We haven't talked about goals in a long time

[Radar]

I've been busy as hell since taking this job. I wanted to be the big fish in the smaller pond and I got it. As the I.T. director for a movie producer, I've got a lot of challenges. The guys who set this place up originally knew next to nothing about computer networking so I've got my work cut out for me.

They left open relay on the mail servers for about 3 years so every spammer on earth was bouncing off our server. Their answer for this was to move half of the users from the .com domain to the .net domain.

This means we had half of our users on llpla dot com and half of them on llpla dot net.

I took care of this immediately by installing a new Cisco IronPort spam appliance, and a new mail server. Between them we've got 4 layers of spam protection and 2 layers of virus protection not including the virus protection on the client computers.

I've checked our charts and about 1.1% of the messages sent here are legitimate and the rest are spam. The users are happy as hell now because they don't get a thousand messages a day telling them how to make their dicks bigger.

We've got 5 offices across Southern Cal and none of them are connected. They have no help desk, no ticketing system, no standardization of hardware or software, no software pushing mechanism, no remote desktop setup for the PC's or Macs, no real network security, etc.

My goals are to implement all of these and to hire a couple of guys to help me do it. My other goals are to increase my income enough so I can actually afford a house in the L.A. area while sending my daughter to private school. (a lofty goal).

I'm already working on connecting our sites using point-to-point fiber with an ungodly amount of bandwidth.

Next is desktop and laptop hardware and software standardization and making baseload ghost images. After that, I'll setup the remote desktop stuff with the software push ability, and the helpdesk ticketing software. Then I've got to create an inventory system for our props warehouse, get the company to switch to digital video rather than film (not easy) so we can video something in HD at our states in Simi Valley, transfer it to the editing department in L.A. who can have our digital effects department send them stuff, and then have it all sent to our sound studios in Burbank and have the finished product done in about 1/4 the time it takes while using film.

This isn't going to be cheap or easy, but I swear I'm going to bring this company up to par if it kills me.

Sorry for the long and geeky post, but I needed to vent.

What are your goals? short term? long term?