It often seems as though competing network software vendors are out to get one another. Security patches that cut off your NAS box from your clients. Antivirus utilities that report competing security packages as "false-positives". Trial versions of useful utilities that quietly time out and demand renewal fees. Remote access utilities that choke up your internet connection with idle backchat. Gateways to mobile data devices that demand you open your firewall to the world...

Making a diverse pool of equally important platforms and programs all live together, when they're merrily sold as "PC-compatible", is likely to take up a lot of your day.

So don't dive in to every available gadget assuming that there will be no side effects: keep the core machines, the servers and workflow PCs, running as lean and mean as you can possibly make them. Having to deal with the product battleground problem in the first place makes good network administrators into great purists, and with very good reason. Keep it simple.