This past week I got a new boss, a guy with a pretty diverse background in IT, hands on and at the executive level. Seems like a good guy so far. I was concerned that since I took over as Director of Systems engineering just a month ago and was still getting my arms wrapped around all the different aspects of the job and all the details on systems I wouldn't bee able to give him all the info I wanted. He understood the situation and has been cool when I have told him I needed so time to find the answer to one of his questions.
On the second day he told me something I knew was a sign that the two of us are going to work well together: "I would much rather have all our monitoring tools be Open Source"
YES! I have been trying to get the department away from using the bloated, expensive, hard to configure and not to reliable software they have been using for the last few years to something easier to configure, reliable and open.
I've used nagios, Cacti, MRTG and other open source monitoring tools for years. I just recently started playing around with opennms at home. I can't wait to get these in place and move away from the proprietary crap we are using now. Keep checking here for progress.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Trying to sell Web2.0 to C-level execs - Update
I got a few comments here on the blog and some via email regarding the original post, so I wanted to give everyone an update.
To answer so of the questions I received, the resistance was from management at a divisional level. The biggest push back was "we can't allow users to make changes on a website". That's when some of us started making comparisons to Web2.0 sites on the internet. We gave the example of Google's customizable home page. User's can add gadgets, change the theme, change the order, etc. but they are far from able to "break" the page. SharePoint isn't necessarily aimed at creating Web2.0 websites, but I felt that the move away from static websites to sites where users can customize their experience had a certain relevance.
Another comparison was used that management would not get into the habit of telling staff how they could set up their desk, what format they use to take notes, or micromanage things that made the person more comfortable in their work space as long as they were able to get their work done.
Management is still on the fence, which is better that the flat out no they had started with. We are working on getting more specific feedback from users that shows the lack of customization options as a major stumbling block to user adoption. I'll keep everyone up to date.
To answer so of the questions I received, the resistance was from management at a divisional level. The biggest push back was "we can't allow users to make changes on a website". That's when some of us started making comparisons to Web2.0 sites on the internet. We gave the example of Google's customizable home page. User's can add gadgets, change the theme, change the order, etc. but they are far from able to "break" the page. SharePoint isn't necessarily aimed at creating Web2.0 websites, but I felt that the move away from static websites to sites where users can customize their experience had a certain relevance.
Another comparison was used that management would not get into the habit of telling staff how they could set up their desk, what format they use to take notes, or micromanage things that made the person more comfortable in their work space as long as they were able to get their work done.
Management is still on the fence, which is better that the flat out no they had started with. We are working on getting more specific feedback from users that shows the lack of customization options as a major stumbling block to user adoption. I'll keep everyone up to date.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Trying to sell Web2.0 to C-level execs
The company I work for started planning a document management system about four years ago, two years before I started there. At about that time people started talking about Web 2.0. Unfortunately since the project was started before wide spread adoption of the term and concepts of Web 2.0, those ideas were not incorporated into the scope of the project.
There were a lot of obstacles that came up which delayed the actual implementation, personnel changes, internal politics, and the biggest obstacle changing platforms for the project. The company first started working with Documentum, spent tons of money, then settled on SharePoint. The SharePoint platform was rolled out about a year ago.
For the last year all we have been using SharePoint for has been as a fancy file server. Some of the criticism I have seen about SharePoint calling it FileServer 2.0 would fit how limited our use has been. Managers and some users believed that emailing a document back and forth with track changes turned on was collaborating.
Finally we have started to look at some of the collaboration features of SharePoint and setting up sites with many collaboration features enabled for users to share data and work together in more efficient manner. The developers got together with some stake holders and some of our early adopters and came up with the features they wanted and that would have the biggest impact on their work. A large number of the features requested and added were ways to eliminate data that was kept in multiple spreadsheets. Email enabled lists, group calendars and RSS feeds were also popular. The fact that each individual could customize the way the page looked to fit their work style was a HUGE selling point.
Well, that point was immediately attacked by the executive team. When we first started to show them the sites the website team had developed, the first thing they said was that we had to lock each site down so that they all looked exactly the same. Huh?!
Now, I am a former security guy and am usually all about taking permissions from users. But this is going to be counter productive. People are now used to working on Web2.0-y sites where they can customize the pages they are working on. We aren't talking giving users administrative rights on pages. They arent going to have access to the backend database. We just want to give them the ability to close features they don't like, move them around on the page, change the display options of lists.
After the first meeting where were told we had to deny users the ability to make any changes, most users in the pilot program said that this was going to be something that kept them from using the sites as their main project management tool. They would go back to emailing documents back and forth, saving their own versions of spreadsheets, and even worse saving files locally on their hard drives.
I still hold out hope that we can convince management to get with the 2.0 times and let us enable the level of cutomization that is available to most people on the WWW today.
Anyone else deal with a similar issue? Or enabling Web2.0 type features in corporate web aps?
There were a lot of obstacles that came up which delayed the actual implementation, personnel changes, internal politics, and the biggest obstacle changing platforms for the project. The company first started working with Documentum, spent tons of money, then settled on SharePoint. The SharePoint platform was rolled out about a year ago.
For the last year all we have been using SharePoint for has been as a fancy file server. Some of the criticism I have seen about SharePoint calling it FileServer 2.0 would fit how limited our use has been. Managers and some users believed that emailing a document back and forth with track changes turned on was collaborating.
Finally we have started to look at some of the collaboration features of SharePoint and setting up sites with many collaboration features enabled for users to share data and work together in more efficient manner. The developers got together with some stake holders and some of our early adopters and came up with the features they wanted and that would have the biggest impact on their work. A large number of the features requested and added were ways to eliminate data that was kept in multiple spreadsheets. Email enabled lists, group calendars and RSS feeds were also popular. The fact that each individual could customize the way the page looked to fit their work style was a HUGE selling point.
Well, that point was immediately attacked by the executive team. When we first started to show them the sites the website team had developed, the first thing they said was that we had to lock each site down so that they all looked exactly the same. Huh?!
Now, I am a former security guy and am usually all about taking permissions from users. But this is going to be counter productive. People are now used to working on Web2.0-y sites where they can customize the pages they are working on. We aren't talking giving users administrative rights on pages. They arent going to have access to the backend database. We just want to give them the ability to close features they don't like, move them around on the page, change the display options of lists.
After the first meeting where were told we had to deny users the ability to make any changes, most users in the pilot program said that this was going to be something that kept them from using the sites as their main project management tool. They would go back to emailing documents back and forth, saving their own versions of spreadsheets, and even worse saving files locally on their hard drives.
I still hold out hope that we can convince management to get with the 2.0 times and let us enable the level of cutomization that is available to most people on the WWW today.
Anyone else deal with a similar issue? Or enabling Web2.0 type features in corporate web aps?
Monday, April 28, 2008
Xobni, a week later
It's been a week since I installed Xobni, and I must say, I love this thing! The feature I find the most useful is where it links people and the files they have sent me. I get close to 100 emails a day, half of them with attachments. Most of the time the subject of the email isn't even close to the name of the documents, making searching for it with Outlooks search or by looking at the preview view difficult. With Xobni, as long as I know the person who sent it to me, I can get a list of all the files that person has sent me. That has made my life a lot easier.
Finding emails by topic etc has also been easier. I havent found too much use yet for the analytics in Xobni, most of the email I get is from co-workers so it's not important to me to know when they email me or with what frequency. I can definitely see a value to that feature if xobni worked with my Gmail account. I hear rumors today about a Yahoo plug in and of Microsoft and Xobni in talks about a possible buy out by Msoft.
I see a lot of potential for this tool and hope to hear about some developments soon.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Back to the addiction
Twitter seems to have gotten past its caching problems of the last few days. More about what that means for Twitter here and here and my question on what it means to sites that depend on Twitter to generate traffic here.
For me it meant a loss of the community feeling I get from Twitter and wondering if it will replace my other sources of information gathering like RSS feeds, social bookmarking etc.
For me it meant a loss of the community feeling I get from Twitter and wondering if it will replace my other sources of information gathering like RSS feeds, social bookmarking etc.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Xobni
Finally got around to installing the Xobni Beta Outlook plug in. Pretty simple install, no reboot required.
One thing I immediately did not like was that I had to change my Outlook to use cached Exchange mode. Not a big fan of that on my desktop since we have 99.99% uptime to the Exchange server and it tends to make Outlook slow to get my new messages. I went ahead and enabled it and we will see how that goes.
Once the install was done it started scanning my Outlook folders, including my PST surprisingly enough. It did say that Outlook would be slow this first time and they weren't kidding. I switched to my BlackBerry and OWA while it did its thing.
After it finished it had installed a new toolbar along the side of my Outlook.
When I choose an email from the preview pane, I get information like this sample. It lists how many emails I have gotten from the person, all the past conversations, and a list of files I have sent to or been sent by that person.
Xobni's website says it is "the Outlook plug-in that helps you organize your flooded inbox." I can definitely see that. Just the fact that it finds all the past files I have sent someone is going to be a huge use for me. On their blog they show a quote from Bill Gates calling it “the next generation of social networking.” That part I am not that convinced about. Maybe if they add additional clients it will work worth maybe. Or it could be just me since most of my emails are with internal users.
One thing I immediately did not like was that I had to change my Outlook to use cached Exchange mode. Not a big fan of that on my desktop since we have 99.99% uptime to the Exchange server and it tends to make Outlook slow to get my new messages. I went ahead and enabled it and we will see how that goes.
Once the install was done it started scanning my Outlook folders, including my PST surprisingly enough. It did say that Outlook would be slow this first time and they weren't kidding. I switched to my BlackBerry and OWA while it did its thing.
After it finished it had installed a new toolbar along the side of my Outlook.
When I choose an email from the preview pane, I get information like this sample. It lists how many emails I have gotten from the person, all the past conversations, and a list of files I have sent to or been sent by that person.Xobni's website says it is "the Outlook plug-in that helps you organize your flooded inbox." I can definitely see that. Just the fact that it finds all the past files I have sent someone is going to be a huge use for me. On their blog they show a quote from Bill Gates calling it “the next generation of social networking.” That part I am not that convinced about. Maybe if they add additional clients it will work worth maybe. Or it could be just me since most of my emails are with internal users.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
