GroupWise sucks, web-based GroupWise is worse. The biggest beef my users have with the web-based client is you can't access your archive. Novell is supposedly working on a Linux client to go along with their "we're packing up and moving to Linux-land" marketing deal. We'll see what happens there, though...
I think the essence of the previous poster's point is that what you will save in software licensing you will most likely lose in user re-education. And you WILL need to retrain users, and most likely your support desk as well. Training costs add up fast in an IT department supporting 1000 desktops. I'd guess the author of this Ask Slashdot has around 25-30 people in his/her IT department, figure one or two classes for half of them (being rather conservative with that number) racks up to around $15,000 (perhaps more) at once. Granted, the licensing for Windows may ring up to a bigger number, but this is just the internal training. You haven't addressed the users yet.
As much of a POS that GroupWise is, it can be set up to generate keypairs for users and be automatically inserted into their clients. You could then make default the option to sign every message and leave it up to them to use encryption. Of course, I doubt most corporate users use passwords that are strong enough to deny someone access to the system, which would then give you access to the private key[s] of the compromised user. Still, it's there.
The only place this might help is for internal company mail. Even then, it may or may not help things. Rather, PGP/GPG needs to have a simplified interface that doesn't require people to fully understand everything. Make it automatically generate your keys, submit and update them to key servers, and verify other's signed messages. Encrypted mail may be slightly more difficult, but I think could still be made easy.
I didn't see prices on PGP's site, but I'll wager two cattle it's more than my parent's [an ideal audience for `easy crypto'] could afford.
I saw your project, and actually emailed you but had it rejected. Basically, I was asking a: what your project did specifically, and b: aside from the project, how were the PDAs used by UMDers. For example, did they just track assignments on them, or did many of the students actually hack on them, as you do with your Zaurus? I was just curious because this seems like a great suggestion to the UMTC CSci folks (my current home.)
A small toolbar, I can handle. But it needs to be paired with a simple and intuitive UI and be able to replace a palm's PDA simplicity for it to gain market outside of the gaggle of geeks out there. Of course, if Sharp is happy with a very finite market, have at it.
If they could make this a good PDA, get a cleaner UI, and pair with a phone, I would be willing to spend this kind of cash on a PDA/"palmtop computer." I'm still thinking a truly "all-in-one" device is still a pipe-dream though.
I agree totally. I would strongly consider buying one of these if they were really usable as a PDA. (e.g. do everything my palm does, simply) Until then, I would need a palm for the datebook and the zaurus for the remote admin stuff. (no 802.11/cell/etc on my palm)
Until then, I'll consider a laptop any day over this. Especially for the cost. Granted, I don't know what the cost is, as I can't get at the article, but in the last review I saw, the cheapest I could find was about $700, or enough for a halfway decent used laptop.
Anyone have money to burn on a poor college student so I can just have one to play with?
Spare loaner hw is fine. But never, never, EVER, sell hardware. You may make suggestions, you may install it, but do NOT buy it for them and install it. If you do so, you are now the provider of warranty service. A coworker who consulted for 18 years got about five years into his business and got burned nearly to the point of bankruptcy because all his customers and their lawyers were coming to him, saying the five year old pc he built and installed is faulty because the latest-`n-greatest software no longer runs on it.
Yes, these people were full of sh*t, but it's tough to argue with a lawyer.
Also, and this goes to the heart of the "consulting" side of all of this, do not tell your customers how to solve the problem and do not tell them what to buy. You are making suggestions, and it is often a good idea to build two or three proposals. Now of course, you are free to slant the best proposal so it is obviously the best answer, but you are not giving them that and saying "do this."
This can save you later, and it makes your customer feel more like they are in control of the situation because you gave them the opportunity to make the final decision. Of course, the decision was already made by you what would happen before they did it. But they don't know that.
Yes, but NetWare doesn't run on a desktop. It is the back-end. So what if they move the back-end to Linux. Their clients still have quite a few issues. Although, I've experienced fewer problems since moving off IPX.
And don't ever delete an account accidently. Our admin spent 20 hours on a weekend recovering an account someone else had deleted accidently. Granted, this was his first time doing this, but he had to grab a tape backup, mount it, go in and find which [randomly-named] directory was this user's (out of 1300 users) and restore it. Then he had to do it again because the server abended when he tried to bring it back up.
Not to mention the UI sucks. From everything I've seen, Outlook/Exchange is your only option. (I have not used Lotus Notes, but I know several people who've been involved recently in migrations off of Notes, if that says anything...)
GroupWise can be extremely buggy, and you'll spend a lot of time retraining your Outlook users. And none of them will like the switch.
No, but dealing with ten out of 550 PCs (say) would not be as bad as dealing with 100+ out of 550. This has been the case here, and it's going to get worse when students bring their infected PCs back to campus in a week. I just hope our NetOps people have their ducks in a row to keep the impact to a minimum.
Besides, we have at least one user every week that destroys his or her workstation completely. Not that this is okay, or makes auto-updates okay...
One of my coworkers "fixed" an infected computer twice. Both times, the network connection was shut back off. I sit down at the computer, find blast and welchia both active (not SoBig, at least), the antivirus definitions a week old, and the RPC vuln. patch installed. I don't understand how you forget steps one and two in removing this thing, but remember to apply the patch...
Heh, I and four others make up our helpdesk. They make 50k a piece plus [very good] bennies. I make $10/hr. Anywhere else, I would be at least level 2 support, if not 3. My four coworkers would be lucky to pass probation at level 1.
<wicked witch of the west voice> What a world! oh what a world! </>
We had auto-updates set up on every one of our PCs. Of both our anti-virus software and XP. On every PC I've had to remove these viruses from, either one or both have been disabled. In some cases, the user uninstalled the anti-virus software altogether. Granted, they should never have had permission to do something so stupid, but that err lies on the head of our system engineers, not the lowly support analysts (me).
Of course! We can pretend it's like Hepatitis. Once you get it, you're stuck with it. At least you can get infected by it again. Of course you could get another strain of it at the same time...
Viruses like this are the ONLY thing that make me glad I use and support GroupWise at work. Of course, we still have the idiot employees who open every email and every attachment they receive in case it's something cool. I had a guy open an email that was infected with another virus on TEN different computers in a half-hour because he thought it was really important and it wouldn't open on any of them. I was two inches from blowing a gasket with that one.
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GroupWise sucks, web-based GroupWise is worse. The biggest beef my users have with the web-based client is you can't access your archive. Novell is supposedly working on a Linux client to go along with their "we're packing up and moving to Linux-land" marketing deal. We'll see what happens there, though...
Food for thought, if nothing else.
Wrong. These are new holes in MS' RPC implementation. Read the articles.
Patch: here. (For XP...this and the rest of the patches are also linked on the above page.)
Scan tool: here.
As much of a POS that GroupWise is, it can be set up to generate keypairs for users and be automatically inserted into their clients. You could then make default the option to sign every message and leave it up to them to use encryption. Of course, I doubt most corporate users use passwords that are strong enough to deny someone access to the system, which would then give you access to the private key[s] of the compromised user. Still, it's there.
I didn't see prices on PGP's site, but I'll wager two cattle it's more than my parent's [an ideal audience for `easy crypto'] could afford.
I saw your project, and actually emailed you but had it rejected. Basically, I was asking a: what your project did specifically, and b: aside from the project, how were the PDAs used by UMDers. For example, did they just track assignments on them, or did many of the students actually hack on them, as you do with your Zaurus? I was just curious because this seems like a great suggestion to the UMTC CSci folks (my current home.)
If they could make this a good PDA, get a cleaner UI, and pair with a phone, I would be willing to spend this kind of cash on a PDA/"palmtop computer." I'm still thinking a truly "all-in-one" device is still a pipe-dream though.
Until then, I'll consider a laptop any day over this. Especially for the cost. Granted, I don't know what the cost is, as I can't get at the article, but in the last review I saw, the cheapest I could find was about $700, or enough for a halfway decent used laptop.
Anyone have money to burn on a poor college student so I can just have one to play with?
Yes, these people were full of sh*t, but it's tough to argue with a lawyer.
Also, and this goes to the heart of the "consulting" side of all of this, do not tell your customers how to solve the problem and do not tell them what to buy. You are making suggestions, and it is often a good idea to build two or three proposals. Now of course, you are free to slant the best proposal so it is obviously the best answer, but you are not giving them that and saying "do this."
This can save you later, and it makes your customer feel more like they are in control of the situation because you gave them the opportunity to make the final decision. Of course, the decision was already made by you what would happen before they did it. But they don't know that.
Easily solved: quit. Or better yet, adopt a more interesting telephone etiquette. You can start by always answering "Whaddya want!?!"
Yes, but NetWare doesn't run on a desktop. It is the back-end. So what if they move the back-end to Linux. Their clients still have quite a few issues. Although, I've experienced fewer problems since moving off IPX.
And no archive access. And all [slow] java-based.
And don't ever delete an account accidently. Our admin spent 20 hours on a weekend recovering an account someone else had deleted accidently. Granted, this was his first time doing this, but he had to grab a tape backup, mount it, go in and find which [randomly-named] directory was this user's (out of 1300 users) and restore it. Then he had to do it again because the server abended when he tried to bring it back up.
GroupWise can be extremely buggy, and you'll spend a lot of time retraining your Outlook users. And none of them will like the switch.
Besides, we have at least one user every week that destroys his or her workstation completely. Not that this is okay, or makes auto-updates okay...
What, no popcorn machine?
My Kingdom for a mod point!
One of my coworkers "fixed" an infected computer twice. Both times, the network connection was shut back off. I sit down at the computer, find blast and welchia both active (not SoBig, at least), the antivirus definitions a week old, and the RPC vuln. patch installed. I don't understand how you forget steps one and two in removing this thing, but remember to apply the patch...
<wicked witch of the west voice> What a world! oh what a world! < />
We had auto-updates set up on every one of our PCs. Of both our anti-virus software and XP. On every PC I've had to remove these viruses from, either one or both have been disabled. In some cases, the user uninstalled the anti-virus software altogether. Granted, they should never have had permission to do something so stupid, but that err lies on the head of our system engineers, not the lowly support analysts (me).
Of course! We can pretend it's like Hepatitis. Once you get it, you're stuck with it. At least you can get infected by it again. Of course you could get another strain of it at the same time... Viruses like this are the ONLY thing that make me glad I use and support GroupWise at work. Of course, we still have the idiot employees who open every email and every attachment they receive in case it's something cool. I had a guy open an email that was infected with another virus on TEN different computers in a half-hour because he thought it was really important and it wouldn't open on any of them. I was two inches from blowing a gasket with that one.
I would LOVE to see Linus cancel the GPL licensing and relicense the kernel under "GPL 2.0 For Everyone Except SCO"