings are pushed up an hour — a 2 pm meeting is now a 3 pm meeting.

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I can only feel for IT managers right now.

Alex Eckelberry