5 Ways To Keep The IT Department Busy in August
While the lion's share of your staff is out on a beach somewhere the rest of the summer, what to do around the office during the month of August other than listen to the sound of crickets coming from the cubicles?
Yes, there's hours and hours of chair hockey to be played. Someone could put on a hazmat suit and clean out a year's worth of gunk out of the coffee maker. It's also a good time to do all those techie honey-do projects that always sound like a good idea, but never get done.
Here are five projects to keep you busy until Labor Day:
1. Update all your software and make sure each application has the latest security patches. Here's an article I wrote earlier this year to get your started.
2. Pay a housecall to every desktop in the shop. Uninstall outdated or never-used applications, including any malware that slipped through the firewall. Defrag the hard drives. See who might need a memory upgrade or a newer browser version. Get the employees that are around this month to purge out old email. Make sure everyone has a popup blocker and that its on!
3. Have you backed up all your data lately? No time like the present.
4. Put together a crisis plan. How would your employees keep the business going remotely if anything ever happened to your building during a hurricane or earthquake or fire, for example. Here's a report from Gartner Research from a year ago with some suggestions.
5. Don't upgrade to Vista. Play chair hockey instead.
