How hard is it to maintain an intranet?

[joker_927]

I just graduated with a bachelors degree in Computer Engineering and am finding myself interested in Information Systems Specialist positions. Most of these positions include 'standard' IT assistance to employees and 'standard' building and maintenance of hardware/software. That's all easy.

I am looking for advice on the other aspects of the positions that seem a little daunting to me. For example. Maintaining an intranet, setting up servers, and configuring company-wide e-mail.

Can anyone give me some advice on how to go about learning to do these things? I of course will be doing my own research, but finding someone who does this kind of work already would be great.

thank you

[vass0922]

its a whirlwind sometimes
it can be fun and challenging, but also very stressful .. especially when something is down, you have bosses crawling down your throat and you dont know how to get resources back online.

I'd suggest creating a VM env setup on a local desktop/server to start playing with it.
getting VM experience is always a huge benefit anyways, so that will be another point on the resume.
Get some servers stood up
email can be very daunting, and unfortunately setting it up and getting it to run out of the box is not difficult
getting it to run in a large environment with specific requirements is a different story

ie if you have 10000 mailboxes, 250 VIP's
do you have a VIP server that has highest priority to bring back online?
or do you spread out the vip's so if one server goes down it doesn't impact them all at the same time?
how do you organize storage groups, databases?
what type of storage is best for transaction logs vs database ?

these are production type questions, you wont have to deal with in such a small environment.

setup a few servers, make sure to create standard user for yourself
try to lock it down so it only has rights to specific files/shares.. make it realistic.

VMWare has a free VMWare workstation you can install locally to start playing with

[GroundZero3]

Well what do you know already? Im pretty sure your degree never went over how to manage any of those things which will make things difficult for you.

Let's start off with what you do know and work are way up from there

Vmware like vass mention and look into the CBTnuggets videos. The MCSA 2003 videos are pretty good.

[nemowolf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by joker_927

I just graduated with a bachelors degree in Computer Engineering and am finding myself interested in Information Systems Specialist positions. Most of these positions include 'standard' IT assistance to employees and 'standard' building and maintenance of hardware/software. That's all easy.

I am looking for advice on the other aspects of the positions that seem a little daunting to me. For example. Maintaining an intranet, setting up servers, and configuring company-wide e-mail.

Can anyone give me some advice on how to go about learning to do these things? I of course will be doing my own research, but finding someone who does this kind of work already would be great.

thank you

The first thing that comes to mind is what are they using to run the intranet. If you learn/know sharepoint but they are using another product to do this ... well you might have a general knowledge of but nothing specific to the product your using for instance.

As suggested, there are lots of places and ways to learn material but you need to know what you need to learn before you just blindly start learning stuff.