Today, I finally got some news about some stuff that has been going on at work for a while.
Blogging Policy
When I started this, I asked at work about their policy for blogging. The answer – ‘what’s a blog?’ After explaining, the next reaction was no. No employee should blog at all, it wopuld only cause problems if they mentioned anything that could possibly cause an issue. So a few months of gentle explanations, discussion and asking again and again, I’ve finally got confirmation that blogging is now recognised in both the HR and the security policies of the company, which are being re-issued next month. So I can blog (but not during company time), I can discuss incidents at work that affect me (avoiding libel etc) but I cannot refer directly to the company, its commercial direction or anything that may relate to strategy. Guess that’s fair – and far better than where I started.
Test Computers
The next good news was confirmation that I can finally get some test computers. We have a good security policy, plus standard PC builds (reducing IS support costs) But I work with websites which means I need to test on multiple browsers and without firewalls/proxies causing connection issues or blocking content. So the solution is to provide us a PCs that will not connect to the company network at all, but access direct. I can do what I need to, but there’s no support available at all for them
This takes me back a little. Ten years ago I convinced my then manager to let me have access to the internet from work. Given the ‘experimental’ nature of this at the time I had to have a non-networked PC, in a locked room with controlled access. Of course, the IS team wanted to charge me 3 days work to load the software and train me on it! Once that was sorted, I did actually manage to use the access to get me valuable research 🙂
