Like when you send a .7z instead of a .zip or .rar to a friend or a teacher because that’s what your computer has installed and they’re like “Oh No, not one of those, now I have to install 7Zip” even though the same program that opens .rar also opens .7z I feel like people are way more annoyed when they receive a .7z
Why does it take days?
There’s usually an entire approval process every software request goes through. First it needs a legit business use case that one of our current approved pieces of software cannot do. For example, they may not let you install Chrome because they officially support Edge since it’s heavily tied into the Microsoft ecosystem, and therefore don’t want to deal with managing Chrome in the environment.
If it’s a new piece of software, then it goes through a security review through the security team. Verify there’s nothing in it that oversteps it’s bounds, has no known security vulnerabilities, comes from a respectfully company that hasn’t done things like tax evasion, things like that. After security approves it then legal has to review the EULA or any licensing agreements. Company lawyers don’t really like doing this because it can be time consuming and low on their priority list.
After it’s approved, including any potential costs that the responsible parties accept, the operations team has a go at it. They don’t want to have to manually install it and maintain it on your computer, so they package it up and test it in a testing environment. After verifying the package can be deployed, configured, and kept up to date, or even completely removed remotely, then it gets put in to the production deployment, and finally sent to install on your machine.
Keep in mind that these employees are also doing all their other daily tasks. They’re not sitting there churning out app deployment packages. Maybe they only meet once a week for 30 minutes to approve software, and maybe they ran out of time before your request made the agenda. Maybe the security team held up on it because they had to deal with an emergency.
This is why some big companies can take a lot longer to get software approvals compared to places with one or two techs in the IT department.
Many of those steps should be trivial in this case, since 7-Zip is a popular open-source project.
Right, and generally they are for all but the specialized or large scale software, but it’s still the typical “hurry up and wait” scenario. The manager that needs to approve the business use case could be in meetings all day, then legal may be buried in a case taking all their attention so they won’t be able to review the license for a day or two, maybe the IT ops team didn’t get the request until 4:55 on a Friday afternoon, but no step can be done in the process without completing all the prior steps, and even the smallest piece of software still goes through the process in some form. The main point I was trying to get across is that it’s not an assembly line, and even if only one person is needed to approve it you still have to wait for that person to have time to do it.
Big companies are slow.
I like that your comment is the tl;dr for the above comment
We have usually more important tickets like “I can’t use my computer at all” or “my server is burning”. And as such are lower on the priority list.