Skip Marsh is responsible for maintaining the publishing company's corporate network, helpdesk, e-mail, portal architecture and SAN environment. He also creates and enforces the company's security policy. "If it plugs into a wall or takes batteries, I am responsible for it," Marsh says. Marsh has worked in IT for six years, four of them at MediaNews. He holds an associate's degree in electronics and has an MCSE certification.
Next time, I'll: Use something other than Vignette's content-delivery application to deliver our Web sites. And I'll insist that vendors demonstrate everything they say their products/applications can do before we sign a purchase order.
Most ill-timed Web failure: During the week of 9/11, I was in Texas going to Dell training, and the sites became extremely sluggish due to traffic loads. Our developers had to really dumb down many of our sites' templates to get them to load faster.
Why running a media portal is no picnic: The only thing each of our newspapers has in common is the look of the final product. Some newspapers don't have anyone who can manage their site and therefore want everything automated, while others want to manage everything and don't want IT to do anything with it.
Best advice I've ever gotten: Buy the best one they make, because inevitably you will need a feature on the one you didn't buy.