It's morons like this that give the morons I hate on the right ammunition.
Our Migration plan
on
Time To Dump XP?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Our migration is probably similar to many other companies. Here's what we're doing in case anyone is curious how this roadmap looks in a reasonably sized company (multilocation, etc, etc):
1. We got our first Win7 system to test a few months ago. We discovered almost everything worked, but our VPN clients should be updated, our AV needed some updating, and really we should be on Office 2010. The nice thing there is we can eradicate Office 2003 once and for all.
2. So, that really prompts some server upgrades that we've been planning for a while anyway. We're going to consolidate a lot of servers onto VM'ed boxes. Most of our stuff (was) running Server 2003, with the exceptions of our domain controllers which we updated to 2008 last year. Exchange 2010 (from 2003) was planned for a while, so we pulled the trigger on that one. That also prompts an upgrade of BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) from 4.1 to 5.0. Our asset tracking also needed some attention in order to make sure we don't populate it with garbage when new machines arrive. We're hoping to have Exchange completely migrated by the end of July using a slow migration tactic instead of cutting over in the middle of the night. The goal here is to leave some app servers on 2003 until the new version of MS's server platform comes out, then update to that on an application by application basis.
3. So.. that means there's a fair amount of work to do before we want to consider replacing the user machines. I suspect most companies are in that boat. I think most companies are itching to replace XP - it's getting pretty tough to maintain these days and pretty outdated. Plus, no (sane) company actually upgrades machines from XP to Win7 - you transition to Win7 when your leases expire or you need to purchase a new desktop/laptop. Upgrading is in no way cost effective. Therefore, based on a lifecycle of 3 - 4 years per machine, we'll see XP still being used for 2 - 3 years at least for light duty.
Now, the really crazy part? Most suppliers are pushing 32-bit Win7. That means the 32-bit legacy is going to continue to haunt us when we could have transitioned to Win64.
Remember when you wanted independence from Mexico? You went and had that little revolution. Now you brag about how you're the only state to have ever been its own republic, yada, yada.
Tell you what, you can have your independence back. The rest of us never really liked you; we kinda think you're douchebags. So, go raise that Lone Star flag and tattoo "In God We Trust" on all of your children.
I hope you were merely tasked with finding benchmarks and that you're just a tech. If your CIO tasked you with picking the next platform and you decided to perform technical benchmarks, then you really missed the boat.
1. First, you need to be analyzing support you'll get. Don't get too hung up on it, but you need something better than a 90-day warranty. There are diminishing returns though, at some point it's not worth getting a 3 year or 4 year contract.
2. Next, you need a vendor that will help you with license management. Being able to audit your licenses for Office or Symantec or whatever quickly will help you. If you don't have volume licensing, now is the time your vendor should be helping you with it.
3. Usability matters a lot, but what matters almost as much is how cool your laptops are. When your marketing director, you know, the one that always wears cool clothes and would have to have his iPhone pried out of his cold dead hands, goes to a conference you better make sure he has the coolest laptop of any of the other marketing geeks. A lot of companies overlook this, but I guarantee you he doesn't want to be carrying around a Latitude E6510 clunker.
4. There's a nice price point right now around $1000 for decent corporate laptops and you'll get about 3 years out of them.
5. You need to be negotiating with your sales rep hard if you're making a purchase like this. Your rep isn't going to be able to make huge discounts on laptops like they can on server equipment or some software licenses, so see if you can get some killer pricing on servers while you're shopping for a big laptop package.
Skip the benchmarks, it's not worth your time. Anything you teach your boss about Core duo, i5, etc will be useless knowledge for him in six months when Intel introduces some new spec.
ISP's operate in that magical land of no tariffs. I bet not for long. If the FCC has any backbone (I'm not necessarily convinced they do, but hey, sometimes you can hope) they'll turn this into a regulated service. Just like all of those other wonderful tariffs we've had, for basic POTS lines, T1's, ISDN, etc, etc, look for that to happen with all sorts of Internet connections. So, in return for keeping net neutrality we'll lose ISP's... and the vicious dog eat dog cycle begins.
1. You'd have to out-Facebook Facebook. Good luck building a better social networking site. Look at the morons at Linked-In and MySpace, they can't get it right and they both had a headstart. 2. Good luck getting someone to purchase hardware. 3. Why would anyone think the NSA didn't have a backdoor built into it anyway? 4. Even most of us geeks long ago gave up caring.
One thing I wanna point out is your managers. If you have some departments that are starting to not fit in your culture, look closely at the manager in place. People like to hire other people like themselves. So, if you hire an asshole, he's going to hire more assholes to work for him. If you hire a boring, introverted bean counter, he's going to hire more just like himself. If you look at your managers and think, "Well, he gets his job done and I guess he's good enough." then you probably don't have a good manager. You should be thinking, "Wow. This gal is brilliant and really kicks ass." Don't settle for mediocrity. Also, don't ever let one of your managers convince you they can't be replaced. If they're able to convince you of that, then you're building your organizational structure wrong.
I like the other ideas regarding food and drink - that's very important and it would have been the first thing I mentioned if it hadn't been covered well above..
Oh, and hire a young front desk girl that wears low cut tops, mini skirts, and thigh highs. It makes the geeks happy.
I love the idea of these kinds of devices. I could definitely see myself having breakfast and reading the newspaper on one of these things. It'd also be nice for taking freeform notes.
However, at the end of the day I really need even a basic computing device running something that will let me get my job done. Namely:
* I need to be able to read my corporate email. From an Exchange server. Preferably using Outlook.
* That probably means I need a VPN client. Even if I don't need a VPN client for Outlook, there's a few other reasons it would be nice to have; not the least of which is just to be able to get to that corporate Intranet server.
* I want to be able to open and do a quick change on a spreadsheet or document.
In other words, everything that I can do on my netbook, I want to do on a little tablet.
Well, if you need any more proof of OpenGL's ability you can look at Wine's implementation of Direct3D all layered on top of Direct3D.
Now, having said that, drivers are much more optimized for DirectX than for OpenGL and tend to render similar scenes quite a bit faster. Direct3D is also ahead of OpenGL in terms of technology.
F*ck you Verizon.
You know, I used to manage a 500 phone cell contract at the last company I worked for. I actually liked Verizon then. They had great support and offered decent phones (although it still took them a year to get the RAZR, the hot phone at the time.) We had some great regional sales reps too. Warranties were hassle free and we appreciated that.
I moved jobs three years ago. It came time to consider switching cell providers and I naively assumed Verizon was the same. Sure, they're rates were still about the same, but everything else has changed with the company. I hate dealing with them now and they're the bane of my existence. I had SEVERAL regional reps outright lie to me this year.
I hate them.
1. Your first mistake was that you probably really wanted to set up an LLC.
2. Hire someone else to do it. Seriously. You might be a superintelligent shade of the color blue, but you're no match for someone who does this professionally. A good business accountant will make you even more money by finding all the writeoffs you're too much of a wimp to claim. I run all of my books through Quickbooks through the year and then pay $180 at the end of the year for a CPA to go through it. I also pay a payroll service throughout the year to process payroll separately from the year end accounting. It's worth every penny.
First off, be honest. When I get a bunch of resumes I sort them into three piles: the trash can, the junk pile on my desk, and then four or five go into the "interview immediately" pile on the front of my desk. I don't care about gaps in employment, especially from contractors. Hell, if anything it means you have a life and probably went off and did something interesting. (Note: if you come into the interview, please tell me a great story about a cool beach town in Central America you hung out in. Don't come in looking like you made a pile of cash and spent three months in your bedroom with your bong.)
Second, recognize that right now this job market is brutal for anyone looking for a job. If I post a job today, I'll have 100 resumes by tomorrow and small mountain by the end of the week. Therefore, I'm going to hire the guy who has a Ph.D in comp sci, who successfully led a team of 5000 developers through the most complex development ever, and did all of the architectural programming himself. And, rather than pay him, I'm going to offer him a Costco membership and a couple cans of chicken noodle soup. Hey, I lost a bunch of my budget this year but I still have to get all my projects done.
Third, get out of your lease, take all the cash you have, and go sit on a beach somewhere for the next year and let all this blow over.
You know, I thought the community would have picked up on this about three years ago when Sharepoint was first getting attention. Microsoft has done something brilliant with Sharepoint: they've managed to tie each of their server and client pieces together in such a way that Sharepoint is the conduit for the information exchange. Want to share MS Project files? Get Sharepoint. Want to have BI reporting or workflows in Dynamics GP? Get Sharepoint. Want to have a Microsoft CRM dashboard? Get Sharepoint. All of this is functionality that should be built into the core products, not a centralized system requiring separate licensing.
Sharepoint is the evil glue that is starting to hold things together. I think other proprietary vendors need to wake up and seriously consider whether or not it's worth integrating with this evil beast. Sharepoint locks you very tightly to Microsoft's platforms and it also sets you on a road toward having upgrade difficulties due to how tightly the software is coupled.
All in all, it may be too little, too late. Sharepoint is very quickly gaining traction.
We're humans. We thrive on exploration. We absolutely love going into the unknown and revel in the joy of returning. 19th century America got off on hearing of Lewis and Clark's journeys. Peary in the Arctic, Shackleton in the Antarctic, and Hilary on Everest; these are the stories of endurance and adventure we love. It's pretty tough these days to find the summits that haven't been climbed, the epic lines that haven't been skied, and the places on the map no one has gone.
Sorry, I just don't find any interesting in going to L1 and L2. However, if you send a crew to Mars I'll watch NASA TV every f*cking day, 24-hours to see what happens. It'll probably result in selling every possession I have and booking a trip on Virgin Galactic, but it'll be SOOOO worth it.
Let's not forget that regular cellular calls will travel over this network too.
Verizon's new LTE networks will require a different type of architecture - much more of a hub and spoke topology. They also require more, not less, cell sites. The aim is to actually decrease the coverage of each site but install many more sites to make up for it. Therefore, what's going to end up happening is you're going to get different coverage than what you have now. For some people, things will inevitably improve. For others, things will inevitably become worse.
If your cell contract is up about the time 4G networks are going in, then you'd be well advised to test out a new handset to make sure it works in all of the areas you need it to. Just because a 3G phone works fine doesn't mean a 4G one will.
We use OCS and really like it:
http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org/
It's one of those things that tends to just work well. In fact, our version is about 2 years old now and we haven't had a need to upgrade it at all because it's just doing what it need to do.
Yup, you'd pretty much have to pry Outlook out of my cold dead fingers before switching to Google's apps. See, it's not the software, it's the way I work. Outlook just so happens to fit the style of how I like to work, organize my my stuff, organize appointments, and has some nice integration points with tools I need, like CRM.
(Note: I'm not a Microsoft fanboy. I've been using Linux since 1995 and my first mail client was mh.)
Google wants me to rethink how I work in order to use their tools. I don't have cute little folders, I have to deal with "labels". I want filters to put mail into folders, not labels, because I don't want to deal with seeing the new mail in my Inbox that I know is irrelevant; I want the Facebook mail in a Facebook folder I can ignore all week long. Searching isn't necessarily as nice as sorting because sometimes my brain might remember someone's initials, but not their full last name. When I want to see all the "K's", I want to see all the K's. All in all, I find it too foreign of a way to work to be truly comfortable. However, I do use it for my personal mail.
By the way, the argument about using them for hosted services isn't a showstopper for our business. We have 2 Exchange servers and I fully intend on moving them to some kind of hosted solution around the time Exchange 2010 comes out. We have 200 mail accounts or so and I don't really have a problem trading off the amount of administration for someone else taking care of the data.
PS. The killer app for me for the year is Google Voice. It's going to change how I work and I love it.
This is directed at all of you middle level managers out there. Yes you.
I worked on one of the large open source projects for over 5 years. I saw the day in, day out grind of the project. Now I'm a middle level manager in the IT world and I'm seeing things from the other side. It's one thing if you use a small, free utility a few times a week. It's quite another if you're running your business on it. Now, lots of people here are saying "blah blah, it's free, it's ok to not contribute." I say BS. All take and no give just makes you a jerk. If each of us just helps a little bit, we only make things even better.
There are a TON of things you can do that don't involve donating code, it just requires you get off your lazy butt and do something.
I bet your company has a way of making charitable contributions. Do you know how that works? You probably fill out a form and give it to someone. They evaluate the merits of the application and possibly write a check. If you write something like, "This piece of free software saved us $20,000 in implementation costs last year." and then fight for it, you can probably get some $$$ from your company to donate back to the project. Yes, projects like money. Even if it's just for beer money.
Donate documentation. All documentation can be better, take some time to get someone to make it better.
Translate. A lot of open source projects have i18n capabilities and if you have someone that can translate the English into Swahili it'd be appreciated.
Forum mongering / bug reporting. Hang out in the forums for the project, answer questions. Log into the project's bugzilla and triage bugs. No bugzilla? Offer to set one up for them and host it.
Use your secret manager-fu skills to help the project out. This can mean different things, but sometimes it's very helpful to have someone act as an organizer, a lightning rod, or in general a communicator for a project. For instance, once there was a project that could really benefit by having about 5 VMWare licenses. I realized none of the developers lived in the US or spoke English as a native language. Therefore, it was easiest for me to make some phone calls and get the licenses - I called VMWare and arranged the whole thing. It took about 2 hours but was immensely useful for development.
Hire interns. How does your intern policy work? Do you even know? Sometimes it's possible to get an intern to work for you and in turn you can donate some of the intern's time to work on a project.
Are your vendors using open source? Get them to contribute back in one of these ways too. Talk to them about it - get them to understand why it's important.
So, if you're a mid-level manager and you say "I can't" donate to open source projects, then you're just being lazy.
It sounds like you have a good idea of what you want to do. That's great because most CRM implementations seems to die because they don't nail down the requirements of what they're trying to do very well.
Anyway, I would recommend the Raisers Edge product only because anything else you buy might require extensive customization. Ultimately, in the end it's that kind of implementation that will kill you. For example, MS CRM is actually pretty good, but it's too generic out of the box for what you need.
This requires Windows source code so that you can hook the API's. Who the heck has that for any applications they run? Instead, this is a fix being presented to ISV's... however, if an ISV hasn't fixed their code yet, they probably aren't going to bother now.
As someone who has worked in the 'energy' business and knows lots of people in the 'energy' biz, I can summarize the ENTIRE mentality of that entire industry: drill, drill, drill.
The concept of better, faster, cheaper doesn't apply to them - they are too narrowly focused on moving a rig from one well to another.
We have all sorts of people apply to work on our SoC projects. The most successful SoC projects are ones where the student already has active involvement in the community and has already committed patches.
I've never seen anything on Linux that mimics Windows group policy. While you can do many of the same things, it's MUCH harder because the configuration isn't centralized nor is it easily changed.
Some of this was touched on by other posts here - namely that changing a computer's configuration is as simple as moving it to a different OU in AD (usually that translates to a department). For example, where I work we are a seasonal resort. People move quite frequently between departments and jobs and it's essential we can change their configuration without reloading their configuration.
So, firing up gpedit.msc, here's an example of some of the settings you can configure there - keep in mind there's probably THOUSANDS of settings:
Task Scheduler: Prevent Task Run or End Internet Explorer: Security Zones: Do not allow users to add/delete sites Internet Explorer: Disable changing proxy settings Security Options: Interactive logon: Do not require CTRL-ALT-DEL Security Options: Network security: Force logoff when logon hours expire Disk quotas: Enforce disk quota limit Disk quotas: Log event when quota warning level exceeded Password policy: Password must meet complexity requirements Devices: Allowed to format and eject removable media
So, sure, you can kind of do some of that stuff in Linux. But what happens when your boss' admin assistant suddenly goes to work in the marketing department and wants to take her laptop with her? Well, I spend about 30 seconds moving her computer to a different OU in AD and everything magically transitions over.
This scales really well across large organizations. For example, you probably want to give users in the corporate office more freedom than the kids in the call center. At the same time, you manage your computers as part of one large inventory, so you don't want to be bothered changing the configuration when you move a computer from office A to office B.
Other people have said it and I'll just reiterate: you can't win based on cost. That's a moot point.
So let's assume you can't get MS to step up with free licenses and you want to transition MS Office to OpenOffice. First you'll need to set up a training program for everyone on staff - you are shooting yourself in the foot if you don't. Next, you're still going to need Excel in some places because there's all kinds of nasty spreadsheets you don't know about using VB macros and COM plugins.
Finally, you're on Exchange? Good luck ripping Outlook out of anyone's hands. Do you have a BES server and Blackberry's? That'll be tough to ditch Exchange.
Take your OSS wins where you can. It's good to set ambitious goals, but you need to be realistic on what you can and can't do. A failed OSS conversion is much worse than not trying at all.
Okay, I'm going to make an assumption that you know how to do a migration. e.g. You don't change everyone at once, you get some 'early adopters' singing praises, you treat the bitch down the hall with kid gloves, and you provide training for everyone.
Now, assuming you know how to make people smile when confronted with change, the question I have is: will they hang you at the end of the day if it fails? Assuming you get 6 months into this migration and things are still broken all over the place, the boss' admin assistant wants to kill you, and the company has lost $1M worth of productivity, will you get fired because of it?
Somewhere between the yes and the no of that question is whether or not you should do the migration. Personally, if my ass was on the line I just wouldn't bother. However, if you feel like the company will support you as long as you try to make it work, then maybe this is a good time to introduce OSS into the organization.
These are tools, nothing more. 50 seats x $200 per MS Office (Basic) license = $10,000. That's a small price to pay for a productivity tool. You'll save more money by scrutinizing the company phone bills than by cutting MS Office.
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It's morons like this that give the morons I hate on the right ammunition.
Our migration is probably similar to many other companies. Here's what we're doing in case anyone is curious how this roadmap looks in a reasonably sized company (multilocation, etc, etc):
1. We got our first Win7 system to test a few months ago. We discovered almost everything worked, but our VPN clients should be updated, our AV needed some updating, and really we should be on Office 2010. The nice thing there is we can eradicate Office 2003 once and for all.
2. So, that really prompts some server upgrades that we've been planning for a while anyway. We're going to consolidate a lot of servers onto VM'ed boxes. Most of our stuff (was) running Server 2003, with the exceptions of our domain controllers which we updated to 2008 last year. Exchange 2010 (from 2003) was planned for a while, so we pulled the trigger on that one. That also prompts an upgrade of BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) from 4.1 to 5.0. Our asset tracking also needed some attention in order to make sure we don't populate it with garbage when new machines arrive. We're hoping to have Exchange completely migrated by the end of July using a slow migration tactic instead of cutting over in the middle of the night. The goal here is to leave some app servers on 2003 until the new version of MS's server platform comes out, then update to that on an application by application basis.
3. So.. that means there's a fair amount of work to do before we want to consider replacing the user machines. I suspect most companies are in that boat. I think most companies are itching to replace XP - it's getting pretty tough to maintain these days and pretty outdated. Plus, no (sane) company actually upgrades machines from XP to Win7 - you transition to Win7 when your leases expire or you need to purchase a new desktop/laptop. Upgrading is in no way cost effective. Therefore, based on a lifecycle of 3 - 4 years per machine, we'll see XP still being used for 2 - 3 years at least for light duty.
Now, the really crazy part? Most suppliers are pushing 32-bit Win7. That means the 32-bit legacy is going to continue to haunt us when we could have transitioned to Win64.
Dear Texas,
Remember when you wanted independence from Mexico? You went and had that little revolution. Now you brag about how you're the only state to have ever been its own republic, yada, yada.
Tell you what, you can have your independence back. The rest of us never really liked you; we kinda think you're douchebags. So, go raise that Lone Star flag and tattoo "In God We Trust" on all of your children.
Sincerely,
The Rest of Us
I hope you were merely tasked with finding benchmarks and that you're just a tech. If your CIO tasked you with picking the next platform and you decided to perform technical benchmarks, then you really missed the boat.
1. First, you need to be analyzing support you'll get. Don't get too hung up on it, but you need something better than a 90-day warranty. There are diminishing returns though, at some point it's not worth getting a 3 year or 4 year contract.
2. Next, you need a vendor that will help you with license management. Being able to audit your licenses for Office or Symantec or whatever quickly will help you. If you don't have volume licensing, now is the time your vendor should be helping you with it.
3. Usability matters a lot, but what matters almost as much is how cool your laptops are. When your marketing director, you know, the one that always wears cool clothes and would have to have his iPhone pried out of his cold dead hands, goes to a conference you better make sure he has the coolest laptop of any of the other marketing geeks. A lot of companies overlook this, but I guarantee you he doesn't want to be carrying around a Latitude E6510 clunker.
4. There's a nice price point right now around $1000 for decent corporate laptops and you'll get about 3 years out of them.
5. You need to be negotiating with your sales rep hard if you're making a purchase like this. Your rep isn't going to be able to make huge discounts on laptops like they can on server equipment or some software licenses, so see if you can get some killer pricing on servers while you're shopping for a big laptop package.
Skip the benchmarks, it's not worth your time. Anything you teach your boss about Core duo, i5, etc will be useless knowledge for him in six months when Intel introduces some new spec.
ISP's operate in that magical land of no tariffs. I bet not for long. If the FCC has any backbone (I'm not necessarily convinced they do, but hey, sometimes you can hope) they'll turn this into a regulated service. Just like all of those other wonderful tariffs we've had, for basic POTS lines, T1's, ISDN, etc, etc, look for that to happen with all sorts of Internet connections. So, in return for keeping net neutrality we'll lose ISP's... and the vicious dog eat dog cycle begins.
1. You'd have to out-Facebook Facebook. Good luck building a better social networking site. Look at the morons at Linked-In and MySpace, they can't get it right and they both had a headstart.
2. Good luck getting someone to purchase hardware.
3. Why would anyone think the NSA didn't have a backdoor built into it anyway?
4. Even most of us geeks long ago gave up caring.
One thing I wanna point out is your managers. If you have some departments that are starting to not fit in your culture, look closely at the manager in place. People like to hire other people like themselves. So, if you hire an asshole, he's going to hire more assholes to work for him. If you hire a boring, introverted bean counter, he's going to hire more just like himself. If you look at your managers and think, "Well, he gets his job done and I guess he's good enough." then you probably don't have a good manager. You should be thinking, "Wow. This gal is brilliant and really kicks ass." Don't settle for mediocrity. Also, don't ever let one of your managers convince you they can't be replaced. If they're able to convince you of that, then you're building your organizational structure wrong.
I like the other ideas regarding food and drink - that's very important and it would have been the first thing I mentioned if it hadn't been covered well above..
Oh, and hire a young front desk girl that wears low cut tops, mini skirts, and thigh highs. It makes the geeks happy.
I love the idea of these kinds of devices. I could definitely see myself having breakfast and reading the newspaper on one of these things. It'd also be nice for taking freeform notes. However, at the end of the day I really need even a basic computing device running something that will let me get my job done. Namely: * I need to be able to read my corporate email. From an Exchange server. Preferably using Outlook. * That probably means I need a VPN client. Even if I don't need a VPN client for Outlook, there's a few other reasons it would be nice to have; not the least of which is just to be able to get to that corporate Intranet server. * I want to be able to open and do a quick change on a spreadsheet or document. In other words, everything that I can do on my netbook, I want to do on a little tablet.
Well, if you need any more proof of OpenGL's ability you can look at Wine's implementation of Direct3D all layered on top of Direct3D. Now, having said that, drivers are much more optimized for DirectX than for OpenGL and tend to render similar scenes quite a bit faster. Direct3D is also ahead of OpenGL in terms of technology.
F*ck you Verizon. You know, I used to manage a 500 phone cell contract at the last company I worked for. I actually liked Verizon then. They had great support and offered decent phones (although it still took them a year to get the RAZR, the hot phone at the time.) We had some great regional sales reps too. Warranties were hassle free and we appreciated that. I moved jobs three years ago. It came time to consider switching cell providers and I naively assumed Verizon was the same. Sure, they're rates were still about the same, but everything else has changed with the company. I hate dealing with them now and they're the bane of my existence. I had SEVERAL regional reps outright lie to me this year. I hate them.
1. Your first mistake was that you probably really wanted to set up an LLC. 2. Hire someone else to do it. Seriously. You might be a superintelligent shade of the color blue, but you're no match for someone who does this professionally. A good business accountant will make you even more money by finding all the writeoffs you're too much of a wimp to claim. I run all of my books through Quickbooks through the year and then pay $180 at the end of the year for a CPA to go through it. I also pay a payroll service throughout the year to process payroll separately from the year end accounting. It's worth every penny.
First off, be honest. When I get a bunch of resumes I sort them into three piles: the trash can, the junk pile on my desk, and then four or five go into the "interview immediately" pile on the front of my desk. I don't care about gaps in employment, especially from contractors. Hell, if anything it means you have a life and probably went off and did something interesting. (Note: if you come into the interview, please tell me a great story about a cool beach town in Central America you hung out in. Don't come in looking like you made a pile of cash and spent three months in your bedroom with your bong.) Second, recognize that right now this job market is brutal for anyone looking for a job. If I post a job today, I'll have 100 resumes by tomorrow and small mountain by the end of the week. Therefore, I'm going to hire the guy who has a Ph.D in comp sci, who successfully led a team of 5000 developers through the most complex development ever, and did all of the architectural programming himself. And, rather than pay him, I'm going to offer him a Costco membership and a couple cans of chicken noodle soup. Hey, I lost a bunch of my budget this year but I still have to get all my projects done. Third, get out of your lease, take all the cash you have, and go sit on a beach somewhere for the next year and let all this blow over.
You know, I thought the community would have picked up on this about three years ago when Sharepoint was first getting attention. Microsoft has done something brilliant with Sharepoint: they've managed to tie each of their server and client pieces together in such a way that Sharepoint is the conduit for the information exchange. Want to share MS Project files? Get Sharepoint. Want to have BI reporting or workflows in Dynamics GP? Get Sharepoint. Want to have a Microsoft CRM dashboard? Get Sharepoint. All of this is functionality that should be built into the core products, not a centralized system requiring separate licensing. Sharepoint is the evil glue that is starting to hold things together. I think other proprietary vendors need to wake up and seriously consider whether or not it's worth integrating with this evil beast. Sharepoint locks you very tightly to Microsoft's platforms and it also sets you on a road toward having upgrade difficulties due to how tightly the software is coupled. All in all, it may be too little, too late. Sharepoint is very quickly gaining traction.
We're humans. We thrive on exploration. We absolutely love going into the unknown and revel in the joy of returning. 19th century America got off on hearing of Lewis and Clark's journeys. Peary in the Arctic, Shackleton in the Antarctic, and Hilary on Everest; these are the stories of endurance and adventure we love. It's pretty tough these days to find the summits that haven't been climbed, the epic lines that haven't been skied, and the places on the map no one has gone. Sorry, I just don't find any interesting in going to L1 and L2. However, if you send a crew to Mars I'll watch NASA TV every f*cking day, 24-hours to see what happens. It'll probably result in selling every possession I have and booking a trip on Virgin Galactic, but it'll be SOOOO worth it.
Let's not forget that regular cellular calls will travel over this network too. Verizon's new LTE networks will require a different type of architecture - much more of a hub and spoke topology. They also require more, not less, cell sites. The aim is to actually decrease the coverage of each site but install many more sites to make up for it. Therefore, what's going to end up happening is you're going to get different coverage than what you have now. For some people, things will inevitably improve. For others, things will inevitably become worse. If your cell contract is up about the time 4G networks are going in, then you'd be well advised to test out a new handset to make sure it works in all of the areas you need it to. Just because a 3G phone works fine doesn't mean a 4G one will.
We use OCS and really like it: http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org/ It's one of those things that tends to just work well. In fact, our version is about 2 years old now and we haven't had a need to upgrade it at all because it's just doing what it need to do.
Yup, you'd pretty much have to pry Outlook out of my cold dead fingers before switching to Google's apps. See, it's not the software, it's the way I work. Outlook just so happens to fit the style of how I like to work, organize my my stuff, organize appointments, and has some nice integration points with tools I need, like CRM.
(Note: I'm not a Microsoft fanboy. I've been using Linux since 1995 and my first mail client was mh.)
Google wants me to rethink how I work in order to use their tools. I don't have cute little folders, I have to deal with "labels". I want filters to put mail into folders, not labels, because I don't want to deal with seeing the new mail in my Inbox that I know is irrelevant; I want the Facebook mail in a Facebook folder I can ignore all week long. Searching isn't necessarily as nice as sorting because sometimes my brain might remember someone's initials, but not their full last name. When I want to see all the "K's", I want to see all the K's. All in all, I find it too foreign of a way to work to be truly comfortable. However, I do use it for my personal mail.
By the way, the argument about using them for hosted services isn't a showstopper for our business. We have 2 Exchange servers and I fully intend on moving them to some kind of hosted solution around the time Exchange 2010 comes out. We have 200 mail accounts or so and I don't really have a problem trading off the amount of administration for someone else taking care of the data.
PS. The killer app for me for the year is Google Voice. It's going to change how I work and I love it.
This is directed at all of you middle level managers out there. Yes you.
I worked on one of the large open source projects for over 5 years. I saw the day in, day out grind of the project. Now I'm a middle level manager in the IT world and I'm seeing things from the other side. It's one thing if you use a small, free utility a few times a week. It's quite another if you're running your business on it. Now, lots of people here are saying "blah blah, it's free, it's ok to not contribute." I say BS. All take and no give just makes you a jerk. If each of us just helps a little bit, we only make things even better.
There are a TON of things you can do that don't involve donating code, it just requires you get off your lazy butt and do something.
So, if you're a mid-level manager and you say "I can't" donate to open source projects, then you're just being lazy.
It sounds like you have a good idea of what you want to do. That's great because most CRM implementations seems to die because they don't nail down the requirements of what they're trying to do very well.
Anyway, I would recommend the Raisers Edge product only because anything else you buy might require extensive customization. Ultimately, in the end it's that kind of implementation that will kill you. For example, MS CRM is actually pretty good, but it's too generic out of the box for what you need.
This requires Windows source code so that you can hook the API's. Who the heck has that for any applications they run? Instead, this is a fix being presented to ISV's... however, if an ISV hasn't fixed their code yet, they probably aren't going to bother now.
As someone who has worked in the 'energy' business and knows lots of people in the 'energy' biz, I can summarize the ENTIRE mentality of that entire industry: drill, drill, drill.
The concept of better, faster, cheaper doesn't apply to them - they are too narrowly focused on moving a rig from one well to another.
Yup - Wine has had quite a bit of success with these projects. Here's a link:
We have all sorts of people apply to work on our SoC projects. The most successful SoC projects are ones where the student already has active involvement in the community and has already committed patches.
I've never seen anything on Linux that mimics Windows group policy. While you can do many of the same things, it's MUCH harder because the configuration isn't centralized nor is it easily changed.
Some of this was touched on by other posts here - namely that changing a computer's configuration is as simple as moving it to a different OU in AD (usually that translates to a department). For example, where I work we are a seasonal resort. People move quite frequently between departments and jobs and it's essential we can change their configuration without reloading their configuration.
So, firing up gpedit.msc, here's an example of some of the settings you can configure there - keep in mind there's probably THOUSANDS of settings:
Task Scheduler: Prevent Task Run or End
Internet Explorer: Security Zones: Do not allow users to add/delete sites
Internet Explorer: Disable changing proxy settings
Security Options: Interactive logon: Do not require CTRL-ALT-DEL
Security Options: Network security: Force logoff when logon hours expire
Disk quotas: Enforce disk quota limit
Disk quotas: Log event when quota warning level exceeded
Password policy: Password must meet complexity requirements
Devices: Allowed to format and eject removable media
So, sure, you can kind of do some of that stuff in Linux. But what happens when your boss' admin assistant suddenly goes to work in the marketing department and wants to take her laptop with her? Well, I spend about 30 seconds moving her computer to a different OU in AD and everything magically transitions over.
This scales really well across large organizations. For example, you probably want to give users in the corporate office more freedom than the kids in the call center. At the same time, you manage your computers as part of one large inventory, so you don't want to be bothered changing the configuration when you move a computer from office A to office B.
Other people have said it and I'll just reiterate: you can't win based on cost. That's a moot point.
So let's assume you can't get MS to step up with free licenses and you want to transition MS Office to OpenOffice. First you'll need to set up a training program for everyone on staff - you are shooting yourself in the foot if you don't. Next, you're still going to need Excel in some places because there's all kinds of nasty spreadsheets you don't know about using VB macros and COM plugins.
Finally, you're on Exchange? Good luck ripping Outlook out of anyone's hands. Do you have a BES server and Blackberry's? That'll be tough to ditch Exchange.
Take your OSS wins where you can. It's good to set ambitious goals, but you need to be realistic on what you can and can't do. A failed OSS conversion is much worse than not trying at all.
Okay, I'm going to make an assumption that you know how to do a migration. e.g. You don't change everyone at once, you get some 'early adopters' singing praises, you treat the bitch down the hall with kid gloves, and you provide training for everyone.
Now, assuming you know how to make people smile when confronted with change, the question I have is: will they hang you at the end of the day if it fails? Assuming you get 6 months into this migration and things are still broken all over the place, the boss' admin assistant wants to kill you, and the company has lost $1M worth of productivity, will you get fired because of it?
Somewhere between the yes and the no of that question is whether or not you should do the migration. Personally, if my ass was on the line I just wouldn't bother. However, if you feel like the company will support you as long as you try to make it work, then maybe this is a good time to introduce OSS into the organization.
These are tools, nothing more. 50 seats x $200 per MS Office (Basic) license = $10,000. That's a small price to pay for a productivity tool. You'll save more money by scrutinizing the company phone bills than by cutting MS Office.