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

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?

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.

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...