Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!yale!bunker!stpstn!aad
From: aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Corporate Image
Keywords: do you have one?
Message-ID: <1969@stpstn.UUCP>
Date: 6 Aug 88 17:32:46 GMT
References: <7047@tness7.UUCP>
Reply-To: aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri)
Organization: The Stepstone Corporation, Sandy Hook, CT
Lines: 70

In article <7047@tness7.UUCP> mechjgh@tness7.UUCP (Greg Hackney ) writes:
>Do you administer Netnews for a large corporation ?
Well, a little one (50 people)

>question, what if a VP reads the news and runs across articles
I have to think that VP's would rarely have time to read news at all --
too busy golfing, chasing secretaries -- that sort of thing:-)
Of course, if yours do, you can just make sure that rn (or whatever)
never asks them if they want to read alt.sodomy or rec.whips-and-chains.

>in the explicit newsgroups, i.e. alt.sex, alt.drugs, talk.*, etc.
>From a pure business standpoint, this might be construed as a
>waste of computing resources and employee time. Do you as
>a large company carry the alt groups and others?

Often you don't even get a choice of whether or not to carry the alt
groups -- your feeds don't get them.  Once you've got a feed going,
the incremental cost of adding a few groups shouldn't be significant.

>Do you feel that it is a bad reflection on the image
>of your company for allowing the groups to pass to public
>and business sites?

  I don't think many people think about news being connected to companies --
the article came from foo@freezlebloorp, not The Guy From Big Bad Company.  Of
course, there must be a reason for all the disclaimers around.  I guess you do
have to be careful not to be perceived as giving company policy, unless you
really are, and are "authorized" to do so.  I've had one person (in France, no
less) who saw the name of my company in a news header and sent me mail asking
about our products.  For a computer-related company, at least, I sort of
feel that a news presence can be important for the company's image.  People
from Sun, for example, sometimes respond to questions about Suns, and
you can't help but get an impression that the company is contemporary,
agressive, ...

>Do you have any advice on how to justify the existence of netnews
>on your machines, the existence of public gateway machines, the
>existence of administrative positions for news administrators, etc.

  A news system, once running really doesn't seem to require all that much
administration.  I just keep an eye on the re-used nd partition where our news
is spooled (grrrrr) to make sure it doesn't fill up like the rest of our
re-used nd partitions.  I find news valuable in my work as a system
administrator.  Most recently I was trying to get a couple of imagewriters to
work on sun's, and within a day or two of posting, I got three responses that
let me get them working within 5 minutes.  Having news expands your
information base by orders of magnitude.  If you have to explain the effort to
a suit, merely speaking of the reduction of duplication of effort could be
enough to convince him (her).

>And finally, if you do administer news for a big company, could
>you email me a message so I can say, "Look, so-and-so company
>is an advocate of netnews, we should be too".
Well, until recently you could point to AT&T for that...

>Greg Hackney
>Southwestern Bell Telephone Co.
>Dallas, Texas
>postmaster@tness7.UUCP

Bell, eh?  Ironic, but I never claimed to understand the structure of
"The Phone Company"



-- 
@disclaimer(Any concepts or opinions above are entirely mine, not those of my
	    employer, my GIGI, or my 11/34)
beak is								  beak is not
Anthony A. Datri,SysAdmin,StepstoneCorporation,stpstn!aad