r/ITdept • u/Forsaken-Remove-5278 • 17h ago
Has anyone tried managing company assets in SharePoint?
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r/ITdept • u/geeklimit • Nov 18 '23
Yes, your work can see what you do on their computer, and other questions [READ FIRST]
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Due to the number of repeat questions around the topic of using work resources to do personal business, or generally questions around 'what can my work see', I've created this sticky to answer these and similar questions:
First, and most importantly:
/r/itdept is a place where IT workers come to talk to / ideate with / vent to each other, as mentioned in the sidebar. It's not a place for non-IT people to ask IT questions.
There are many, many places on Reddit to get IT help, depending on what you're asking for help on - use the sitewide search and use one of them, there are many people waiting to help you with your issue.
Second, to answer common questions:
Many of these questions come from having the wrong perspective around a person's usage of property and data belonging to the business they work for. The reality of your employment situation is as follows:
- It's not 'your computer'. It belongs to your workplace. They allow you to use it to do your work.
- Businesses have a lot of risk and liability. It's their right to know where their data is and how their equipment is being used. Where their data is, who can see it, and what their employees are doing or saying as an agent of the company is a huge concern, and they are within their rights to protect themselves.
- Some choose to monitor this to protect themselves, and some don't. Assume yours does. This monitoring applies to anything put into the computer with the keyboard or mouse/touchpad, all data going to/from the computer - including information about where it's going to and from, everything stored on the computer and any connected storage device, and anything stored under or done within any cloud service your workplace provides.
- None of this matters, because you should only use your work-issued equipment for work. Don't check your personal mail (or use work mail for personal things!), don't do online shopping, don't do your banking. Don't exist for your work as anything other than an employee, and you don't have anything to worry about.
Finally, and most importantly, something you need to understand about your local IT department that nobody will ever tell you:
It's likely that only one in 10,000 IT people are at all interested in what you're doing on your laptop, or if you're even doing your job at all - and they should be (and often are) fired for it, because they're probably violating the trust and faith the job requires to stick their nose where it doesn't belong. That's not IT's business or responsibility, and most of us want to be left alone when it comes to stuff like that.
It's HR and your manager's job to make sure you're productive and to manage you well. Frankly, many managers are quite terrible at their job and want a technological magic bullet to make up for their shortcomings. They're not bad people, this desire for a "solution" or a tool to "help them manage better" comes from the same place as their understanding of the problem: they don't know what they're doing, and it's easier to point at a "missing tool" that is "needed" than reflect and admit where the true deficits are, even to themselves. People often think of this as a victimless situation, because they're not blaming IT, they're just "sharing their amazing insight" into what's needed for the business, and "partnering with IT" to "fix it".
Most IT people hate this, both because it uses us to cover up other people doing their job poorly (something we're not allowed to do ourselves) but also because we're generally the type that believes that people should get what they deserve, both positively and negatively. Many IT people change careers because of the depression that comes from dealing with this. You'd be shocked by how many former technology people have gone "Stardew Valley" and are quite happy talking to a row of carrots instead of dealing with this any more.
By and large, we're also a very logical group of people. Generally, something will work when it's done a certain way in IT, and it doesn't work (or has significant downsides) when you don't do it that way. That's how IT systems work - there's a right way for a desired outcome, and the other ways are generally wrong based on what the desired outcome is.
We tend to know immediately that the problem is with your manager, or other underskilled "decision makers" in the organization, and that their idea is bad. This is very common when someone is looking for a technical solution to a non-technical problem. Unfortunately, we frequently will have a non-technical hand-shaker and yes-sayer leading our department, the same as you do, and we don't get the support we need to ask the business to exercise stronger critical thinking instead of complicating the IT environment with the product of inadequate management of human resources.
This usually leads to a system, process or policy that is either generally offensive to people they should consider as human beings, developing a system that attempts to solve problems that should be solved by non-technical means, and/or generally making our job more complicated and difficult to manage than it already is.
We're aware that this will be the case before, during and after the request gets put in, and the reality that waits for us for the forseeable future- but that is regrettably part of the job. It's not all doom and gloom, though - these darker parts sit alongside amazing opportunities that give us the chance to use our skills to create enormous value, extreme satisfaction at a job well done for thousands (or millions!) or people, great camaraderie with our IT coworkers who are there "in the trenches" with us, and a decent paycheck for our time and effort.
All this is a significant amount of background to truly understand where we're coming from, but results in this:
pre-tl;dr
If we're told to put in systems that record your screen or generally "spy" on employees, we'll either quit (and the next person will do it for them), or we'll do it to the best of our ability, but we like it even less than you do. We can't put them in halfway so they aren't effective - then the deficiency of good decision-making at the business turns into focusing on us and our ability to deliver working systems, no matter how asinine the reasoning was from poor managers. It's often better to perfectly implement the system and let them see that their proposed solution doesn't solve their perceived problem than to try and explain how bad of an idea it is (which they can't even accept, because it means admitting the problem is them!)
Our advice, by and large, is to ask questions in a non-suspicious way in regards to your privacy at work. Be clear on what the company expects and allows (get it in writing, the handbook is a good start) and don't work for places that want excessive monitoring systems from us - it's stuff like this that makes us leave, and you should too if it means a compromise in your self-respect.
But also realize that a minimal amount of monitoring is required by a business to manage its risk and liabilities, and this is fair for them to have in place / is often in place by default, whether they use it or not.
tl;dr:
Don't work for companies that have monitoring systems you don't feel comfortable with, and rest assured that IT people could not care less about what you're doing or not doing. It's not what we're in this career to do.
It's likely that nobody is watching anything, and it's only when the business already has decided that they want you gone that they'll go back through the records, looking for evidence to legally support that decision, regardless of what the real reason might be.
tl;dr edit: The exception to this is when you're blatantly violating company policy, the law, basic human rights, or other regulations. It should be assumed that doing intentional, egregious harm will trigger even the most basic of alerts in many systems, because that's the bare minimum any company should do to protect their assets and control their liabilities - and most companies have this by default with any standard software they've purchased.
r/ITdept • u/Sbaakhir • 1d ago
Our NGO’s budget got severely cut and we need to save on software
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I have about 8-9 weeks to trim 30% off our SaaS budget before the new fiscal cycle starts (January). A primary institutional donor to our NGO pulled out last month, taking roughly 1/4 of our annual funding with them (still mourning it). We have around 110 people spread across 4 regional offices, and leadership handed me the spreadsheet to fix.
I already did the easy cuts, after Microsoft ended the free Business Premium licences our renewal finally lapsed in March. I downgraded the org to free Business Basic tiers and pushed the staff onto web apps, which cost us Intune and Defender (not ideal but workable). We also migrated our password management from Bitwarden Enterprise over to Passwork, their nonprofit pricing freed up north of $400 a month.
(For context: we do environmental mapping and cleanups, from forests to beaches, we also collect the trash and turn it into data to understand which products keep showing up and which sites keep refilling after we clear them. That data is also what proves the work to the government, it gets attached to every report we file and our main government grant depends on it.)
Now I am stuck on the remaining which is NOT little (we’re already on every nonprofit programme I could find):
- ArcGIS: 4 years of survey data and every report we’ve published sit inside it, and the Esri nonprofit programme we’re already on comes with a fixed named-user count, no price I can argue down whatsoever.
- Planet: their imagery used to reach us free through the NICFI programme on Global Forest Watch, and that access got pulled on 1 April 2025. The limited version that came back in May 2026 only covers the Amazon basin, which includes none of our sites. So it’s either commercial rates or dropping to Sentinel and losing the resolution, which also breaks comparability with everything we’ve already filed.
- Starlink Business: field sites have no other connectivity. I can’t find a nonprofit rate anywhere and there’s no cheaper satellite option I’d trust for a 2-week deployment.
- Deel: payroll and contracts for staff in the 2 countries where we have no legal entity. Remote dot com runs a nonprofit programme, bbut moving means re-papering those contracts.
When I price out alternatives, it rarely mathematically works. A cheaper tool usually means self-hosting, which trades licence fees for infrastructure costs and my own sanity. When I factor in migration hours, the switch seems to cost more in labour than the subscription costs in dollars.
Which of these aforementioned tools makes the most sense to rip out/switch from, and which ones should I fight to keep? I am overwhelmed to the brim by the deadline so excuse me if the post is a bit all over the place please, thanks.
r/ITdept • u/Enough_Charge2845 • 20h ago
We analyzed 3,518 job postings. The skills employers mention most aren't always the tools you'd expect.
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We looked at 3,518 open job postings across 81 companies' public Greenhouse boards, covering seven job categories. The goal was simple: find out which keywords employers actually use.
A few findings stood out.
- Software engineering: Mentoring appeared in nearly half of the postings, more often than Kubernetes or React. Python was the most frequently mentioned programming language.
- Product management: More than 85% mentioned roadmaps. Jira appeared in just 7 of 421 postings.
- Marketing: Google Ads showed up in only 6 of 347 postings, while pipeline appeared in more than half.
We also noticed a pattern across roles: employers often described the practice rather than naming a specific tool. Observability came up where you might expect Grafana, and SIEM where you might expect Splunk.
What does this mean for your resume?
If you're listing tools but leaving out the responsibilities, practices, and skills explicitly mentioned in the job description, you could be missing relevant keywords.
That doesn't mean stuffing your resume with buzzwords. It means describing your actual experience using language that matches the role you're applying for.
One important caveat: the sample leans heavily toward tech companies and uses a single ATS platform, so these results aren't representative of every employer.
The full study, including findings for sales, cybersecurity, DevOps, and accounting, is here:
r/ITdept • u/NicekamrynGuard6903 • 1d ago
SOC 2 auditor asked for our laptop count. We had three different ones
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Type II, second year. The auditor wants the full list of laptops so he can pick 25 and check encryption, EDR and patching on each. Simple ask.
I sent him three exports because i did not know which one to send. He sent back one line asking which was the population.
Three days in excel after that. AD has computer objects for people who left in 2023 and for VMs that were never laptops. Intune has 60 loaners that got autopilot registered and never handed out. The EDR only knows what the sensor reached. Host names don't match between any two of them because half the fleet got renamed during the domain migration, all three already feed axonius on the security side, which i only found out on day three. it would have given me the overlap, not the rule for what counts as a laptop.
I ended up handing over a list of 1,912 with a page explaining how i got there, and he was fine with it. Auditors are fine with mess as long as you can explain it.
I am not fine with it. Nobody owns the question "what counts as a laptop" and every tool answers it differently. Next year its the same three exports and the same three days unless somebody writes that rule down.
So that is what i am doing this week, writing the rule down, before anyone asks me for the number again.
r/ITdept • u/organizational_IT • 1d ago
School project survey
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Have you ever struggled to find the right screw bolt or small part in a messy workspace? For our school engineering project we’re researching how poor organization of small parts can waste time and make repair work tedious and more difficult. We’re exploring ideas for a solution that could make finding and sorting parts easier and more efficient, especially in computer repair jobs and hobbies. If you have a few minutes could you please fill out this quick survey to help us better understand the problem it would be a huge help
r/ITdept • u/UPDF_Enterprise • 1d ago
Cutting Adobe costs: how do you decide who actually needs a paid PDF license?
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When there’s pressure to reduce Adobe spending, how do you decide which licenses to keep without turning the review into an argument with every department?
IT can check assignments and whatever usage data is available. But that doesn’t necessarily explain why someone needs Acrobat. A person using it twice a month could depend on a specific feature; someone opening PDFs every day might only need a reader.
I’d want department managers to confirm the tasks their teams need, with IT checking which plans or tools can support them. The options could include reclaiming unused seats, changing plans or testing another PDF editor with a small group.
The part I’d be cautious about is counting the license savings before understanding the support work. Deployment, document compatibility, signatures and retraining could all affect whether a switch is worthwhile.
There’s also the ownership question. Procurement handles the renewal, IT manages access, and departments request the software. Who has the final say when a manager wants to retain every license but IT is expected to reduce the budget?
How have you handled that review, and which changes actually reduced costs without creating more work for your team?
r/ITdept • u/mia-sutton8 • 1d ago
[ Removed by Reddit ]
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[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]
r/ITdept • u/Available_Chair_9451 • 1d ago
so anyone using an AI technician for tier 1 yet?
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wel our helpdesk lead at a 300 person company, 4 of us on the desk. password resets, lockouts and outlook issues are like half our queue and we're always behind. trying to figure out if any of these AI options are worth it or if its all hype
we're on freshservice for ticketing and been happy with it overall. they have their freddy AI stuff and our account rep has been pushing us to try more of it, so thats one option. we're also looking at atera's robin since it fixes stuff on the device and closes the ticket, and apparently it works with freshservice so we wouldnt have to switch our ticketing
mostly want to hear from people actually running one of these, setup time, what you let it handle at first, all that. demos all look amazing so not much help there lol
r/ITdept • u/Posible_Cnrprab_9424 • 1d ago
A contractor laptop we dont own got ransomware. We have about 90 of those
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Agency contractor working for marketing. We gave her a vpn login and an okta account like we do for all of them. No EDR, because its not our device, and no intune, same reason.
She got hit at home, connected to the vpn to start her day, and that was our monday. Contained fine, nothing spread. Then the IT director asked how many devices like that we have, and i watched four people look at each other.
HR has contractors as "external" with no asset against them. Okta has 140 accounts in the contractors group. The vpn concentrator logs show devices by hostname, which are things like DESKTOP-7FJ2K1. Intune has 31 who enrolled voluntarily because they wanted the wifi. Thats it, thats the inventory.
We have axonius reading okta, intune and the EDR, and it had the same blind spot, because the vpn logs were never one of its sources.
After two days of matching hostnames to okta sessions we got to roughly 90 laptops we dont own with access to the network, 12 of which had never appeared anywhere except the vpn.
Policy change is coming, either we issue a laptop or they get a virtual desktop. Getting the list before the policy was the bit nobody had budgeted for.
r/ITdept • u/organizational_IT • 5d ago
Organization school project help
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Have you ever struggled to find the right screw bolt or small part in a messy workspace? For our school engineering project we’re researching how poor organization of small parts can waste time and make repair work tedious and more difficult. We’re exploring ideas for a solution that could make finding and sorting parts easier and more efficient, especially in computer repair jobs and hobbies. If you have a few minutes could you please fill out this quick survey to help us better understand the problem it would be a huge help
r/ITdept • u/organizational_IT • 5d ago
Organizational survey
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Have you ever struggled to find the right screw bolt or small part in a messy workspace? For our school engineering project we’re researching how poor organization of small parts can waste time and make repair work tedious and more difficult. We’re exploring ideas for a solution that could make finding and sorting parts easier and more efficient, especially in computer repair jobs and hobbies. If you have a few minutes could you please fill out this quick survey to help us better understand the problem it would be a huge help
r/ITdept • u/organizational_IT • 5d ago
Organization survey
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Have you ever struggled to find the right screw bolt or small part in a messy workspace? For our school engineering project we’re researching how poor organization of small parts can waste time and make repair work tedious and more difficult. We’re exploring ideas for a solution that could make finding and sorting parts easier and more efficient, especially in computer repair jobs and hobbies. If you have a few minutes could you please fill out this quick survey to help us better understand the problem it would be a huge help
r/ITdept • u/organizational_IT • 5d ago
School project
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Have you ever struggled to find the right screw bolt or small part in a messy workspace? For our school engineering project we’re researching how poor organization of small parts can waste time and make repair work tedious and more difficult. We’re exploring ideas for a solution that could make finding and sorting parts easier and more efficient, especially in computer repair jobs and hobbies. If you have a few minutes could you please fill out this quick survey to help us better understand the problem it would be a huge help
r/ITdept • u/MeJuvante_AI • 5d ago
We measured how long people actually spend looking for internal information. The number changed how we prioritized our AI roadmap
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r/ITdept • u/1click1vote • 6d ago
Does DLP need to change bc our employees are pasting data into generative AI tools?
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Hi, a concerning number of employees at my job are pasting source code, customer data and strategy documents into our AI tools and our DLP isn't catching this. What should my team change in our process so these don't become a security risk?
Fake 3.5" disk that would be read by standard 3.5" floppy drive?
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We have an older physical industrial tooling machine that needs data from a 3.5" floppy drive.
No USB can be done and swapping the drive not doable
(This info is second-hand to me. I'll be looking myself soon)
Is there such a beast where one end is a floppy disk that would slide in to the 3.5 drive, but would have attached to to it and feed data to the fake 3.5 disk and trick the regular 3.5" drive into thinking the data is on the disk itself instead of the device feeding the fake disk?
r/ITdept • u/sitonmydickandrotate • 6d ago
Found: Indonesia upgraded to High Risk in my dev database
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Let’s hope this is just a sandbox/dev environment and not making it to prod…right? 😑
Really really hoping it’s a joke and doesn’t get pushed
r/ITdept • u/Electrical-Knee-3331 • 7d ago
What is genuinely the hardest simple thing IT teams to manage?
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I was having a beer with another sysadmin last night, and we were laughing about how the hardest things in IT aren't the complex networking setups, it’s the stuff that sounds incredibly simple to non-technical management.
For me, it’s standardizing company branding across our tech stack. When leadership says "Let's update everyone's email signature with our new logo and a holiday banner," they think it's a 5-minute job. They don't realize how much of a nightmare it is dealing with cached images in Outlook, users randomly changing their job titles to "Director of First Impressions," and different clients rendering HTML differently.
What is your version of the "simple" request that is actually a logistical nightmare to deploy company wide?
r/ITdept • u/Visible-Lie8505 • 7d ago
Advice Needed on Third-Party Payroll Job
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My friend has 3.5 years of experience and received a Data Analyst job opportunity through Company A (consultancy), with Company B as the end client. However, the interview invitation came from Company C.
We're unsure who the actual employer and payroll company would be.
Is third-party payroll worth considering? What should we clarify with HR regarding job security, salary, benefits, and what happens if the client project ends?
Please share your experiences and advice. Thanks!
r/ITdept • u/harper-summers5 • 8d ago
The overlooked problem in most cyber incident response plans: who can make decisions at 2 a.m.?
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A technical team can identify a credible compromise and still be unable to contain it.
The usual blocker is not a missing playbook. It is a decision with business consequences: isolating a production network segment, disabling a privileged identity that supports a critical workflow, or taking an application offline before the full scope is known.
In a real incident, "escalate to leadership" is not specific enough. Someone needs delegated authority, a defined threshold for action, and enough context to understand the cost of waiting.
For IT leaders, which security actions can your on call team take without executive approval, and which ones still require a business owner to decide?
r/ITdept • u/External_Pizaao_8305 • 8d ago
Vibe coded finance app is on a public URL with a NetSuite token, close is nine days out. What would you do first?
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Monday a Lovable subscription showed up on a corporate card expense report. tuesday we traced it to a commission recon app a senior accountant built over a few weekends. About 30 people in finance use it every day. It pulls carrier statements and writes to NetSuite through an API token with way more access than the app needs. Wednesday we found the app sitting on a public URL with no login. no Entra, no auth at all. just anyone with the URL. the accountant never turned it on and nobody asked, which is on us too. the CFO said, "the close runs through this now." close is nine days out. Killing it breaks month end. leaving it means an unauthenticated app has a broad token to the accounting system. the accountant solved a real problem and is proud of it, so turning this into a punishment exercise probably means the next app gets hidden better. What's the first thing you'd actually do this week, before close?