Eating your own dog food is a phrase that IT people use that means, using the products you recommend. There’s a verb for this too; it’s dogfooding. Dogfooding happens when we are testing something in production to see if it’s going to be worth mentioning to you or not. At Harbor we both Eat Our Own Dogfood and Dogfood hardware, software and services to see if they live up to their hype. It’s how we stay ahead and can make educated recommendations.
IT people have a lot of strange terms for things. Some items end up being our favorites and so they end up in production here as a permanent fixtures: Sharepoint, Office 365, Harbor Secure Cloud, Lync, Windows Phones. We just couldn’t get along without them. Some things are absolute winners like MultiPoint, Hyper-V, IP Phone systems, Spectorsoft and Remote Desktop Server. Some things comes and go: iPhones, NetBooks, Onsite Servers, Desktop PC’s, scanners, and fax machines.
Here’s a few of the items that we’re dogfooding right now.
- Intune, mobile phone management, Azure, SkyDrive Pro, non-domain environments, two-factor authentication, single sign-on and password servers
- Lenovo Twist, NUC, and Surface
- Policy’s, policy’s and more policy’s
We think that most of these are winners and so that’s were we are focusing. Some ideas come and go but the ones above are items that we’ve decided to really focus on because early indications are that these things are going to solve problems that we see developing.
