Like most of you, we have an Intranet at our office. Also like most of you it is a very useful tool to store information and launch web based applications. I like our Intranet. I find it very useful. In fact, it is my home page for Internet Explorer. (Of course our .net heavy intranet is the only thing I use IE, but still the Intranet is my home page) That being said, one of the most useful tools to me is the phone list. Seriously, it is interfaced with the phone switch and it always up to date. I use it often. On the home page of our Intranet is a phone list search box. I think it is great. Unfortunately, someone with too much power and is not afraid to use it has taken it too far. You didn’t think the whole post would be “I love my Intranet” did you? Someone decided that clicking a web browser icon and going to the Intranet (if it’s not your homepage) is too much work so they decided that everyone needs to have a desktop icon for the phone list. I’m still trying to figure out if minimizing everything to find the icon is less work. So they fired up the “Worlds Greatest Icon Pusher” (SMS for short) and pushed out an icon for the telephone list web page to every desktop. Oh, but wait there’s more. Every time SMS does an inventory if checks to see if you have the icon and if you don’t it pushed it back out again. Now I have to admit, I have never clicked on this icon so I suppose there is the possibility that world peace and cancer cures would spontaneously occur my user experience would be exponentially better than the search box on the homepage. Now for most of you, another icon on your desktop would not even be noticed. But I am a little strange (O.K. not a little) my desktop is black, I have no icons on it. I even use TweakUI to remove the recycle bin icon. I mean two 19″ monitors with a taskbar on one is all you see if everything is minimized. But that is the point. I usually have dozens of windows open. SSMS 2005, SSMS2008, Outlook, Word, Text editors, Etc. If I need a phone number, it is so much easier to hit IE from the Quick Launch bar. But every once in a while I cleanup all my open windows and I get stuck looking at the hideous red 1980′s looking telephone icon totally ruining the zen of my minimalist desktop. I have even gone to the desktop/SMS gurus and humbly requested that I be removed from this random deployment, but alas their hands are tied. Everyone must have the icon. O.K., I feel better now. Back to real work.
