Real World Computing

Today's world is all about cloud.  We have email in the cloud, document storage in the cloud, data, applications and even development in the cloud. Why Cloud is Best From one point of view, cloud is an excellent choice. You no longer need to worry about; Physical servers which can suffer hardware failures. Storage and rack space for servers Local services, such as Air Conditioning and the Water Supply in the computer room. Local environmental factors, such as storms which can directly impact your infrastructure. Local backups, which can take hours and require special software Tape management (or streaming backup services) Server failover -- this is managed by the cloud sites. Hotfixes and patches to operating systems and applications. Most of the cloud systems offer some pretty good restore functionality too. For example; IBM Connections has some great version control tools which allow you to roll back to previous versions of your file.  This means that if...

I've just finished filling out a survey questionnaire for Michael Osterman and I noticed that the same sorts of things just keep on cropping up. I can't figure out why these things are "issues" in this day and age. Certainly, they're not problems for us. I was just wondering if people have email problems because of poor implementations, poor policy, low expenditure or because they're on other systems with less resilience than domino. The Problems Discussed The problems mentioned in the survey were as follows; Spam Outbound Confidential Material Archiving and Retrieval System Management Time Mail File Sizes None of these are issues for us. Spam After struggling for a few years with the Symantec Anti-Spam solutions, I finally redirected our mail through a cleansing service. This service runs our mail through several different Anti-Spam solutions. Anything considered spam is sent to spam@myorganisation.com while all other mail goes to it's rightful reci...

I've probably blogged about this kind of thing before but since we did a domino server replacement a couple of nights ago and it all went smoothly, I figure it's worth reiterating the procedure. It's funny how as you try to type a blog during the gaps in your busy schedule, it mutates from your original idea. I've ended up talking more about backups than intended but since it's all useful information, I've decided to retain it and split this into two articles. The Aim Our main domino server was getting a bit old and we wanted to move to newer hardware. The server runs Domino 7.0.2 on Windows Server 2003. It replicates with an offsite server as well as an internal one. The server runs mail, lots of internal notes applications, an ExtraNet and two web sites. It used to run blackberry too but that's a different post. The server is part of a ...believe it or not... Windows NT Domain. One day we'll move to active directory - maybe. Downtime is fairly cr...