Situation:

Like many governmental IT departments, St. Lawrence County Central Services in upstate New York supports many users with limited resources. “We’re a small shop that does a lot,” says Microcomputer Systems Coordinator Rick Johnson. “We provide support for all the departments of St. Lawrence County, which means hundreds of desktops and a lot of hands-on work.”
The county served is the largest geographically in New York State. The department includes nine IT professionals managing an infrastructure comprised of 15 Windows NT servers, one Exchange server, two Novell servers, eight Cisco routers, and 3Com hubs and switches that must be properly configured and up and running at all times. And, according to Johnson, backup documentation of the environment is also critical.

Problem:

According to Johnson, documentation “saved my bacon” on one occasion. “For some inexplicable reason, one of our NT servers lost all of its shares,” Johnson says. “To this day, I do not know why, though I have researched it on Tech Net and other places.”

Solution:

Luckily for Johnson, all of the NT settings were documented using Configuration Auditor from Ecora. The application discovers enterprise devices, such as servers and routers, and generates comprehensive reports that can be stored as text, HTML, or CSV files.
“The thing I like about Configuration Auditor is that it gives me fast, accurate documentation of all of the servers,” Johnson says. “It’s nice to know I have solid documentation of the entire infrastructure. All I had to do was open the HTML file of the Ecora documentation and every share was there. You don’t know the time and trouble that saved me.”

Benefits:

In addition to system documentation, Johnson finds Configuration Auditor useful in the ongoing education of his colleagues and even increasing his own knowledge.
“I really like the comments,” Johnson says, referring to the notes written into Configuration Auditor that offer insights on security and other issues. “Every time I get a minute, and I make a minute, I read the long version of a report and pick up tips and tricks and hints that are all very useful.” Configuration Auditor supports most of the major enterprise products from Cisco, Lotus, Microsoft, Novel, Oracle, and Solaris, making cross training and skill-expansion easier.

When a new employee joins the team, as happened recently, Ecora reports serve as a fast, efficient means to bring that person up to speed on how the enterprise is configured.

“I can give the person a report and say, here’s our NT server base, all the IP addresses and protocols, what’s running WINS, what’s running the ACP—it’s a great training tool; it’s a great reference tool,” Johnson says.

In conclusion, Johnson notes that for his department, Ecora documentation not only saves the day, it also preserves knowledge of County Services’ environment and helps extend understanding to new and existing users as well.