My #1 problem with wizards is that they make people think they are capable of configuring things properly, regardless of whether or not they actually know what the hell they’re doing. This is also one of the major gripes that I have with companies like Microsoft, who have managed to convince people all over the world that a pretty interface with a bunch of wizards is a good substitute for competence. Sorry, but that’s bullshit, and every IT professional worth their salt knows this.
For the record, I am not just an elitist who advocates doing everything manually through a command line. I understand that a wizard can help get you up and running quickly, and I think any wizard that tells you all the things it did would be a great learning tool. However, I have yet to encounter a wizard that tells you much (if anything) about what it’s doing, and nobody is going to convince me that speed of implementation is more important than knowing how to configure something so that you can fix it when it breaks.
The bottom line is that if you feel the need to use the wizard (especially for critical security infrastructure like firewalls), then you have no business using it, because you obviously don’t know what you’re doing.
*My* big gripe is the damn firewalls that you speak of that actually HAVE wizards!! These firewalls require you to register them, which involves contacting the manufacturer’s licensing server. If that alone isn’t stupid enough, I once was trying to register one of these things and the licensing server was down. I called their support line and they confirmed this fact but could not help me register the thing. The best they could say is “try again in an hour”. A week later I was able to register the damn thing.
Imagine if this firewall was replacing one that died recently. The business would’ve been down and losing money for an entire week.
Moreover, a config dump from one of these things is unreadable, so you don’t know what’s in the config before you load it in. Also, the only thing you can really do from the command line (SSH) is ping.
/rant /post_takeover
The wizards in Exchange 2007 are pretty cool. In fact, I wish there were more of them. Exchange 2007 was suppose to be all-PowerShell, so the GUI is actually built on top of the commands. Whenever you do something in a wizard it will give you the PowerShell command(s) it ran.
See http://www.msexchange.org/img/upl/image0071170752729093.jpg
Finally, Microsoft does something right. (AH! I can’t believe I just said that!)