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