Slim Chants

Organizations looking to mobilize and motivate their employees by implementing a social network are in uncharted territory when it comes to evaluating the various products available in the marketplace. Social Network Solutions can harness information, organizing it in one place, thereby transforming it into knowledge. Wikis make great documentation systems. Blogs are an excellent way of publishing timely articles and keeping staff informed. Forums give employees a place to discuss issues. Pages can help departments and teams maintain a presence and identity of their own. Search and tagging systems can mine the accumulated information, especially when these components are all integrated into one large application.

But Social Network Solutions are new and very different from other enterprise applications like ERP, MRP and CRM, especially when they are provided “In the Cloud” or in multi-tenant form. Providers are almost exclusively startups, usually fresh out of university and without any of the discipline enforced by corporate IT staff. With those thoughts in mind I’ve put together a list of ten important questions that you should ask any potential vendor, when sourcing a Social Network Solution.

• Who owns my data? This is obviously the first question. If the answer isn’t you then you should move on to the next vendor. Not much point in continuing the conversation.
• Is my data stored in a database separate from other customers? It’s very difficult to prevent a security breach when people who don’t belong anywhere near your data have access to the same database. Isolation is the first step in securing data so it only makes common sense to store it in a separate database. Again, if the answer is no you should move on to the next vendor.
• What is the guaranteed availability or uptime (including scheduled maintenance)? All web service providers publish uptime stats, usually guaranteed. What they don’t all necessarily tell you is how they define uptime. From the client’s perspective it may seem as simple as the percentage of time that the system is available. Social Network Solutions are Web 2.0 applications and many providers of such technologies evolve their product rapidly, meaning frequent updates to the system. If they don’t have controlled roll out plans with redundant servers and instant switchover there will be downtime at every roll out and some providers may not count that as “downtime”. Large corporations insist on service level agreements (SLAs) that specify penalties when they are exceeded.
• How will you integrate with our Change Management Process? Having raised the issue of system updates this is an appropriate time to ask about change management. Many medium to large corporations have rigorous controls over change. This is especially so in any ISO 9000 certified company. ISO mandates that your providers at the very least meet your own strict requirements, if they are not certified in their own right. You should be informed about each change and have input into any decision regarding if and when to deploy. This goes further if you are using the solution as part of your documentation system Wikis and document storage repositories will have to conform to your document control standards.
• What is the disaster recovery plan? While we’re on the standard process track we might as well ask about this. Any business in today’s economy needs to think about business continuity. Advanced catastrophe planning allows staff to react instantly to implement the plan and keep your business going. If you have a business continuity/disaster recovery plan it will have to be modified to include the new system.
• If I decide to change providers in the future, how can I extract my data? Pretty obvious, this one. You don’t want to be tied in to one vendor.The advantage of the customer to walk out the door and deal with someone else or even do it yourself is essential.
• In the event that your business fails, how will I be able to obtain my data? Not meaning to sound ominous but it does happen, to an alarmingly high percentage of startups. This should actually be part of your own disaster recovery plan but it warrants asking a separate question of the vendor. In the old days, IT departments would demand that source code to mainframe applications be held in escrow so that they could continue to operate in the event of a vendor’s demise.
• How closely does the product integrate with existing business systems such as LDAP, Email, Messaging, ERP, MRP and CRM? Don’t get your hopes up too much here but the question still needs to be asked. At the very minimum, companies using Directory Services should demand LDAP for sign in security. Unless you like duplication of data (possibly even duplicate data entry) you should also require LDAP be used for user profile information. In an ideal world all email on behalf of your network would be routed through your own email servers to help you maintain your “email reputation” (critical in a SPAM infested web) and also to keep track of what is sent and received. This can easily be accomplished through forwarding. Some companies already have a private instant messaging network like Lotus SameTime, MSN or an Open Source XMPP implementation. Ideally the Social Network Solution would hook in to this for presence management so other users could know when their contacts are on line. It’s unlikely that ERP, MRP or CRM integrations are available but if there is an extensive web service API you may be able to roll-yer-own extensions.
• Is the solution white-brand? You’ve done a lot to build an identity for your business. Social Network Solutions are web applications. You will want your implementation to look like it is from your company in almost every respect. Beyond “Help – About” annotations all prominent logos and identifiers should be your own. Email should look like any other corporate correspondence.
• What about moderation? Any system which encourages open discussion and publication is subject to abuse. Moderation is essential to maintain decorum and respect and to promote a civil exchange of ideas. Face to face meetings are moderated so why wouldn’t you do the same on line? You need to know who’s responsibility it is to moderate (the vendor or you), how many staff you will have to dedicate, and how to establish standards and train them.

No doubt, there are more questions which pertain to your specific situation. I’m sure the vendor sales folks will provide many answers to questions you might not even care to ask. Hopefully, the ones I’ve provided will prompt a lively discussion and many more questions and answers to your satisfaction. Social Network Solutions can be a powerful tool for your business or organization. As with any new product on the market, it is best to choose wisely.

Here’s something that came as no surprise: A recent survey of enterprise IT managers that administer both PCs and Macs finds that Macs have a lower TOC (total cost of ownership) than Windows boxes, and require less user training and help. It came as no surprise because Macs have a reputation for ease-of-use. Most business employees need a computer as a tool and they could care less what you gave them as long as it made them more productive with little effort. Virus infections and disk fragmentation are non-issues on Macs. Apple takes care of both the software AND hardware updates. As a rule they are problem free.

One wonders why it took IT so long to catch on. Likely Vista caused many IT shops to examine alternatives and if they asked their employees many would have said give me a Mac like I have at home. Little wonder they cost less to support.

I’m back to running Linux on the desktop. I took a few months hiatus due to some overheating issues that seemed to coincide with my update to Ubuntu 9.10. Others running various laptops had the same problem. The problem as it turned out was caused by an out-of-date BIOS in the laptop. Once I flashed it to the latest my fan started spinning up and down as required and my Acer notebook was useful once again.

Since the occurrence of the overheating I was using a MacBook Pro for my day to day computing. I’ve since dedicated that wonderful machine to recording studio duties specifically. (More on that in another post.) While I was dependent on the Mac I fell in love with Ecto for blog posts. It’s really a wonderful tool and today I went on a quest for an open source equivalent for my Ubuntu system. It took me awhile. Most of the available clients just don’t measure up. In the end I installed Bilbo, a KDE client which has most of the features provided by Ecto. It does not currently support addition of categories, unfortunately but it seems to be quite capable of managing posts. I’m using it to write this post. So far I’m satisfied but I will miss Ecto.

I’ve been using Ecto to write articles, post them and manage the blog for the past month. I like it so much I paid for a license before the trial ended. This tool is so much more convenient and effective. I much prefer the quick response of a desktop app over an HTML interface which is inherently slow. The convenience has resulted in more time spent writing. I especially like being able to work offline and then publish when I can get connected. For anyone using a Mac I highly recommend it.

I upgraded my hard drive yesterday. I decided to cover all my bases and have plenty of backup. I got started on Sat. evening by plugging in a large USB drive I had kicking around. Time Machine fired up and asked if I wanted to use it for backups. I went along and was prompted to reformat the drive for the exclusive use of Time Machine. Once the drive was configured Time Machine took a backup of the OS X drive. It ran silently in the background. I left the MacBook Pro plugged in to the drive for the evening and TM took a backup (incremental) every hour. I ended up with 5 backups.

I followed instructions I found on the web here and here to replace the drive. As it happens, you need a Torx T-6 driver to remove two of the many screws that have to come out to get at the hard drive. I had to wait until Sunday when I could get the necessary tools to crack the case as a result. Many PC type computers I’ve worked with make replacement of internal components quite simple. Field Replaceable Units (FRUs) they call them. Well, if the difficulty of accessing and removing/replacing components in a Mac is any indication of the reliability of said components, my mind has been put at ease. I had to remove something like 17 screws (teeny weenie screws at that!) to open the case and get at the hard drive in my MacBook Pro.

The video instructions had a step to install the new drive in a USB case, open Disk Utility and copy the old disk partition onto the new drive, so I did that. The I went through the tedious process of removing all the screws, opening the case and removing the old drive. The instructions were very accurate and complete in this regard. I removed the old drive and installed the new drive, a 320 GB Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM drive. The old drive is 120 GB 5400 RPM Fuji.

After replacing all the screws to reassemble the case I pressed the power switch to boot the computer and was very disappointed when it did not boot off the new drive. So I inserted the Snow Leopard DVD and booted off that. I restored the backup from Time Machine to the new drive and rebooted. Merde! The drive continued to fail to boot. In the end I installed a fresh copy of Snow Leopard and on first boot it asked if I wanted to transfer information from another image or a backup or network location. I plugged in the old drive (now mounted in the USB case) and chose that. It copied over all the user settings, applications, files, etc to the new drive and I was back in business with a new, larger, faster hard drive, and a spare 120 GB USB drive for music backup.

I’m pleased with the result. My Acer had 160 GB. I now have 320 GB and it’s nice and quick. The new drive cost me $72.99 CDN. Next I’ll upgrade the RAM.

Now my brother has one. My brother is a lawyer. He bought a NetBook recently, an Acer One, for courtroom work. He has an Acer laptop that he uses at the office. He’s not terribly pleased with the NetBook. It came with Vista Home Basic and TigerDirect won’t give him an upgrade to Windows 7 so he’s kinda pissed. Anyway, his laptop in the office stopped working after making a shreaking noise, never a good thing. So he went down to Best Buy to see what they had and the salesman asked him if he’d ever considered a Mac. Showed him a MacBook and explained how they don’t get viruses and how they do’t need defragging and how easy they are to use. So he bought one. He’ll probably off the NetBook now; the MacBook is halfway between a fullsize laptop and a NetBook so it serves both purposes.   

We all got together at my brother’s place for a party last weekend and I mentioned that I’d bought a mac. “What are you going to do about software?” my youngest brother asked. He knows that I’ve been a PC all my life. But the answer isn’t that difficult. Most of the applications I use everyday are available for the Mac, especially the Open Source apps, or else there are reasonable alternatives either included or available. No big stumbling blocks here.

I’ve just begun a paradigm shift. I bought a MacBook Pro, a used one that our co-op QA tech at work had for sale. It needed an OS upgrade and a new battery, and it had some cosmetic damage so I got it for a good price.

Those who know me are shocked, to say the least. I’ve been a PC all my life. (Not entirely true because I’ve been a Penguin for the past five years.) I develop software on a PC for a living. But I started looking at NetBooks, and as an alternative I decided to consider an upgrade to something more powerful than the Acer Aspire 5720Z that I’ve been running Ubuntu on since it was purchased new three years ago. The Acer has a 1.6GHz Dual Core processor and shared video, but the real downfall is the poor FireWire firmware. I am a musician and FireWire is the preferred interface for getting high-quality audio into a laptop. The MacBook Pro has a 2.16GHz Dual Core processor and 256Mb dedicated video. It also has both FireWire 400 and 800 ports. Macs are preferred for multimedia of all sorts and along with music I am also a photographer, so Apple seems to be a logical choice.

I’m really impressed. I can see why non-computer types gravitate to Macs. Buying a computer that is supported top-to-bottom by the manufacturer has tremendous appeal. Case-in-point: The Mac informed me of a software update this week. During the update the Mac performed an upgrade of the keyboard firmware in the laptop. Did I say I was impressed? If there is an upgrade to the firmware of my Acer I have to check the website to find out about it, download it, run a special program in Windows to apply it (or boot from a floppy image) and restart my OS. There is absolutely no link between the hardware vendor and the software vendor. And here is where the PC business model falls apart. A Mac is an integrated unit, not hardware from one source and an Operating System from another.

So far I’m a happy camper. Not everything is perfect. OS X cannot natively recognise Linux disk partitions, for one. But the computer is powerful and fast, even with only a gig of memory. We’ll see what happens when I load it up with four. Stay tuned …

AMD co-founder, Ed Turney passed away on Friday, Oct. 17, 2008, The Register reports.