What’s the Best Approach to Business Continuity?

Business continuity is critical to delivering world-class service to your customers, so it’s important to understand the variety of approaches available. Whether you ultimately decide to employ cloud services or a remote hot site data center, understanding the implications of your decisions may be more important than the actual technologies you deploy.

You can read more about this in my feature story in this month’s Baseline magazine here.

Windows 7 networking controls video screencast

This week I begin a new series of video screencasts for Dell’s IT Expert Voice Web site. The site has all sorts of useful information for corporate IT folks that are interested in migrating and using Windows 7, and my humble part will be to produce a regular series of videos similar to what I have been doing on my own over at WebInformant.tv. Do check out this video which talks about the differences between Windows 7 and earlier versions when it comes to networking controls.

25 Years of PC Week

The scene is a deserted office park in Los Angeles after hours. I am driving around, trying to find the spot that my IT manager friend left an envelope for me. Inside the envelope is a disc with a secret IBM software program that is about to give me one heck of a scoop for PC Week, c. 1987.

It has been a week of memories. Last week was the 40th anniversary of the real beginning of the Internet, and this week is the 25 years that PC Week (regrettably now called eWeek) began publishing its weekly commentary on our industry.

While I didn’t start writing for the publication until 1987, I remember those times very well: back in the early 1980s I was working for a private software developer and we were porting our programs from the Apple to the new fangled IBM PC, and trying to make them work. Given that we were charging several thousand dollars to electric utilities for these products, it was my job to do the quality control and make sure that the code was written properly.

I eventually went on to work in various end-user computing departments for government and private industry before getting the job at PC Week as a writer and analyst. I went on to work there for more than three years when the PC industry was rapidly expanding and corporations were buying truckloads of PCs. Back then we didn’t have networks other than the ones that connected our PCs to our IBM mainframes, and I began to specialize in networking and installed the first one in our company before I became a tech journalist.

Wayne Rash called me last month to catch up and get some input on a story that he has written for the publication about those early days. It made me go back and actually find some of the articles that I wrote and recall some fond memories.

For those of you that were born after this year and don’t remember a world without computers, it is worth taking a moment to remind you that we had 80386 computers that had barely more than a megabyte of RAM and ran at 10 MHz clock speeds. Most of the machines back then had character-mode displays (except for Macs, which were rare on corporate desktops) and Windows and Linux hadn’t yet been invented. IBM and Microsoft were working together on OS/2 and Novell’s Netware was the most popular networking operating system because it could run on 80286s and use all of the entire memory of the machine. Hard disks were rarely larger than 20 MB, and floppies had just increased to store 1 MB of data. Mostly academic researchers were using the Internet and few corporations had email, let alone email connections to the outside.

In a story that I wrote in May 1990, I talk about what corporate IT folks need to think about when upgrading to the latest OS – which at the time was Windows 3 or OS/2 1.2. Some of those issues are still with us as we wrestle with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard.

Here are a few memories from that era. You can see scans of various magazine covers and articles that I mentioned from that era here.

My first story for PC Week (Jan 1987) was about a little-known company in the PC-to-mainframe market called Attachmate and how they planned on unseating the then-champion Digital Communications Associates, makers of the popular Irma boards. Attachmate went on years later to purchase DCA, and is still around in the terminal emulation space, also having bought network analysis company NetIQ.

What really got the IBM PC started in corporate computing circles was a spreadsheet called 1-2-3 from upstart Lotus Development Corporation. For some people, it was the only application that they ran on their desktops. Lotus 1-2-3 wasn’t the first spreadsheet and indeed, here is a brief post on the original spreadsheet called Visicalc.

Years before IBM ironically purchased Lotus, they started a skunk works project to use spreadsheets as a front-end to their mainframe databases, something that was very sophisticated at the time. The sole programmer behind the project was Oleg Vishnepolsky who spent about 18 months writing the software simply called S2. The code was used for internal purposes. I spoke to Vishnepolsky last week and rather than be mad at me for blowing his cover he was reminded that when my article ran his status as a lowly programmer was immediately elevated and he got to talk to the big brass about his project. “I got to rub shoulders with people at the top layers of management, and remember this is when IBM had about ten or 12 managers between me and the CEO.” Still, the S2 project was one of the best ones of his career and the code was used by tens of thousands of IBMers.

At the time this was being developed – say 1987 or so – there were a variety of people who were trying to clone 1-2-3 using the exact same command syntax, most notably Adam Osborne. There were legal challenges going back and forth about intellectual property and Osborne, being the roué that he was, only brought more attention to the whole thing.

Somehow, I got a hold of a copy of S2 from one of IBM’s customers, the setting for my cloak and dagger black ops mission at the top of this essay. I wrote the story about S2 and saw Osborne coincidentally a few weeks later at an industry event. Much as I wanted to give him a copy, I didn’t. But you can see the screen caps of S2 that I found in my archives.

Back then, IBM was very secretive about their new products and had all sorts of established protocols for dealing with the press. One place where they gave out advance information about their plans was at their user group meetings. Since I had come from IT, I knew how easy it was to attend these meetings under somewhat false pretenses. I called up the IT manager for Ziff Davis and found out that we indeed had an IBM mainframe squirreled away in New Jersey. I asked the manager if he could give me their customer number, which is pretty much all you needed to register for the IBM user conference. When I reassured him that it wasn’t going to come out of his budget (some things never change), I signed up and brought home several scoops from the meeting, much to the dismay of my fellow PC Week news hounds. But they were quick learners and when it came time for the next meeting, several of us attended as “Ziff Davis IT managers.” When we came back from the third meeting with even more scoops, Infoworld – which at the time was our main competitor — starting putting together the pieces and called up the president of the user group and got us banned from further meetings. But it was fun while it lasted.

Speaking of fun scoops, one of our younger and more eager reporters was Gina Smith. Gina was out to dinner with her boyfriend (who later married her) at a Cambridge, Mass. Restaurant. Sitting at the next table were two Germans speaking quickly. Little did they know that Smith was fluent in German and as she listened it turned out they were from Lotus’ German office telling each other what the future product plans were for the company. Lotus never knew how we got that story, and Smith went on to write a few books and run a couple of companies in Silicon Valley.

One of my early columns (July 1987) was about how hard it was to use a laptop in a hotel room. Back then modems were the main remote access devices, and they were running at 2400 bps, which was slow enough that you could read the text as it was being transmitted. Most hotels had hard-wired their phones so you couldn’t attach a modem easily, without having to unscrew the wall plates and take out the two wires that you needed to attach the modem to the phone system. How far have we come now with universal wireless everywhere.

Another of my favorite columns (March 1988) was written as if I was Judith Martin, answering questions of network etiquette. I considered it a successful parody when I got a cease and desist letter from Miss Manner’s law firm!

In October 1988, I was promoted to run a major portion of the PC Week. That same week, I was visiting one of my friends, Cheryl Currid, who ran the IT organization of Coke Foods (Minute Maid et al.) in Dallas. One of Cheryl’s staffers had baked a cake in my honor, iced with a simulated cover of PC Week’s front page with various “stories” in icing. Currid went on to write many columns for me at various publications, and is still consulting in the industry.

Yes, those were interesting and fun times. I hope you enjoyed some of these memories too.

CTOedge: Better Collaboration Tools Than Google

Google has certainly been busy building a lot of different software tools that can be used for collaboration, including Google Docs, Google Voice, Google Sites (formerly Jotspot) and Google Calendar. But there are a number of specialized tools that are more useful than these Google services for particular circumstances. These can be big productivity boosts for enterprises.

You can read the entire post in this week’s story for a new IT site called CTOedge here.

How to extract your LinkedIn contacts

If you have spent any time online using social networks like LinkedIn or Facebook, you know they can be difficult to grow your network and add contacts. But even harder is the ability to extract your contacts once you have built up a reasonably sized network. None of the social networks makes it very easy to get this information.

Why would you want to do this? Several reasons. First is the peace of mind that you have control over your own data. Should you decide to leave the network, or should the network decided to leave you (either for cause or for lack of funds to continue operations), it would be nice to have your contacts tucked safely on your own hard drive. Second is the ability to do some targeted marketing emails or just do some research: none of the networks has the right search fields when you need to find everyone that lives in a certain area with a certain job or works for a specific company. Sometimes I can find people on my network using the search tools, but often I can’t. And wouldn’t it be nice to see if everyone that is on your LinkedIn network is also on your Facebook network? Or not, if you are still trying to keep these two separate?

Before you hit the reply key and tell me that there are several different services that allow for you to synchronize your contacts, that isn’t quite what I mean. Yes, there are services such as Plaxo’s Pulse and MyOtherDrive.com that allow for synchronization of your desktop to their cloud-based contact list, but that is usually in one direction only (Pulse offers de-duplication services and better searching tools if you want to pay them for a premium membership.) Say I don’t want to have anyone from my last employer on my LinkedIn network, because I left that job under a dark cloud. (Purely hypothetical, of course, not that I am saying that this ever happened to me!) It isn’t easy to find this out with these networks, even if you do know how to manipulate their complex privacy settings.

So if you are still reading down here, I suggest you take a look at a Web service called Open Xchange, at ox.io. You can set up a free account and within a few minutes have it setup to automatically bring in all of your contacts from Google’s Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook, and a few other places as well. What is more important though is that you can easily publish all this information (or some of it) to a Web site, or download it to a comma-separated file, so that you stay in control of your data at all times.

OX is the same technology that is white-labled by Network Solutions and 1&1 Internet as their own email services. You can also purchase a software license if you don’t want to run it across the Internet and on your own Linux servers. It has a lot more under the hood, including plug-ins for Microsoft Outlook, import/export of calendar items, iPhone apps and a shared document repository. If you want to get a feel for the software, go on over to my screencast video that I just finished on the product here.

(And while you are over there, if you haven’t seen these videos, you might want to browser around, or better yet, hire me to do one for your company’s product.)

I am glad to see products like OX take hold: all of us need better and more open ways to control our contacts.

Using OpenXchange to manage your communications

A flexible unified communications service for collaborative workgroups that can share files, import and export contacts and calendars from a wide variety of data sources and Web services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google’s Gmail. Entirely open-source based.

Price: Begins at $5/user/month for hosted version; $1095/yr for 25 users for server-based software version
Requirements: Works on a wide variety of browsers and operating systems. We tested it on IE 7, Firefox 3 and Mac Safari 4 in October 2009.

OpenXchange Inc.
303 South Broadway
Tarrytown, New York 10591
914 332-5720
http://ox.io

Making science a spectator sport

I had a chance to see Dean Kamen speak last night, and I have to say he was inspiring. The man, who is known for inventing the Segway two-wheeled transport, has actually touched millions of people more directly through a variety of innovative medical devices, including the first portable glucose injector, better stents for heart patients, and improved wheelchairs and prosthetic arms.

The occaision was the kickoff of a science festival that brings together school children, scientists from around the world, and leading local technologists for a multi-day series of seminars held at our local science museum. Some of them, such as the session on the science behind flirting, are just fun. Others present up-to-minute basic research. There are even a variety of rare Omnimax movies too. For a geek, it is hog heaven.

Anyway, back to Kamen. He showed us some of the devices that he has invented over his career. What I found amazing is how down to earth he is about his creations: yup, I just came up with this thingie, it is now used by ten million diabetics or hundred million kidney patients. He wears jeans and work boots — even when visiting the White House to receive one of his numerous awards or proclamations. Perhaps it is an affectation, but it comes across as someone who isn’t trying to impress anyone. You got the feeling that after the speech and when the theater lights are turned off, he is just going about his business, coming up with the next great thing.

One of his current efforts is an international science competition called FIRST that involves thousands of grade school, middle school and high school students to build various robotic devices and square off against each other in the grand tradition of any sporting event. Indeed, that was his original motivation — our society honors and extols the virtues of athletes, so why not use the same metaphor for budding student scientists? He has been extraordinarily successful. Each year’s competition is larger with more teams and more corporate sponsorship than the last. One of his sponsors’ CEO at a large aerospace firm put it this way: he told the audience that most of the engineers are nearing retirement age and he needs to find thousands of replacements, and find them quickly. So sponsoring FIRST teams isn’t completely altruistic, it is the best way to develop a farm team and start locating and encouraging fresh talent. Makes a lot of sense to me. Kamen now requires his sponsors to kick in four-year college scholarships too, which is terrific.

Ironically, Kamen was here the day after Lance Armstrong was in town inking a new deal with Michelob, something else that St. Louis is famous for (the beer, not Lance.) Kamen also announced last night that FIRST will hold its final championship rounds in St. Louis starting in 2011. They have outgrown their current digs and he wanted to take the competition to a city that would be a natural fit for science buffs.For those of you that aren’t local, this may come as a bit of a surprise. Not Silicon Valley? Or Austin? Or even Chicago? (That suggestion drew a big laugh last night.) St. Louis has long roots in science competitions, stretching back to Lindbergh’s flight and the X Prize. I am very proud that our region was chosen and look forward to attending the events.

It is time we considering making science and engineering more of a spectator sport. We need farm teams, seeding the professional leagues, we need local venues that will bring out the tailgaters and the devotees wearing their colors parading around downtown the night before the big meet. We need commentators that will give us the play-by-play. We need the winners to be celebrated more than the annual Westinghouse/Intel scholars or the Nobelists that were just announced this past week. We need highways names after famous scientists, not just steroid-laden sluggers. Granted, nerds have come a long way since I was in high school and couldn’t get a date. But Kamen showed me just how far we still need to go.

Getting Started With E-Discovery

When implemented correctly, the best e-discovery systems can save a pile of cash and time, and can become real productivity boosters.

The news is filled with reports about companies buried in legal fees as a result of the presence or absence of a key document. The process of using various automated systems to track documents is called electronic discovery, and many e-discovery solutions are available—often with six-figure implementations attached. Unfortunately, only a small number of companies have implemented such systems fully. You can read more about how to get started with eDiscovery in my Baseline magazine article here.

When is a friend a “friend”?

Tonight I am expecting my BFF to stay for a short visit. He and I have known each other since high school, and we get together about once a year to catch up. That visit, and a new book called “Connected,” got me thinking about friendship and how we account for our connections in this era of hyper social networking.

You might want to read this post that I wrote a few months ago about when to defriend and defollow, I want to build on the thoughts that I mention there.

Ironically, just because we have lots of social network “friends” doesn’t mean we really socialize with the vast majority of them, or even have met them f2f. (BFF is best friends forever, f2f is face to face for those of you that either don’t have teens or have yet to grasp the lingo). In my case, I try to keep my contacts in LinkedIn with people that I have some business relationship with, and Facebook friends a bit looser. It doesn’t always work out that way, and now I have given up trying to distinguish the two networks. I have found that over the summer a lot more of my blog comments have come through Facebook than through either email or posted on my Strominator.com blog directly. Why? I have no idea.

Anyway, the book “Connected” is written by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler and talks about the inner structure of our social networks. I found it interesting. According to a recent survey, the average American has four close social contacts, with the variation between two and six for most of us. That surprised me, and you can read more of the sample chapter here:

The two authors talk about the effect of social networks on particular behavior, such as obesity and revenge and other things that you might not be thinking about when you are updating your status or posting a new set of photos from the weekend. It turns out that our networks influence a lot of what we do, no surprise.

They also talk about the structure of social networks: a fire bucket brigade where each person is just connected to two people, a telephone tree-structure for the PTA, and a military collection of squads and commands are three very different structures of how people are collected together into a group. And where you are placed in your network – either at the center with a lot of dense connections outward, or at the periphery with just a few friends – can also make a big difference in how happy or healthy you might be too, according to the authors.

As you can imagine, there are network visualization tools that can help you understand the structure of your social networks. One for Facebook that I have tried is called Touchgraph and it allows you to select different subsets of your friends and see how they are related. With over a 1,000 friends, it becomes hard to see the relationships, but one of the things that I noticed – at least about my Facebook friends – is that there are a lot of people that I know that also know a lot of people.

If you find these concepts intriguing, pick up a copy of the book and let me know your thoughts.

Markmonitor BrandJacking Report on Pharma Abuse

My latest report for Markmonitor is on the continuing abuses of phishers and fraudsters in the pharma industry. The crooks have gotten more sophisticated and savvy, even using phony SSL certificates. You can download the report here.