The Group Account

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The Group Account

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Points: 736193
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February 12, 2013 at 9:29 pm

#268495

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Group Account

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Gary Varga SSC Guru Points: 82166 More actions · Answer 1

I feel that the inability to share ones own purchased digital media either discourages purchasing or encourages downloading of possibly dubious versions. Most people who have bought DVDs or CDs move them from room to room, perhaps to the car, taken them on holiday even, in a caravan or a motorhome. That is legitimate use of the license bought. I personally have totally avoided buying films from iTunes because I am unhappy with being tied in. Other members of my family either were ignorant (the common general scenario - and you can only explain so much before "I just want to watch a film on my..." comes up) or rely on me as a "get out of jail" option. I think that this is starting to blow up in the media (if you haven't heard about it try searching news sites regarding Bruce Willis and his iTunes account).

But it is not just the movies (or films as I say it) and music scenario alone. Families want shared photo albums, document storage and a shared calendar. They also don't want to rely on an IT professional in the family to consider temporary and permanent access, security, resilience of data (i.e. backups but also who can delete what), protection from supplier failure (what if the company holding your photos goes bankrupt) and ownership (no I don't want to be the poster boy for [insert serious but personal ailment for comedic effect] so I don't want to grant usage rights). Until group accounts, ownership and permissions are truly considered and easy then we are holding people back. And possibly innovation.

Gaz

-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!

joinerg Grasshopper Points: 24 More actions · Answer 2

For work we force all team members to register software and sign into applications with a generic team email account such as for our support department we use Support@XYZ.COM. THese departmental accounts save us from not getting notices or losing PWD reset rights.

When someone leaves the department they are no longer on the group mailing list so they can't take the software 'rights' with them either!

-Greg Joiner

Richard-760904 Old Hand Points: 314 More actions · Answer 3

Using personal or employee email accounts for software registration, support, and managing domains is a continuous problem. Our organization is large enough to have it's own mailservers. There is no limit to the number of aliases we can make and forward to specific accounts. But still people assign their own email to important functions. This is probably because they don't have to deal with the problem when they leave.

Gary Varga SSC Guru Points: 82166 More actions · Answer 4

joinerg (2/13/2013)
For work we force all team members to register software and sign into applications with a generic team email account such as for our support department we use Support@XYZ.COM. THese departmental accounts save us from not getting notices or losing PWD reset rights.
When someone leaves the department they are no longer on the group mailing list so they can't take the software 'rights' with them either!

I had a problem when an ISP with free email accounts (akin to Hotmail and GMail) suddenly decided to remove the accounts of those access the free versions. I lost all my emails AND access to my email addresses. I had problems getting access to a number of sites (SQL Server Central being one - thanks Steve for sorting that one out!!!) and people still are trying to contact me via those email addresses as occasionally gets mentioned on phone calls.

I purchased my own domain to resolve that. I store a copy of all emails locally and they are hosted by a mail service as well. Worst case scenario is that I lose a few emails or email addresses (if I haven't updated my records).

Gaz

-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!

Carl Kepford SSC-Addicted Points: 423 More actions · Answer 5

I'm an accidental DBA, but also spend quite a bit of time with Systems and Exhange issues. We have a group of people who work closely together on all of above. For that reason, when we put in a web request for support on for example, HP, Cisco, NetApp, Quest, Symantec, and so on, we want any Email response to go to a common shared mailbox. In that way, if the person who sent the request is off when the response comes back, someone else can carry on, upload config files, etc.. This makes sense for us, but it's hard to explain to a vendor. We often waste time on explaining why we are responding instead of the person who originated the support ticket.

I work with a different group of people on SAP issues. SAP does a great job with this issue, because with the right permissions, each of uscan log onto the support site and view and respond to each other's tickets, search for old tickets on the same issue, etc.