I’ve been working with a couple of folks lately who’ve been trying to review and pilot Active Directory auditing solutions. Both bemoaned the fact that, unlike consumer products of nearly any kind, IT products (specifically, enterprise software in this instance), don’t really get reviews from the admins who use those products.
So, I’m curious. If you could (a) anonymously, and (b) without giving your organization’s name, would you (c) leave reviews of enterprise software for other admins? You’d need to leave some obvious details, like the approximate size of your organization (number of users), what you expected the software to do, what it really did, what you liked, what you didn’t like, and so on.
Such a site would be a lot better (I think) than magazine or “professional” reviews, since you’d be reading the experiences of people who actually use the stuff every day. Yeah, as with any publicly-contributed content, review quality will vary - but you already know how to read between the lines, right? 😉
Drop a comment, or even send a tweet to @concentrateddon with “Reviews: YES!” or “Reviews: NO!” comment. Or if you prefer Facebook, leave that comment on my FB page. It sure seems like we IT professionals could use something like this - it’d be a good place to start researching solutions to particular problems, and a good place to share some real-world intel on how different solutions really work. Even if you don’t like writing reviews, would you use such a site as part of your research process?