What is the best way to address users storing and streaming music within your company?

Question

We have a number of users who have MP3s in their home directories which are stored on our centralized file server. This has a negative affect on how long our backups take, how much drives space we need to have, etc. I thought about sending e-mails out for people to remove it with a notice that it would be deleted by a certain day but I don't feel that this is the right way to go about this. Many of these employees have music because it helps them work more efficiently and they don't have quantities that are excessive but the amount in sum across all the employees is still significant.

I have come up with a couple of ideas but each have their own problems:

• Idea: Allow Users to stream music instead of storing it
• Problem: Takes up too much bandwidth
• Idea: Move all the music to the users' local machines
• Problem: This would take significant effort on my department's part and we would then be responsible for doing things like redirecting the default directories for iTunes on people's computers so that data is stored locally
• Idea: Encourage people to purchase their own portable MP3 players by leveraging our corporate discount to offer employees discounted players
• Problem: Some of our users listen to podcasts, something that I have found extremely beneficial in my job, and may not have a computer at home to synchronize with

What are some good ways to handle respecting our users and getting the productivity and morale benefits that music affords without having to store users' music on our file server?

Answer 1

I'd be tempted to ask senior management just to send out a "remove and don't do it again" email - then you can do a monthly scan and give the management a list of those still doing it.

It's not a technical issue so don't make it one.

Answer 2

Whatever you do, you are going to need management support for it. IT can rarely set its own policies without this support (especially if your policy affects management - like if they are also storing mp3s on the server...) Users generally get upset when things stop working the way they always have as well so you are going to need to communicate with them BEFORE you make any changes too. Company storage of mp3s is not a good idea even if you don't have any SLA on the data and it could disappear at any time since it could lead to legal issues (can you be certain that NONE of the mp3s are copyrighted?). Again, this is a small chance, but it is still there.

Depending on your file server, you may be able to exclude certain file types from being stored at all, and you can usually exclude certain file types from backups as well depending on the backup software. Windows 2003 has File Server Resource Manager that allows you to set quotas, file screens, etc...

Answer 3

Exclude music and video directories from your backups entirely, and let your coworkers know that those directories are provided as-is, not backed up and they shouldn't put important stuff there.

If legal/copyright issues are a concern, have employees sign a waiver that says anything they put in those directories is solely their own responsibility.

I have seen a lot of companies where the IT department is a total pain-in-the-ass, making their coworkers miserable day after day. Please work hard towards not being one of those. Keep in mind that you are there to help your coworkers make the best of their working day :)

Answer 4

I'm afraid that there isn't an answer that either you or your users are going to like. This type of issue plagues many IT departments. I'm lucky because I work for a government agency, where it's strictly forbidden to rip MP3s to the network (for that matter, they're strictly prohibited from connecting ANY personal device to the network). We have specific policies in place prohibiting it.

We encourage people to bring portable radios or MP3 players instead. That's the easiest route.

Edited to add: The minute you lay your hands (IT) on this issue will be the minute that your users expect numerous things to happen. One, that you'll help them restore all the MP3s they deleted. Two, you'll help them rip CDs they brought. Three, make it easier for them to share music with other employees...and the list goes on and on.

This is a Pandora's box that you don't want to open my friend, because it will only end in frustration from an IT standpoint. DO NOT ALLOW THIS.

Answer 5

I had the same issue at my company, what I ended up doing in the end was creating a separate network share dedicated to music. Backups are limited to a single weekly sync. We call the share 'play', and its reserved for non-essential data, anything that ends up there might disappear forever :)

Bonus edit: just checked the share size:

[ben@kentro play]# du -h
  ...
712G    .

Yikes!

Answer 6

I’m not an employer nor a sysadmin so I can only offer an employee’s perspective:

A company that bans me from storing music on my work PC sucks.

Of course finding a solution will cost resources (and effectively money). But so do all other investments for the employees, from the second monitor to a fridge full of milk and all the other stuff.

I was under the impression that abolishing fresh milk to cut costs is universally seen as a douchey move. In fact, Joel even uses this as a hook in a promo movie for Fog Creek, to offset himself from those big, unfriendly corporations.

If music makes programmers productive, giving them second-best solutions isn’t a smart move, in my opinion.

Instead of mandating portable MP3 players or blaring radios, can’t the company reserve a remote folder for storage that isn’t backed up?

Answer 7

Hardware is cheap, employees are expensive. If adding $100 in hardware/infrastructure and $50/mo in support costs PER USER allows your users to be even 5% more effective, then it is a good business decision. Buy more hard drives and a faster network for your backup system, or a faster network to allow streaming. Happy employees are productive employees.

Answer 8

One possibility is that you could create an MP3 share for every user on some USB drives hooked up to your system (or some sort of other cheaper storage) depending on the size of your company. The only downside is that you or your company might get in trouble if these are copyrighted mp3s -- that seems a bit paranoid to me for a small/medium company though.

You could then not worry about backing up these shares. Also, it wouldn't help the file storage issues but you could always exclude *.mp3 from backups. But then you might loose actual needed mp3 content.

My vote would be just to go and delete them periodically for anything outside of iTunes which you could control with the GPO. I think saying "No Music" would really hurt Moral, but I never got much kickback when trying to tell them that these files had to be local -- users were understanding. You can make a help document that explains how to move it and send automated warnings. You could even say it has to be legal data as well in that document.

Answer 9

To start I'd enforce quotas for the home directories and exclude *.mp3, *.mp4, *.ogg, *.wma *.whatever-other-stuff you don't want backed up.

Answer 10

I'd suggest promoting the personal music player policy. It encourages users to continue listening to the music that helps their productivity, but limits your liability. Set a policy for storage of personal data and usage of streaming services on work computers/networks.

Some employees have purchased smartphones for the purpose of streaming music during work hours without using company bandwidth. The guy across the aisle from me does that.

You could also search for .mp3 files and email the users reminders about responsible computer use, but this risks straying into the "Mordac the Preventer" territory of system administration.

Answer 11

No one seems to be mentioning the legal side of things here. There are huge copyright infringement issues surrounding storing MP3s on corporate servers. Any CIO worth his/her salt will ban MP3 storage on corporate PCs or servers.

I LMAO when I read "A company that bans me from storing music on my work PC sucks.", above.

Answer 12

Enforce quotas for backed-up directories, and leave some larger storage available for non-critical data.

Answer 13

If you're in europe, Spotify solves your problem. Or redirect "My Music" to their local harddrive if you're on the windows platform.

Answer 14

I don't even know why this is an issue tbh.

We don't allow people to store personal music/video files on company machines. We don't do it because of storage implications as that's a relative non-issue - we do it because we don't know, and don't have the resource to find out if we did want to know, the copyright situation of those files.

Some people seem to view music files differently to the way they would if, say, a user wanted to store a bunch of ripped video games on a company owned machine.

An 8gb USB stick costs next to nothing, if people want to play their music on a company PC they're welcome, just don't store it on one.

Answer 15

Assuming that your client computers have plenty of drive space, use Group Policy to redirect the My Music profile folder to a local path (such as its default location, or something like "C:\Local\Music". Once this setting is in effect, users won't have to do anything special to get Windows Media Player or iTunes to rip to that local directory.

For whatever my 2 cents is worth, I definitely get both of the arguments being made here. I've tried to split the difference in my own environment -- I redirect their My Music folders to a local share, and I make it clear that while users are more than welcome to listen to (and store) music on their workstations, this is an activity that we ALLOW, not SUPPORT. Helpdesk tickets regarding music will be openly mocked.

Answer 16

Pragmatism rules !!

1. Make a drive with one (or two) top level folders - music and video.

2. hide the drive so it is not discoverable - tell some users it exists.

3. forget about it - the users will self regulate.

Why hide it - so a simple audit will not find it. Tell no one. move on...

Your IT dept cannot afford to manage it - your company cannot afford to moderate/police it - even acknowledging its existence is dodgy.

Answer 17

When last I had to address this, I took an old PC, some old 250GB HDDs that weren't being used any longer, got the company to spring four hundred quid for a cheap RAID card, and built a terabyte server for "content". I could have done it with software RAID if i wanted to spend absolutely no money at all.

IT management knew about it in a "plausibly deniable" way, that is, I told them in such a way that noone could prove I told them.

Then I let the users know that it was there. They were almost all developers, and developers work better when they have their music and cached radio and stupid games and whatever available to hand, nd easily shareable with their friends (not as in "copy this", but as in "listen to this, it's on the media box"). I told them the server wasn't being backed up, but it was RAIDed, so the content probably wouldn't just vanish. I told them that if I found their streamed content taking up space on the production file servers, I'd summarily delete it and kill them with a stick.

It worked very well, for a time; I got about a third of my main file server back, they got music and video as they pleased, and everyone was happy. Eventually, senior management found out about it and got quietly pissed because of the liability issues some have raised above, and it was turned off. Of course, the developers got wind of this (when I told them), and as I had predicted, we ran out of space on the main file server within a week.

There have been notes above regarding the legality of ripping one's own CDs. I'm no lawyer, but I think there are grounds to suspect as FUD the "oh gods oh gods the server is made of company bits on company property we're all going to die and the riaa will eat our babies eek eek" position that some senior managers take. There is somewhat less doubt about whether developers will have and share this content at work, so it always seemed to me that a pragmatic accord was better.

Answer 18

Where did the music come from? If they're downloading it on their company PC, you have some bigger issues. If they're plugging in their portable MP3 players, that has to stop: there's no reason why they need to setup iTunes or whatever and have their personal library on their own machines.

Regardless, you'll need to get buy-in/support from senior management, but I've had no issues implementing the following policy on my customer's offices:

1. For communal areas, reception, etc., 9 times out of 10 they're happy with a radio: they can't listen to anything NSFW, so your local "easy rock" suffices. We just bought a couple of combo docking station/radios for < $100 at a big box electronics store.

2. For everyone else, plug in your earphones into your mp3 device: trying to find a room or cubicle that can all agree on music isn't something you can solve with technology.

3. Setup file screening on your servers: Windows 2003 R2 and 2008 support file screening where you can setup a policy to forbid certain file types from being stored on your file servers. You could push out a scheduled task on each workstation that deletes audio files but you have to be careful not to blow away legitimate files (like audio dictation, or any sound alerts that may be required for an application).