So it happened. I hoped it would take longer but I knew it would come. It was a sad and frustrating day the other week that I have only now wanted to or have been able to write about it.

A little background to set up the scene: I work at a university, we have a rather large system that is built on MOSS. Which in of itself isn’t a major problem but still proves to be an interesting challenge.

One of those challenges is to create a development environment that is available anonymously (not logged in) to the developers only on the local network. Pretty common in the Apache world and should be fairly easy to setup on the MOSS system (or so I thought). Well it turns out that it’s not overly easy, and currently can’t be done so that it is limited to the local network. Something with how they have the firewalls setup or something.

In order for the developers to work we needed anonymous access turned on so that we could test our code as how the rest of the world would see it. Now this really isn’t an issue because only people who are working on the server know the URL. Google doesn’t know about it, Joe Plumber doesn’t know about it and you anonymous person doesn’t know about it. However the server admin thought that Google would index it right away, and was confused about it because another development environment was already being indexed by Google (another story for another time). After I reassured him that: 1. Google wouldn’t index unless it knew about it, 2. We can make sure that Google won’t index it, and 3. I couldn’t work unless anonymous access was turned on. After going back and forth a little, he decided that he wouldn’t turn it on unless he got approval from him supervisor (out for the day) or from my supervisor (also out for the day).

What it comes down to it a lack of knowledge on his part and a lack of respect for my position. I’m pretty much an expert in SEO and things related to search engines. I can tell you I knew next to nothing about Windows servers and IIS, which is why I trust the people who hold those positions to do their jobs and hope that they also realize what I do and trust me to do my job to the best of my ability.

I came into work this morning like I do on most Mondays. Turned on my computer, fired up a few applacations including Firefox. Thus is my morning routine.

My start page for Firefox happens to be iGoogle. Because it holds my gmail, rss feeds and some other fun things. Now I don’t keep myself logged in over the weekend because that’s silly. So what do you think my reaction was when I came across this before logging in?

I followed the link to the help page and Lo! Firefox 3 is NOT supported by iGoogle but Chrome is? hrrmmm Firefox 3 has been out for a bit longer then Chrome. I guess Chrome is Google’s browser but come on. No one really uses it.