Real World Computing

There seems to have been quite a bit of press lately about “Shadow IT” and it gives the impression that it's a new thing. Perhaps having a formally recognised name is new but shadow IT has been around throughout my (so far 28 year) career in IT and I suspect that it's much older than that. What is Shadow IT? Shadow IT is what happens when someone, not associated with the IT department, starts offering IT services to other parts of the business. Shadow IT can take the form of someone bringing in software from home, downloading software or even writing their own. Sometimes hardware is involved too with work PCs being opened, repaired, upgraded or otherwise "enhanced". In particular, since the emergence of cheap network hardware and the explosive growth of USB, its become very common to find users trying to plug their own hardware into work systems and networks. Sometimes new systems are developed. In one place I worked, a marketing employee rolled out a La...

Last Month, I wrote about the many problems with Connections.Cloud. One of the great things about working with IBM (as opposed to Microsoft) is that I've found that IBM are always willing to help. I had three separate contacts from IBM help me through the problem. It became clear that IBM is aware of the shortcomings with Connections and that they're already well on the way to getting them corrected.  If all goes well, IBM will be in a much better spot than Microsoft by the end of the year.  We managed to get the problems with our communities down to four things; Dissatisfaction with the way @Mentions currently work Lack of Collaborative document editing for guests Usability Features General Design Issues (Building without Design) Of these, we were told that the first two can't be solved now but will be solved soon.  In that case, we had to either switch to another product (and inherit a whole new set of problems) or persevere without those features on ...

I have found a great E-Book reader for the Blackberry. It's called Mobi Pocket Reader , and its free. It's available for a lot of other phones too. You can download books "over the air" or you can copy them to your Blackberry using the desktop manager software - MobiBooks looks in the Ebooks folder (although this can be changed via the options menu). Getting Books I have been enjoying some of the many E-Books available as free downloads in Mobi format from ManyBooks.Net . If you're not a fan of classics, there are also a lot of commercially available books in the built-in libraries. Creating and Converting Books It doesn't stop there though. There is free MobiPocket Creator Home Edition software available for creating MobiReader books from a variety of other formats, including, text,html, pdf and doc. This means that the entire resources of Project Gutenberg are open to you as well as a lot of online fan-fiction and business documents, whitepapers etc...

About a week ago, Ask the Admin ran a feature called What the Heck is Filling Up My Server? . The article was quite a good one and covered several products. I tried a few of these out. IMHO, the best of these is WinDirStat . This utility is free and quite fast. There's also some amusing pacman-like activity when you start it scanning a drive. One of the really cool things about this app is that it recognises the extensions of a lot of file formats - including less common ones like .NSF for notes. An extension that many expensive programs of this type often miss. If it finds a few files of an unknown type, it lists their extension as well (see DES at the bottom of the colour code map). The other exciting thing about this tool is that it creates a colour-map showing all files in relation to eachother. You can quickly spot the big files. If you click on a patch of colour, the name and path of the relevant file will be displayed in the status bar. Imagine my horror at finding ...

I don't think I've ever worked in an IT environment where the server room wasn't plagued by air conditioning issues. We have two in our computer room, a. The standard building air conditioner b. An extra unit They draw their power from different circuits, so they have a degree of redundancy but... ...both draw their water from the same source, a water tank on the roof of our building. Late last night I got a warning from our security company about the air conditioning. They report when it hits 28 degrees Celsius (82.4 F). I live quite a distance from the city and while I have keys to the building, our floor and the computer room, I don't have keys to the air conditioner reset itself. I decided that since I only had a few hours to go, I'd finish sleeping and arrive at my usual time 6.30am. By the time I got there, the room temperature was 32 degrees Celsius (89.6 F). I left the computer room door open and it cooled to 27C (80.6 F) within 30 minutes. I'm obvi...

Since my last post, I've been busy with a lot of things, but one of the most important things has been change management. The problems I, and most other IT people always seem to face is the constant influx of half-baked ideas from Management filtering down without proper paperwork. It has always been a policy of mine to not say "NO" to people without giving their problems/solutions serious thought. Unfortunately this takes quite a toll on my time. This has been a good policy and I'd strongly advise anyone who has Juinor IT staff, particularly helpdesk people, to take a policy like this onboard. Unfortunately, this doesn't work quite so well in IT Management. Here, we need to take a tougher stance. One of the worst aspects of being proactive as well as responsive to user requests is that it encourages plausible deniability. Users who get into trouble about a project, or change their mind about it, can easily deny having asked for it in the first place. It does...

We're having a lot of trouble at work at the moment over business ownership and change management. Here's how the cycle works... 1. Something goes wrong 2. Blame IT 3. Say that IT Needs proper "change management" and authorisation 4. Make IT Write a Business Process for Change Management 5. IT Writes about Business Ownership and Signoff 6. IT Presents it to Management (Personally) 7. Management agree that this is good, but a lot of work 8. IT Takes it to a committee who decide that it's too much work 9. Committee says "we don't want to be bothered with this kind of work" 10. IT is required to rewrite the procedures so that minimal authorisation is required (Everything chuggs along again happily until something else goes wrong - then the cycle restarts). Sorry if this all sounds very negative. I'll have some more constructive thoughts on change management once I get a little more time to report it.