Diary of a ZEN Master

How Confused SysAdmins Are Rendering SPF Useless

2011-12-12T09:14:00.001-06:00

The idea behind Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is to eliminate the possibility for spammers to send messages which appear to come from a given company or entity, even though nobody at that entity sent it.

SMTP allows for this kind of impersonation because, by itself, nothing in SMTP ever checks to see that you are who you say you are in the FROM line. Remember that SMTP has been around longer than most system administrators and was built in a time when everyone on the internet knew everyone else by first name. "Trust" was never a design principle for the internet, and we've been dealing with the fallout ever since. The bottom line is that, as far as SMTP goes, you are who you say you are because you say so. If only it were that easy in real life.

Enter the Sender Policy Framework. SPF is implemented by both senders (as a DNS entry, saying "mail from me is going to come from the following addresses only"), and receivers (by checking the IP address of the sender connecting to your system against the list of valid addresses for the domain they say they are at). Simple.

The problem is this - if you don't implement SPF properly at both ends, it ends up causing more problems than it solves. Confused system administrators are likely to get this wrong, and are likely to be even more confused when you explain to them why they got it wrong and how to fix it. It's happening more and more often, and it's a pain.

The bane of a mail administrator's existence is the false positive - that is, a message which is legitimate, but that got blocked or bounced erroneously by the cocktail of email protection mechanisms they employ.

If as a receiver, you are not properly evaluating SPF for incoming messages, you are creating a problem for your users and the people trying to communicate with them by creating false positives in droves.

Worse yet, if your default action when you think there's an SPF issue is to bounce the message, you eliminate any chance that a human being can spot the problem and bring it to your attention.

Such is the case with tons of Barracuda anti-spam appliance users, who are responsible for a rash of "550 Rejecting for Sender Policy Framework" replies reaching support desks around the world.

A proper implementation of SPF will evaluate the IP address of the connecting system against the list of allowed IP addresses for that sender's domain based on their DNS record for SPF. No more, no less. In the case of the Barracuda, their devices are erroneously evaluating not just the IP address of the connecting system, but the IP addresses of every hop along the way. It is as if they inherently assume that even if the connecting system is in the SPF list, it is an open relay and is being abused by a spammer.

We've seen screenshots of Barracuda administrative consoles, and for messages they blocked as false positives due to "Sender Policy Framework", the details reveal that an IP address of a server involved early in the relay was NOT in the SPF record for that domain - even though the server establishing the connection to the endpoint WAS in the SPF record for that domain. If you use a smarthost configuration, whereby your public-facing mail server always relays to a service "in the cloud" for anti-virus scanning, etc, you are very likely having this problem or will soon. Postini is a good example of this type of setup, but there are others.

So both sides are using SPF, and both think that problems with SPF "violations" are the other one's fault. How do you tell who is right? Well, if you've already validated your record against an SPF query tool, a good source of arbitration is for a sender to send a message to Port25's SPF check service. They'll send you a return message with full details about whether your message complies with SPF properly and if they'd have delivered it. Ours, for example, does comply with SPF properly. And largely, we have no issues, but lately we've seen a rise in bounced messages due to reported SPF problems, and in actual fact, they have all (every single one) come from Barracuda appliance owners.

Plainly, if you are so dim witted as to put a Barracuda anti-spam appliance in place, little if any of this is making any sense. And that's the problem. What you're trying to do is admirable - cut down on spam. What you're really doing isn't - you're blocking legitimate email because you don't understand how this stuff works. Stop it. If you have a Barracuda, turn of SPF checking. It's broken, and you're eating up a lot of our time chasing issues that aren't in our sphere of influence. If you are unwilling to turn it off, see if you can adjust the default behavior for SPF violations to be something other than BOUNCE. Amateurs.

You Can Toucha The Mango

2011-11-16T11:14:00.000-06:00

I've used enough iOS devices to know them inside and out. Simple, clean, no frills - much like Windows for Workgroups 3.1. It doesn't do a heck of a lot other than let you launch apps, and the apps don't really do much outside of their sandboxes.

Same with Android, with the exception of being able to tweak it to look and behave how you'd like. You can't really cover up the fact that it's little more than a platform for launching apps. The cases and screens may change, but at the end of the day, they appear to me no different than iPhones or iPads.

Both iOS and Android are essentially software showcases. They provide developers a nifty, powerful, portable stage to do their thing and a solid commerce mechanism to help them get paid. They're giant digital flea markets (or malls if you will) with everything you need from anyone who makes it, in one convenient spot. The iOS mall is very exclusive, and the Android mall is kind of like the run down joint in the bad end of town where the owner doesn't seem to know or care what happens as long as he gets his cut.

Color me uninspired. The Apple fanbois and Google fandroids can argue about which app launcher / flea market is better than the other. It's like arguing the difference between off-white and eggshell.

Enter (of all people) Microsoft. Yes, the same Microsoft who only ever accidentally trips over an extremely successful product. The same Microsoft with a total lack of coherence, consistency, or a compelling vision for how their products should improve people's lives. Slowly, it appears, they have been coming to grips with the world in which Apple and Google would see us live.

The living room is kind of where it all started. The XBOX 360 platform has been extremely popular, for all the right reasons. It works well. It looks dynamite. It's cheap. It's great with media. It has access to streaming content. It's audiophile and home theater enthusiast-friendly. It's small. It's WiFi. The games are compelling. The multiplayer Live experience is impressive. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to work it. Everyone has one. People continue to trust Microsoft to get it right, whether or not they realize it. A console from two or three years ago will still hang with the latest games, no issues. Brilliant. New stuff like Kinect works with any XBOX 360, no matter how old. Brilliant! Executives across the nation have ditched their Harley helmets for copies of Halo and Modern Warfare. It's cool to be a gamer...finally.

In another part of Redmond, another group of people appeared to have been told "find a spot in the mobile market where nobody else dares go, and own it." The result is impressive. Very impressive. Even if nobody knows it yet, it's fantastic.

Windows Phone 7 was the best mobile user interface of any device ever, period. And it was flawed in some significant ways. There were lots of things you couldn't do with it that you should have been able to do, but at its core, WP7 was a completely different approach to smartphones. Revolutionary, really. Yes, there were some sandboxes, but the difference was that there were also cool Habitrail tunnels connecting them, and very smart hamsters trained to run back and forth.

For example, on WP7, a contact becomes an incredibly powerful thing. The phone almost magically combines everything you know about a person from every source you feed it - Exchange, GMail, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc, so that a person is represented in one "object". You don't need to download a bunch of apps to do it - it just knows, out of the box, that you're probably on several of those services.

Because of this, any action related to a contact is available just about everywhere. You can write on their Facebook wall, send them a tweet, a text message, an email, call them, pull up a map of where they work - all in one place. And you get to do it in what must be the best implementation of graphic arts ever employed in a user interface. It looks great, and it works phenomenally well.

Common bits of information are recognized everywhere. An address, for example - whether it be part of a contact, or your current location (the GPS is freakishly fast and the street address resolution feature is freakishly accurate) - is understood as an address. When you tap on an address, what should happen? A map should appear. What might people want to see in addition to a dot on a map? How about a list of nearby restaurants and things to do? What information should show up if you tap on one of those links? Everything. Phone number, hours, reviews from popular websites, who has checked in there on Facebook, spoken turn-by-turn driving or walking directions, etc. Everything of interest, that you would most likely want to do or know about a place or a person, has been captured and gorgeously integrated in an incredibly simple interface. Two taps simple.

The dependency on tethering to a computer appears to be somewhat diminished, but you will need Zune on PC (or the Mac plugin thingy) to do some things. The good news for PC folks is that the latest Zune is also beautifully designed and simple to use. Microsoft is doing some absolutely remarkable things in terms of user interface. It just works. Hardly a row/column table to be found anywhere. There are definitely feature issues in Zune, but someone else can dive into that. I'm just happy (actually, ecstatic) that Microsoft is demonstrating a capability approaching mastery of the user interface and that the penny has dropped for them in terms of making deep, meaningful interoperability of their various products and platforms a priority. SharePoint, Lync, Office, Exchange, Windows 7, Server, and now Windows Phone. They are all connected. No, really connected.

I am now using the Samsung Focus S. Yes, there are still gaps I'd like to see addressed, but the Mango release has done an amazing job of addressing the most common issues people doing an evaluation would run into. You have to dig at least a little bit to uncover the dead bodies now, whereas before you had to step over them. If I had no interest in connecting to corporate email or no concerns about managing them, I would never use another phone. The app marketplace is not on-par in terms of absolute quantity, but what is there is of high quality and the selection is broad enough to facilitate more time wasting and work-from-Starbucks activities than you can probably justify with a straight face.

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I love my phone.

Froyo Snackins

2011-11-11T15:32:00.000-06:00

It took careful explanation by a "fandroid" over lunch one day to understand Froyo, Gingerbread, and Ice Cream Sandwich. Are they even trying? Is there a dartboard somewhere in Google headquarters with a dessert menu stapled to it?

If you struggle like me with all the TOMS shoe-wearing meme-ery going on around the Android camp, you'll be happy to know that each subsequent "major" version of an Android operating system gets a new name, and each new name starts with the next letter in the alphabet. Froyo begat Gingerbread, which begat Ice Cream Sandwich (F-G-I).

Given that, the next Android OS name will begin with a "J", the one after that a "K", and so on. Which got me to thinking...if I were to be as dopey as possible, what names would I come up with for future Android releases?

The following is the fruit of that labor.

J - tough call, but either Jelly Roll or Jujube
K - should be Key Lime Pie, but with these people you might well get Kaiserschmarrn
L - Ladyfinger? Maybe, but that ruins tiramisu later. I'm going with Lemon Bar
M - Mincemeat Pie. Yes, going for stupid intentionally. Tough to out-stupid "Froyo".
N - They like cold stuff don't they. Neapolitan Sundae?
O - would ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO BE Oreo Cookie, but if that would cost them a cent, you'll get Orange Sherbet and like it.
P - Peanut Butter Fudge
Q - um, let's hope the next great thing is out by then.

Happy Friday.

On the Passing of Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T10:20:00.000-05:00

On the day after the passing of Steve Jobs, it's popular to say what an incredible innovator and pitchman and pioneer he was. And he was all of those things. It's also popular to say that his legacy, in the form of Apple Computer, puts him into a league of his own in terms of accomplishments in affecting the technology industry, and society at large. His importance as an American businessperson cannot be overstated.

Looking ahead though, it's not difficult to harbor grave fears for the long-term future of Apple. That company lived and died with Steve Jobs, and the truth of that is evidenced by the financial performance and market capitalization of Apple during his periods of tenure versus its performance in his absence.

What made Apple remarkable was Steve Jobs. That's easy to say but perhaps harder to understand. Jobs had an unyielding sense of what made a product great, and an almost pathological inability to tolerate anything which fell short of his standards. He set the bar at Apple, and continued to raise it higher and higher over time. He was uninterested by bureaucracy, deadlines, investor expectations, or anything else that would result in Apple delivering a less-than-perfect product. Was he always right? No. But, any deficiency in an Apple product - especially a new one - could never be blamed on an attitude of "just push it out now, we'll fix it in the next version." That is the singular quality of Steve Jobs which, paired with his remarkable ability to envision technology operating in such a way as to be compelling to huge swaths of people, resulted in Apple becoming the largest, most valuable company in the world. Steve Jobs was bigger than everything other than God, and there's a good likelihood that even God uses an iPad.

And now that's gone. There's no-one left at Apple who made the name for themselves that Jobs did - there couldn't be. What does that mean? Can they really maintain that level of inspiration among Apple employees, and that fierce dedication to quality above all else? Can they really continue to fan the flames of true innovation indefinitely, as Jobs had, or are we in for a long future of repackaged/reshuffled products in the catalog as it appears today?

To me, this more than anything, will be his legacy. A leader has many obligations and duties, and one of them is succession. Has Jobs adequately instilled a sustainable culture at Apple, and has he done a good job at surrounding himself with people who can seamlessly carry on his vision and prepare the next generation of leadership, indefinitely? Has he really built an Infinite Loop in Cupertino? Only time will tell.

In the mean time, we will mourn the passing of a technology icon - a man without whom the world as we know it would be a lot worse. Rest in peace, Steve.

They Live

2011-09-01T09:57:00.002-05:00

Ever since finding out about Google Cloud Print embedded into the Chrome browser, I feel like I'm living in a Sci Fi movie. I've discovered a nefarious secret plot, and nobody else is onto it yet. When you search for information on it, you see nothing but happy people who think it's cool but probably haven't used it.

I tried to use it, and it scares the hell out of me.

Our firewall and proxy servers are pretty well bolted down. They don't allow any traffic we don't explicitly name, and we blacklist a ton of URL's above and beyond what the filtering software blocks. Google Chrome's Cloud Print just works, right out of the chute, in ways that are difficult to track down exactly.

From a firewall standpoint, we were able to shut it off entirely, but through the proxy, it's a far trickier operation. The conversation essentially goes from client to google.com directly. It hops to SSL pretty much right away, meaning you have no idea what's going on from a packet capture standpoint. It's all on port 443, and it just works. Google can see behind your firewalls and into your enterprise, using Chrome as a spy agent.

I am not a fan of that for a lot of reasons that should be obvious. I'm even less of a fan of the fact that I cannot cleanly and easily lock down that capability. The options I have are draconian and will definitely result in an internal shit-storm.

Apparently "do no evil" is an increasingly subjective and malleable standard for the Google juggernaut, because this is pretty damned evil.

Everyone's a Cloud Expert

2011-07-11T14:24:00.004-05:00

In case anyone wonders why discussions of Cloud Computing are met with such broad skepticism and cynicism, I submit to you Exhibit "B" in the case against the cloud. (Exhibit "A", of course, is the question of "what happens if you, the service provider, end up being terrible?")

This example demonstrates how tenuous a grasp even those selling and advocating cloud technologies seem to have on the concept. They end up prattling on ad nauseam with a collection of garbled nothing-speak that causes the eyes to roll back in one's head.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-cloud-computing-must-evolve-2011-07-11?link=mw_home_kiosk

"Why Cloud Computing Must Evolve" - wait, what? It has barely been born, yet you talk about it as if it were a foregone certainty.

The adoption of cloud computing — with businesses running a significant portion of their applications in the cloud — is on the verge of becoming ubiquitous. This marked increase in the use of the Internet for accessing computing resources will necessitate an evolution in the cloud computing network, which will include accessing public and private data.

"On the verge of becoming ubiquitous." Really! Eddie's in the space-time continuum, you say?

Hogwash.

The rest of the article is a thinly-veiled effort to drum up interest in the author's company, and as an advertising piece goes, it is pretty lackluster. It seems to me that those who will be successful in marketing their product, will be able to do so in simple terms anyone could easily understand.

That Took Long Enough

2011-04-28T08:10:00.003-05:00

It's tough to imagine that it's been eight years since Novell appointed the single least effective C-level officer in the history of modern business, John Dragoon, as its head of marketing. Today, at last, and perhaps far too late, they are free of him.

http://www.novell.com/company/blogs/cmo/?p=594

It's interesting that the chief marketing officer of a (formerly) great technology company like Novell could go 6 months without updating his blog, after having done so fairly regularly at least in the beginning. This speaks to his utter failure to move the needle even the slightest bit despite having all the time in the world and a canyon full of cash to spend.

Novell's best marketers have always been its customers. That is a sad truth, because its customers have no business being the primary marketing vehicle. It was as if Novell was content with the status quo. Rely on a fickle and often under-equipped channel to deploy and maintain increasingly complicated products (a model that should have disappeared with the emergence of NetWare 4 and NDS, since hardly anyone understood what was happening until they attended expensive training); and allow the people who know and use the products - customers - to sell the advantages over Microsoft.

At the time, Microsoft's data-center (ha!) offering was incredibly weak. No-one who did an objective and thorough evaluation of Novell vs. Microsoft for file & print services would have bothered with Microsoft until roughly 2003, at which point it was becoming clear Microsoft was doing a better job of integrating all their stuff, courting developers, and (ding ding ding) marketing - than Novell. Eight years on, John Dragoon's complete and miserable failure is evident. Novell is almost a distant memory, and even the most loyal key Novell employees and customers have jumped into Microsoft's warm waters. And guess what, it's really nowhere as bad as we had been making it out all of those years. Not now it isn't.

Dragoon is far from alone in taking the blame for Novell's inexplicable failure to dominate the enterprise IT microcomputer landscape. The board of directors has installed one feckless leader after another, and none of them seem to understand the value of what they have. Sure, they're good business people and have a lot of relationships, blah blah blah, none of that matters (or mattered, more appropriately) as we can plainly see.

But John Dragoon had a real chance to make a difference and stem the tide. He had the enthusiasm of a lot of passionate people to build upon, all of whom were begging and pleading for Novell to do a better job selling the story into the board room rather than relying on grass-roots, organic growth to occur in every customer's IT shop. The most we got out of him was some magazine ads that looked foreign to even Novell employees. Nobody had any idea what they were selling. It looked like buzzwords in search of problems. In many, many ways, Novell continually missed the mark.

It is sad to see what was a company of such bright people doing such amazing things become a wilted husk of its former self. I am glad to see Dragoon gone, but I know it's too late for it to make any difference. It's hard to know where Novell should go now, but I think we have enough data to know with certainty that this path leads nowhere for them.

Chipotle!

2011-04-21T16:34:00.000-05:00

It was announced today that Chipotle would replace Novell in the S&P 500 index.

No, Chipotle is not some new technology company, or the result of the Novell-Attachmate merger. It's a national chain of fast casual dining restaurants.

This today as I listen to a former Novell whiz kid and ZEN Master address an audience of CIO's about (gulp) Microsoft products.

How far the mighty have fallen.

Of Smartphones and Sycophants

2011-04-11T13:37:00.004-05:00

Naturally, like everyone else in the world, we are faced with the fact that people want to use their own gadgets to do work stuff. The chants are increasing and getting higher up the ladder, which has made for an interesting set of philosophical conversations around the importance of technology to the business - conversations we've never really had.

It started, predictably, with the iPhone 3. Immensely popular, that was the sound of the first shot so to speak. IT had plausible deniability though - lack of encryption support would undoubtedly result in company data making its way into unscrupulous Russian hackers who walked by with Bond-esque electronic plot devices. With the advent of the the 3GS, IT had to work a little bit harder to stem the tide - they would be difficult (i.e. expensive) to manage, and wouldn't have the same controls as our beloved BlackBerries.

But the screens were awesome on these things, and old eyes kept begging..."Please, please give me more than a postage stamp-sized display for my e-mail, since I can only read it at 72pt."

This whole time, RIM was working on their strategy - an iPhone imitator with all the warm fuzziness of BlackBerry Enterprise Server security & controls. "Awesome!" said the IT department, "That'll shut 'em up!"

We were wrong.

The device RIM delivered was called the "Torch", and it sucked. It sucked worse than anything has ever sucked before. How in the world did the brilliant minds at RIM - the people who created the damned smart phone to begin with - end up laying such a huge turd? Who knows how, but they did. It was bad by all accounts, universally decried as slow and clumsy and a really poor effort from a company that appeared to be well past it's prime.

Crud.

We didn't even bother buying any - we knew people would hate them and the demands would arise anew, but louder, for iPhones. Oh, and Droids! Don't forget the Android devices! We love them, they tell us, because they have an app that turns my phone into a level and it's "open" - nyah nyah, take that Apple f4nb0yz!

How do you explain to people who are operating at that level, that there is A LOT more to supporting these things than simply pointing them at Exchange ActiveSync? They aren't going to get it, and don't really care.

If only there was another option...

Enter the Windows 7 Phone. or Windows Phone 7. I keep flip-flopping on which I like less. I suppose there were Windows Phones before this one, but I don't know anyone outside of Redmond who used them - and even they seemed to do so grudgingly.

It has the same form factor as the Androids. It has the same pretty display, the same touch-screen feature, the same glossy interface gestures as iPhone, but it's just a little different. It has a number of negatives, to be sure - there aren't nearly as many things you can do with it in terms of App availability (I can't believe I have to capitalize App now so that people know what I mean). But, it is made by Microsoft, which means it should work really well with all this other Microsoft stuff we have. Right? Wait, no...right???!?

Facepalm.

It has Word, which is cool. It has Excel and PowerPoint even, and OneNote - nice. It has Outlook, which works well with Exchange as one might expect. But it trips over itself going the extra mile. Want to read PDF's? Create a Live ID and sign-in - hey, it's good enough for Apple! - even though the app is completely free. So much for appealing to enterprise customers at all.

If Microsoft ever figures out what an incredible platform they have in Windows 7 Phone / Windows Phone 7, it will be a dark day somewhere in Canada where incredibly nice people are failing miserably to make a compelling 21st century mobile device. There are a handful of options, probably not difficult to implement, that would make this consumer "also ran" into the dominant, if not singular option for corporate customers. Which, by the way, are the ones who have all the money.

Windows Phone 7 does a lot of things very well. The interface is well thought out and is a refreshing alternative to iOS. It looks good. You like using it. It's fast, at least on the Samsung and LG devices we've tried. It has a big screen that is easy to read. The camera is brilliant, and the video capture & playback are also fantastic. It does social well, even if you don't want it to.

Old fogies who use BlackBerry handhelds don't give a rip about Apps. That means this device would be perfect for them, because it doesn't have many. If only I could provision them complete with a handful of free apps like Acrobat reader and settings for our corporate wireless standard over the air, not require Live ID's, and not require Zune for updates. If only I could have them act as if they were on our private network - like BES phones - where our content filter and internal servers would be available to them. If only I could join them to my domain and have them controllable via GPO, or at least use NTLM authentication to our SharePoint 2007 sites (rather than making us re-deploy on 2010 with forms-based options enabled, which we can't do today). If only there were native integration with OCS 2007 or Lync for updating presence, having video chats, etc. If only there were a built-in RDP client.

It's an incredibly powerful platform, but not an especially good phone. If I'm lucky, Microsoft will figure this out and actually leverage it to embrace and reward enterprise customers...because the consumer ship has sailed, and it's flying an Apple spinnaker.

To Virtualize Desktops...

2011-03-08T14:49:00.003-06:00

...or not to virtualize desktops. That, is the question.

I'm embarking on a journey of discovery regarding all things VDI lately. Our use case scenarios here are probably heavier than normal, and our organization's layout is definitely more WAN dependent than "normal". So we need to find out what is real, what is hype, and what (if anything) will work for us in this space.

Found a good resource here: Validated Design Resources. This is the best collection of technical docs I've found covering NetApp, VMWare, and Citrix Xen Desktop - on Cisco hardware, which seems a little bit like an odd marriage. You can tell where the funding came from.

VMWare View and PCoIP appear to have some real potential for us, especially in the graphics-intensive environments, but it remains to be seen what kind of scalability we would experience given our workloads. More to come as we learn it.

Crazy Ivan

2011-02-22T16:50:00.002-06:00

We recently had a departure of a senior resource that prompted us to go through all of our administrative passwords for the (frankly, surprising number of) systems we manage and update them.

The great fear and apprehension we and everyone feels about changing root or admin passwords is that it's never really crystal clear - I'm talking about vendor documentation in particular - what might break when you do. Like many small-to-mid size shops, we don't do this very often, because it doesn't add money to the bottom line and we have more work than we can handle just keeping the important stuff running smoothly.

But there is value in the exercise. Not for the stuffed-shirt security-Nazi / audit-police reasons, but because it's easy to lose sight of hundreds and thousands of incremental additions and changes to the network - even if you have a careful change control process.

So we did the password change, and by and large, we did a good job of identifying important systems we knew to be using the passwords and prepare them accordingly. In one instance, we missed one, but knew exactly what was wrong and were able to quickly find where it had stored admin credentials. Another surfaced later in the week, that shouldn't have been using admin credentials at all. Sometimes, if you're not real careful, a lab effort can go so well that you just move straight into production rather than re-build everything from scratch. Time is money, after all. Easy enough to fix, create a new set of credentials for that system and move on.

That latter scenario - something breaking that never in a million years would have been expected to be using admin credentials - repeated itself twice. The people responsible for it are, interestingly, the people responsible for us wanting to change the passwords in the first place.

In the movie "Hunt for Red October", the captains of Russian submarines would spontaneously make a sharp turn one direction or the other. This prevented them from getting a false sense of security - the natural tendency when everything is going well to consider it a result of intention rather than chance. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The maneuver was called a "Crazy Ivan", and an experienced U.S. submarine crew knew to expect it and keep following undetected - but only if they knew which way to turn.

If it's been a while since you've changed admin passwords, consider doing a Crazy Ivan of your own - not because you should distrust employees, but because you should distrust your ability to remember whether or not everything you put into production is following best practices.

The Year of the Pad

2011-01-07T14:26:00.005-06:00

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that 2011 will be the year of the tablet computer. Some people still think this means Windows-based tablet edition PC's or laptop hybrids/convertibles, but it really means the NEW tablet - Pads.

My worst fears have become a reality - the iPad has been ridonkulously successful and has spawned an entire industry of me-too Johnny-come-lately impersonators. So reality being what it is (inescapable), we'll have to adjust.

CES this week showcased Google's latest Android OS, which is being called Honeycomb in a manner consistent with their irritatingly quirky penchant for naming their releases. Froyo is as stupid to say as it is to write, and whoever had that idea should be punched someplace tender for a few hours (or at least once for every time an IT executive has been forced to use the term).

Its goofy name aside, it did look impressive in the live demo. It was running on Motorola hardware, and one would fairly imagine that any and every Apple competitor will be cheaper than Big White. If the ActiveSync support is good, well, it's hard to say no.

In quite an about-face, we've actually been talking about supporting these things. Even down to the iPhone. There have emerged some very compelling business apps that bring a sort of Star Trek futurism into the present day. It's amazing how powerful information can be when it is easy to access and truly portable. If only wireless networks were worth a damn. There are a couple of SharePoint apps that do a fantastic job of present collaboration spaces in Apple's intuitive (and almost ubiquitous now) touch interface. With iOS at least, handling PDF's and Office document types requires no configuration at all. Modifying lists is simple and fast. And if all else fails, you just fire up Safari and do things the old fashioned way.

I would still not personally pay for an iPad, but if the company provides one, I'm confident I would be able to replace my laptop with it for daily use. Or perhaps go to a modest desktop configuration and travel only with the iPad. I've done enough testing with it to have become used to them, and my shoulder / back would definitely appreciate it. The apps are 95% there, and improve far more rapidly than their shrink-wrapped counterparts. For all the concerns bandied about, I really do see these as far easier to manage than traditional computers. In the right environment, they would be a brilliant way to augment virtual desktop initiatives.

Some polls show people flocking towards standardization as if that is what IT needs to be able to effectively manage these devices. I can't personally see why that would be the case unless you plan on doing A LOT of development - certainly far more people advocate standardization than I imagine really need it. ActiveSync with Exchange 2007 or later is really adequate for most small-to-medium organizations right out of the box, and it puts the onus on the device - not the admin - to work properly. The most IT would NEED to do is plainly state which OS platforms and versions it wants to support based on their risk profiles.

The only constant is change. Customers first. Antidepressants are fun!

You're Being Throttled

2011-01-07T14:18:00.002-06:00

One of the things you become aware of when you buy more internet bandwidth than you need, is that no matter how fast your connection is, the other side is probably throttling you down. Big sites do this all the time - we have 50Mbps here, and a single download will rarely exceed 6-7Mbps from Microsoft, VMWare, Novell, IBM, etc. as we get patches or ISO's for products. There is a point at which, no matter what, your downloads will not get any faster. It's not a CPU, memory, or LAN bottleneck on your firewalls, not a latency issue, not 70% or more of network overhead - nothing but simple traffic control implemented at the far end.

Never turn down more bandwidth for less money if you can get it, but definitely be cognizant of the fact that if you're not using all the bandwidth you have today - even during spikes - things won't get faster just because you buy more. If you have a big pipe and internet sites still aren't fast enough, it's probably out of your hands.

If you think about it...

2011-01-06T09:43:00.002-06:00

...GUI's like Windows and the original Mac OS pretty much destroyed any real ability a company had to secure its data from walking away. Going back in time, the last instance I can think of where information was not portable was in custom-apps or databases on character based terminals or PC's. Of course you could argue that the dot matrix printer would have probably been the real death knell of distributed computing information security. It's not like you could lock that stuff down back in the day.

In modern times though, the ability to cut & paste in browsers, command prompt windows, etc. means you have to jump through enormous hurdles to institute a truly read-only security level for your data, meaning it only exists within an application and can only be read on-screen. If it's possible at all (it may be and I just don't know what products one would use to perform Windows surgery to disable any cut/paste ability anywhere).

All of the effort an administrator could go through would still be vulnerable to something that renders the measures moot - either that or you have so greatly impacted user productivity that the question becomes why let them come to work at all?

Just once in a while it seems like it would make sense if it were at least a little easier for companies to say "you can see this, but you can't do anything else with it" - especially in browser based apps. Yes it may be possible with a lot of custom coding or third-party products, but they're all essentially working around a fundamental oversight in information security inherent to GUI's. Can't we patch that? Like a GPO setting that disables the ability to select text in a DOS window on a per-user basis, or that disables text selection per-user or per-URL wildcard entry in a list. I bet people would use it if they had it.

Computers - especially networked systems - are inherently insecure. Data breaches and loss should really be expected, frankly. If your data is really that valuable, don't put it on a computer. At least not until OS manufacturers start to take it seriously.

Why Communication Matters

2010-10-08T09:30:00.003-05:00

You've probably heard your fair share of cliches about the importance of communication. How "it's impossible to over-communicate", etc. And there is some value in reinforcing the fact that bad things happen when people take for granted that everyone around them knows what is going on. The advice you hear is usually centered around communicating status, or effectively managing change.

What happens if you can't - not because you aren't good at it, but because, well, you just can't.

Healthy and effective communication are dependent upon healthy and effective relationships. You can "communicate" until you're blue in the face - if you do not have the respect of the people you're addressing, it won't matter.

If you're a leader in particular, it's crucial to go out of your way to establish strong relationships with your subordinates, peers, and supervisors. I have an example of why I feel so strongly about this.

If you have a chilly relationship with a co-worker, where conversations are tense or cold or generally unpleasant, you will not communicate with them as often as you should. Consciously or sub-consciously, you will begin a futile effort of trying to anticipate their reactions to whatever you have to tell them, and because humans do that which is least painful, you'll avoid communicating with them until you get too far down the path (or worse, go in the wrong direction).

You may try overly hard to perfect whatever you're working on for your supervisor if you simply cannot get comfortable dealing with them, and what you end up with will have taken longer and not be as good as it could have been if you were working more closely - communicating more frequently and in smaller chunks.

Progress is impossible without collaboration; collaboration is impossible without communication; communication is impossible without relationships. People can have respect for leaders without liking them - that scenario may be fine in the military where collaboration is scarce or where matters of life-or-death put the importance of friendliness on the back burner, but it's a recipe for inefficiency and mediocrity in the enterprise.

If you're a leader, or you are subordinate to someone with whom you do not have a great relationship, do everyone a favor and make a renewed effort to get there.

People who have talent and respect for themselves do not want to work someplace where their efforts do not result in success. Talented people live for the chance to successfully meet challenges. If that's you, recognize the truth of this - you will never, ever get it done as well by yourself as you can with a team of people who share strong relationships. You owe it to yourself as a leader (by fiat, de facto or otherwise) to do whatever it takes to put differences or past issues aside, focus on the positives with everyone, and break down barriers to communication.

The Torch

2010-08-26T09:35:00.002-05:00

I've been evaluating a BlackBerry Torch for the past few days. It's a pretty phone, but I can certainly understand what people were talking about when the early reviews came in blasting it as not ready for prime-time.

The interface is somewhat clunky to operate - distinctly unlike BlackBerry's of the past. It's slow, in about every respect - perhaps because you're used to things working instantly on a traditional RIM device. It is buggy - I've had the screen lock in sideways mode just pulling it out of my pocket, and couldn't get it un-stuck but to press the dial button. The layout and operation takes some getting used to, and the screen is so sensitive, you often finding it doing things you had no intention of it doing. This device would turn a 30 year old systems engineer into a 70 year old car salesman...muttering, "what dit...why?...no, go back...how did I..."

The screen is good, and people I call say I sound great in either handset or speakerphone mode, but that's where the compliments begin and end. I constantly hear my own voice in a robotic, almost water-in-the-ear "echo" when using it as a handset phone, and it's really irritating. Then of course, we have the AT&T network's propensity to drop calls at will - so it's obviously not a device problem.

We did learn you can press ALT+"n m l l" to have the handset display the actual signal strength in dBm (I think it's dBm). It's at least more useful than counting bars. I see it bounce between -70 and -130 sitting at my desk, immobile. When it does say -70, it's typically not doing anything - as soon as you start hitting the mobile network, it falls like a stone. Still goes back and forth between GPRS / EDGE and 3G - I've probably talked about this before.

Anyway, we won't be deploying them, and that's all that matters. We have a couple hundred RIM handhelds, and I don't want a fleet of people who have devices they hate. Probably for the first time ever, we'll start looking into MobileIron or Good for Enterprise to open the gates a bit. When Amazon starts chopping the price of a new smartphone in half less than a week after it debuts, it's not a good sign. RIM is, as Gordon Ramsay would say, "Deep in the $#!+".

This iPad Nonsense

2010-05-18T13:35:00.002-05:00

I hope to look back at this post in a few years' time and think of the iPad as the Newton - really cool at the time but totally over-hyped. I fear that this will not however be the case.

It's a neat device like everything Apple does. The appeal of a $650 gigantic iPod Touch remains lost on me however. Yes, books and magazines look great. Yes, through WiFi, it's quick. Mostly. Yes, there's tons of unproductive stuff you can make it do. This should all be a given at $650.

Here's what's irritating me. The 3G service. AT&T's network double-live sucks. Period. I've not found a non-AT&T employee who thinks otherwise. It stinks on ice. It is biblically bad. Epic fail. I have a drawer full of retired BlackBerry devices and a building full of similarly disgruntled coworkers to prove it.

The 3G part of this iPad is so God-awfully slow, I've considered taking advice from Sleep Talkin' Man and eat a blend of razors & lemons rather than wait for it to load web pages or start Apps with an internet dependency. Again, on WiFi, it's quick. 3G, not so much.

What I find most interesting of all, is the signal strength meter. I've yet to see the iPad report anything fewer than five bars (5 bars for Googlers) of service. Ever. My BlackBerry shows between one and five most times, and it fluctuates a lot. It's hardly ever five, even right next to the iPad, which seems almost programmatically indifferent to the reality of long range CDMA radio transmissions.

Had I yet another device with the capability to quickly take an image of my BlackBerry and iPad together, or better yet, a video, I'd post it. But, as with all things, I realize I'm not ever going to be the first to experience something and be irritated by it if it's bad, so I don't even bother looking for other examples online. I just decide to let this post serve as a stand-alone testimony to the crappiness of the AT&T network, and the literally laughably optimistic character of the iPad when it comes to how good the 3G signal is. Everywhere. AT&T may cover 97% of the U.S., but the iPad has 5 bars of 3G coverage in 100% of places that have any 3G coverage at all. Remarkable.

Anyway, the experiment with the iPad is distracting and irritating because I don't want one personally and wouldn't spend that kind of money even if I did, and I know that the person who will ultimately use this will curse it to eternal damnation because it cannot read their minds and it is mediocre at best when it comes to brewing tea and they are already sick of bullshit, and it will undoubtedly be me who has to answer the "how do I do this" call from memory. Sigh.

SharePoint on a Shoestring - Done

2010-04-26T10:37:00.002-05:00

It's been a Herculean effort to get all of the loose ends wrapped up and to go live with our SharePoint infrastructure, but we have done, and the end results are fantastic.

Adoption early on was at least as aggressive as we'd hoped for, confirming that there was a huge well of latent demand for better collaboration tools. Some pockets of users are finding some very innovative and exciting uses for the system with no real training at all - a great sign, and further indication of just how badly this system was needed here.

We have been successful because we had a great team of people contributing, not just in the IT department, but throughout the company, in truly meaningful ways. It has been a very gratifying endeavor. We've not even really scratched the surface in terms of capabilities - nothing but default content approval workflows, no Excel services to speak of, no KPI's, etc. Just a basically bone stock deployment, but with some very snazzy dynamic look and feel treatments that customize the appearance for every company we support (allowing us to present a tailored experience on a single farm / set of site collections).

I sometimes surprise myself after answering SharePoint questions, because I know the answer is right, and it actually sounds like I know what I'm talking about. I'm so used to hearing consultants give me such answers, that it's a little disorienting to hear them come from my own mouth. I can adjust audience settings, troubleshoot article publishing issues, manipulate crawls & profile imports, secure document libraries...I'd better stop, I'm scaring myself again.

We know enough about SharePoint to know we'd do a few things differently next time...site collections, for us, are overkill and make some things very difficult. We also know enough to know we want things fixed in the 2010 release - but aren't holding our breath.

The next year will see us attempting to leverage all of these tools and really take things to the next level. Done right, this can be game-changing, business-changing stuff that gets us very tightly aligned with the companies we support. In short, cool stuff.

It's Tough To Be A SharePoint Guy

2009-11-24T11:19:00.002-06:00

There is a gigantic field of people who are chomping at the bit to do SharePoint consulting. They all seem to be very busy, as well. Most of them have polished presentations and speak intelligently about their methodology, the importance of interviewing employees and taking time to document process flows, document types, develop taxonomies, etc.

None of them, at least that we've seen, are very good at running a project from start to finish if you don't have endless years and deep pockets.

If you don't have an appetite for custom development, opting instead to use that which you can support yourself absent an army of SharePoint coders, getting SharePoint installed becomes a very trying exercise.

There are some things that SharePoint does well, and that will be valuable to enterprise organizations who invest in their IT groups (rather than just spending money on them, which is a big difference).

However, most of those things - from an administrative standpoint; from the perspective of an IT director; are overshadowed by all of the things SharePoint either does poorly, or not at all. Even in MOSS 2007, even with the enterprise version of the product, there's a lot that can (and does) frustrate a quality-minded IT manager.

It seems like we might have been the last people on earth to embark upon a SharePoint deployment, but at times, it seemed like we might have been the first. Our knack for running into legitimate issues and bugs that "nobody" has seen before is truly miraculous - a candidate for a well funded study if ever there was one.

If you have NOT yet drank the MOSS kool-aide, and do not have an endless supply of developers to whom you can throw every little requirement, keep the following in mind: implementing it is going to be a problem, but nothing you cannot overcome. It will fall short of your expectations. It will not go smoothly. You will start to become adept at finding the capability gaps in the people delivering the solution to you, and will realize what we have - that NOBODY is good at this.

Maybe it'll be better in the next version.

Still with the Cold Calling? Really?

2009-10-08T16:23:00.003-05:00

I'm baffled that this actually works, but it must, because there are so many companies doing it. I realize this is the third time in as many years that I've written about this, but it is endlessly frustrating yet amusing in a "Curb Your Enthusiasm" sort of way.

For those unfamiliar with the principle, get this. People will actually call up out of the blue, ask to speak to "the IT department", and announce quickly that "they're not selling anything" (because that would be unspeakable!), but rather, they're collecting answers on topic X, Y, or Z for some anonymous cabal of vendors too inept to figure out what the market wants or needs.

Our favorite response is to let the caller know that we have corporate rules restricting us from answering survey questions. Plausible deniability. Sometimes it gets you off of the list for good, sometimes not, but it always makes for a short call.

Just as baffling are the people that survey callers look down upon - the cold calling salesperson. Literally phone a company at random, as for someone, and try to convince them that they should give you the time of day (much less start spending money with you) in the span of about 15 seconds.

Who are the people that keep feeding the birds? Don't feed the birds. Didn't your parents teach you anything? You feed the birds, and more and more show up, and it ruins things for everybody. Don't feed the birds. Do NOT respond to cold callers.

Here's how conversations go for me with these people lately.

The long form:

(phone rings)
ZM: "Zen Master here."
CC: "Hi, can I speak to the person in charge of purchasing decisions for X?" (usually toner or backup tapes or cell phone accessories or something else stupid)
ZM: "That's me, what can we do for you?"
CC: "I'm with Bob's Pretty Good company, have you heard of us?"
ZM: "No."
CC: "Well I'd like to see if we can get on your schedule to talk about all the ways we can save your company money and make everyone more efficient and clear up bad complexions and cure swine flu...what does your calendar look like?"
ZM: "We're all set on that front, but I appreciate the call."
CC: "So what do you use for swine flu and bad complexions?"
ZM: "I'm not inclined to reveal that to you." (click)

The short form:

(phone rings)
ZM: "This is the Zen master."
CC: "Hi Zen master, I'm with Radioactive Toner company and wanted to see if you had any upcoming projects, you know, involving toner, that we might be able to help with."
ZM: "We're all set on toner, but thanks for the call." (click)

This one is interesting too, ever since we became EA customers, people are presenting themselves as being with Microsoft. A particularly sneaky tactic, MS will actually badge channel partners as employees, so they can 'legitimately' say they are with Microsoft. I have nothing but loathing for this form of deceit. I am shocked, SHOCKED, that my influential blog has not put a stop to this practice once and for all.

The liar:

(phone rings)
ZM: "Zen master here."
CC: "Is this the Zen master?"
ZM: "Yes, who is this?"
CC: "I'm Bob calling on behalf of Microsoft."
ZM: "Who are you with?"
CC: "Microsoft?"
ZM: "You aren't on my list of account representatives."
CC: "Well I'm calling on behalf of Microsoft."
ZM: "That's why I asked who you work for."
CC: "Oh, I'm with (some company nobody ever heard of)."
ZM: "Okay, thank you." (click)

One guy recently never came clean, and I knew it, but acted like I didn't. Genuine account reps know everything about us...if someone calling doesn't, they are not with Microsoft.

Perhaps one of you will know what website I can go to in order to get a rebate on all the time I waste with these people. If not, hopefully you get a little satisfaction knowing you're not alone (or that your job could be a lot worse).

Progress At Last

2009-08-21T08:57:00.003-05:00

We finally got the issue with our image resolved and were able to deploy all of our new hardware...just under 500 systems, in just over 3 weeks in June (we took it easy). Everyone seems very happy with them thus far...lots faster, for certain. I do wish the connection manager component with Dell was as good as IBM's Thinkvantage Access Connections, so we'll keep pushing for improvements.

Finally getting some traction on the SharePoint front as well, using a consulting "mercenary" of sorts who has done a great job helping us map our requirements to features, and actually show us what things will look like as we go.

Windows Server 2008 R2 looks as if it may have some interesting benefits for us, as it applies to the total mobility effort we're undertaking. What we have in the lab now isn't far off, frankly, and it's pretty exciting to see it come together. 2008 R2 makes a compelling case to use Windows 7 once it's finally released also, which is depressing in a way, but is something we'll have to keep an eye on.

We just renewed our EA and Support agreements with Microsoft. I had high expectations but low hopes that our Microsoft relationship would be anything other than artificially pleasant and devoid of substance. In short, I've never been so happy to be wrong in my life. What a great lesson.

Sea Change

2009-04-17T09:05:00.003-05:00

While we still don't have our imaging show-stopper taken care of, we're a lot closer. In fact, we're about to download the latest version of our image on ISO's to test, and if the 'fix' we've received does the trick, we'll finally be able to deploy our desktop and laptop hardware - about three months late.

On another front, we were able to migrate off of Novell GroupWise and on to Exchange 2007, with surprisingly little fuss. We used ZENworks to deploy Office 2007 silently, and with all of our Outlook settings pre-populated. We obviously deployed Microsoft Active Directory, using Server 2008 and native mode (I think).

Finally, we dropped our Novell licenses in favor of renewing only the ZEN 10 products for configuration management, asset management, and patch management. This allows us to bring forward the ZEN functionality we were unable to find anywhere else, while finally ridding ourselves of this increasingly cumbersome Novell infrastructure.

We're looking forward to taking full advantage of MS Server 2008 features such as DFS, to simplify backups, file & printer sharing, etc. at our remote sites. We'll be looking closely at Cisco WAAS products in this space.

We've also integrated our network with that of a recent acquisition, using an internet-based VAS Half Tunnel from Sprint. The connection between our networks is 10Mbps, which performs very well so far despite lack of end-to-end CoS/QoS tagging (call it what you want). The next steps there are to basically import their users and e-mail into our AD and Exchange system, using local servers, and begin doing some cool DR stuff using VMware and (hopefully) NetApp storage at the far end.

Despite the bad economy, we're busier than ever. We're nearly finished implementing Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS 2007), and are about to implement Microsoft OCS as well.

The complexion of this environment has undergone rapid, radical change, and we've been successful at facilitating this change with a very small but talented group of individuals. It took around 1,200 man hours over a month to get Exchange in place, and we completed the migration in less than 72 hours. After some post-implementation firefighting, we're pretty confident that we didn't lose a single mailbox, address book, or archive.

Our satisfaction survey following the Outlook/Exchange migration was overwhelmingly positive. In fact, only two of our roughly 500 employees had nothing positive to say. Many went out of their way to complement us on the process, and the decision to do so. Happy customers are a good thing.

The Age Of Careless Development

2009-02-02T16:02:00.003-06:00

It's become really quite alarming lately, just how bad software has become. Everywhere. It's impossible to single out a given vendor for being worse than the rest, without being entirely subjective. They all stink, equally, but in different ways.

In fact, I cannot think of a single software vendor at the moment - or even hardware vendors who write complementary software packages - who are anywhere near proficient or at least competent.

I mentioned to a vendor earlier today, that "we" (as in, the IT industry) is worse at managing computer hardware now than we were 6 years ago. Dell has made the ImageDirect process unbelievably cumbersome. Microsoft's SMS / SCCM is still unweildy and ineffective, ZENworks (while still one of the better offerings) has launched down a rabbit hole so deep and dark that nobody dare follow - to say nothing of the fact that their company isn't interesting to anyone anymore (vis-a-vis the cancellation of BrainShare for the first time ever). Lenovo just flat gave up on imaging, pushing the task to "partners" like Insight, who as box pushers, struggle to manage the lifecycle of a product-customer relationship well at all.

Referring to our current image-impacting show-stopping software bug, that vendor said "Man, I hope desktop virtualization fixes this." And so do I, but I'm still skeptical.

Somewhere along the line, the stuff that made great programmers and resulted in great software, has become lost.

It's almost as if the tools became too easy. Anyone could make software that looked real, because in Windows-land, it all basically looks the same. What's masked is the hard and careful work that used to go into making it work well - which was usually far more important than how it looked. Some of the best running software looked the worst. Take RPG applications on AS/400. They. Just. Never. Fail.

Programmers used to be a unique breed, because not everyone could visualize how everything worked, and make it do what they wanted. Nowadays, you just have to read some Visual Crap++ books or watch a webinar, and viola - you're a developer.

Software developers need to be reconnected with those of us who USE their code day-in and day-out. The whiteboard upon which requirements were drawn will never use the software they produce - people do. If you've had to manage people, or ever managed an IT group, you can spot fundamental, architectural problems in software from a country mile. But developers these days don't have that experience, and they don't get that guidance from their product managers. Which means they churn out code that met requirements only the straw man from "Wizard of Oz" could ever use.

Making matters worse is when companies give up on actual development, farming it off to "code vendors" in favor of becoming keepers of the Gantt chart instead. Development is an organic process, and the people who are the best at it are the ones who are genuinely invested in the success of the organization for whom they're doing development. When the guy writing the code is never going to talk to someone using it (or even the person buying it), they're a lot less accountable - which means they're a lot less careful, or proactive, or focused.

These are all easy problems to solve, and if we're truly entering the age of the cloud where software isn't the commodity anymore, it's absolutely crucial that companies recognize the advantages of experience-based development. Rational Rose, rapid, lean, whatever the buzzword is today, are no substitutes for development lifecycles that involve seasoned professionals who know how EVERYTHING works together.

Novell Sees The Light on Maintenance

2008-10-29T11:41:00.003-05:00

We processed our renewal today, and learned that Novell is now including unlimited support with the software maintenance MLA customers purchase each year. This prevents you from needing to buy Premium 1000 or 2000 (or more), and be worrying about how many times you call.

This is much more consistent with enterprise vendors like Oracle, IBM, and Sun, and is a welcome change. Unfortunately, it's a case of too little, too late. We're done waiting for Novell to do what customers like us have told them for 4, 5 or 6 years. As the saying goes down here, "Even a good dog will only stay on the porch for so long."

I'm told that more changes are coming over the next year, and I'm definitely interested in hearing what they are. I suspect it will address many of the complaints and confusing practices we've called out here, leaving only the question of "What took you so long?" for them to answer.

OES Linux and 8 Character Passwords

2008-10-14T22:16:00.002-05:00

Did you know that OES on SLES is incapable of using passwords for the Root user longer than 8 characters?

...

Did you also know that OES on SLES allows you to blank out the Root user password using the passwd utility?

...

Did you know that lots of stuff is dependent on the Root user, and that password cannot be controlled through NAMCD or eDirectory?

...

Hoo boy.

Here It Comes (Microsoft Update)

2008-09-12T13:15:00.003-05:00

Well, so much for saving money using Microsoft versus Novell. :-)

If ALL we wanted to do was apples-to-apples functionality, and had no needs for the more advanced (and to us, compelling) SharePoint features, we'd probably be able to do more for about the same spend.

But we DO need those Enterprise features, and that means the E-CAL suite. And that means we're definitely spending more than we used to.

What a lot of antagonists of Microsoft don't understand, for all their yelling and fear-mongering, is that the money you need to run Microsoft products is still barely a blip for big companies.

Novell then, as victims of their own success, have relegated themselves to the small-business/school/government niches where they've always done well - places where price trumps value.

Where companies make decisions based on value - not just price - Microsoft wins, hands down. Even if it's more expensive than Novell, it's still cheap. I can run our enterprise on about $70,000 worth of Novell licensing a year, including their pathetic excuse for phone support. Our Microsoft bill is likely to be around 4 times that, but that includes Office Pro Plus, and the entire E-CAL suite. Compare that to what a company spends per-head on enterprise systems like Oracle, etc., and it's a drop in the bucket. More people will get more productivity and efficiency out of MS products at that price than they ever will from their ERP system.

Anyway, we're looking forward to getting up to speed on the MS technologies - we're having in-house training performed, tailored to our specs and individuals, by an MS certified education partner. Other organizations here in town have done the same with this company, and have been very pleased.

If only Dell would release their E-Series laptop, we could really get moving with this effort.

VMWare and NFS on NetApp Filers

2008-08-22T18:17:00.004-05:00

Ran across a very disturbing issue this week, which caused the corruption of nearly half of our virtual machines - certainly all of the ones which were experiencing any load to speak of.

If you run VMWare ESX 3i against a NetApp filer using storage pools defined as NFS mounts (of which a given cluster can only have 32, by the way), and you're a good Systems Engineer and follow the NetApp best practices guidelines for configuring ESX to work optimally with their products, then you'll turn on this nifty little switch called NFS.Lock.Disable by changing the default value of "0" to "1".

The document in question from October, 2007, used to be on the NetApp site (and maybe VMware's as well), but is now relegated to one of those cool sites that leech stuff from the web and hold it forever.

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/304765/Network-Appliance-and-VMware-Virtual-Infrastructure-3-Storage-Best-Practices

Then about 10 months later, or 2 months ago, it changed.

http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3428.pdf

Suddenly, no mention of NFS.Lock.Disable.

This document, on the VMware website, however interestingly titled, makes no mention of it the setting. It's authored by NetApp as well, and is dated May 2007.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/partners/netapp_esx_best_practices_whitepaper.pdf

So what gives? Why so many documents and versions on the same topic, by so many authors? Who knows. All we know is that "best practices" for VMWare ESX 3 customers using NetApp and NFS storage pools was to set NFS.Lock.Disable to 1.

The problem is that VMWare ESX 3i isn't what ESX 3 used to be. From the poor retention of logs (not my opinion; statement of fact from VMware support), to the singular dependency on file locks to ensure split brain conditions don't occur, all the way to patches that somehow slip past QC with license-detonation code included.

All of this means when you do what VMware and NetApp told you to do in order to deploy their products together successfully, you put your data at risk.

And we did, and ours was, and it sucked.

Split brain means, in essence, that the system in charge of deciding what VM goes where (VCenter in this case) is unaware or uncertain of what ESX host holds which guest operating systems. In this condition, two separate ESX hosts can be - simultaneously - running the exact same guest OS instances. The bad news is, as you might imagine, that one half of that "brain" doesn't know what the other half is doing. What results is the utter annihilation of your filesystem, and depending on where and how you keep files, a very long process of restoring to a known good state.

The symptoms are beyond bizarre. VCenter shows a guest VM as being on a different host just about every second. Opening up a VM's console may give two people completely different screens, because you're actually looking at different "real" instances of the same virtual machine. Shutting down VCenter doesn't make things better; connecting directly to the ESX host will show you a wildly fluctuating number of guests running.

The only remedy is to use some neat "unsupported" (wink wink) console commands on the ESX hosts, and 'kill' the offending VM's. The faster you do that, the less badly your data will be corrupted....no matter how you slice it, it stinks.

VMware's Platinum support was surprisingly disappointing. Our first tech "hadn't been trained on 3i yet", and it took a while to get to someone who was. Like, hours. The RCLI is lacking commands that ESX 3 used to have, which vexes them. Following a host reboot, logs aren't kept. At all. They're not kept at all. What? Yes. Used to be in 3, but not in 3i. Nice. Once we got back up, it took ages and a lot of pretty irate e-mail to get someone to do some post-mortem analysis. Ultimately, we heard the details here straight from the horse's mouth. They're trying to eradicate the versions of that document that advise NFS.Lock.Disable - word never made it to us, somehow. They say they've known about the problem for about 30 days, which seems unrealistic. They say about 12 customers have had the same exact issues. And, unequivocally, they say to turn off that NFS.Lock.Disable shit, post haste.

My hope is that people who have deployed with this setting seriously consider changing it, and perhaps ask NetApp WTF? (or better yet, share their experiences in the comment area below). And additionally, my hope is that we're able to convince VMware that the deficiencies with 3i are totally unacceptable (no matter how insignificant they may seem to those with direct-attached or FC-attached disk). They could take a cue from Novell regarding heartbeat and keepalives to make sure direct host-to-host communication is used as a failsafe against these goofy file locks before allowing a VM to start on a new host.

Where Apple Won't Go

2008-07-01T14:47:00.003-05:00

I remain befuddled by Apple Computer's outright thickheadedness with regard to their products and the American enterprise.

It's plain for all to see that Apple want absolutely no part of selling into corporations other than boutique art houses, or any other non-consumer segment other than schools. Yet despite this, Apple publishes a link to a story - on their own Apple "Start" page no less - highlighting the fact that 8 in 10 companies in America have Mac computers in production.

...

So, which is it - you don't care about corporations, or you're proud of the penetration your products have made into the enterprise space?

If it's the latter, how about actually ramping up an enterprise business unit? You know, with financing and on-site support programs and all the rest, like the other big kids?

Apple has done so poorly at speaking to the enterprise, that a group of five companies this week decided they'd do it for them. I love one of the quotes in the story.

"There's an information vacuum that we want to fill," T. Reid Lewis, president of Group Logic, told InformationWeek.

That's for damn sure.

Given that the newest iPhone is touted as having "enterprise" hooks, vis-a-vis integration of sorts with Exchange mail systems (not exactly in-use at many homes), one can hope that Apple's efforts to get into the enterprise will become a bit more purposeful than the X Server or X San. They need only the slightest breath to break the logjam holding Mac computers back from overrunning the enterprise space. That they pay us no attention is becoming less of an interesting quirk, and more of an insult.

Here It Comes

2008-06-26T13:27:00.002-05:00

With a requirement in-hand for a business system that requires Microsoft products on the back-end, we've begun our analysis of a Microsoft-centric technology stack versus the Novell solution we have in place today.

The results thus far have been pretty surprising. I could actually save money by going with Microsoft products to meet our requirements, and increase the functionality we provide our users. The annual maintenance-only costs for MS licenses (the Core CAL) is about half of what Novell's NOWS maintenance runs. The cost of the license is a bit higher, but is masked by the ability to finance the license cost for free over a 3 year term. The net result is that, year over year, I'd spend less with Microsoft for equivalent functionality, and would get SharePoint for free - which people are almost yelling for around here.

Microsoft has done a lot to improve the quality and stability of their products, as well as to bring their features closer to level with those to which we're accustomed in the Novell realm. When you look at all of the third-party integration points, and the benefits to be extracted by leveraging them, it's a very compelling proposition.

Those who know me will know that it's a very painful thing to admit, but it's no secret that I consider the Novell of my past to be long since dead. The people who knew how to envision, build, and maintain these products are long gone. Before much longer, we won't be able to get any help migrating, and doing so is an inevitability for us. I wish those who can continue on as they are the best of luck, but fighting it just for the sake of fighting it is a proposition that adds no value.

Peeved.docx

2008-06-04T08:30:00.003-05:00

Look, I'm really proud that your organization has deployed Office 2007. Now get over yourselves and change the default file format back to Office XP / 2003 compatibility mode, so that you don't make your customers and external colleagues feel like idiots for asking "What's a docx (or xlsx) - can't you just send it to me as a Word doc (or Excel sheet)?"

ESPECIALLY for Mac users, who don't have the luxury of an Excel or PowerPoint "compatibility pack" in Office 2004.

Thank you,
The World

Tough loss

2008-06-01T20:20:00.004-05:00

This week saw me experience the first ever of my employees to resign. Tough, tough loss.

I've had Help Desk contractors who have left to do other things, which is what I prepare them to do since there are rarely opportunities for them to come on-board.

I've had employees that I've wanted to fire, but thankfully haven't, because it helped me get better at coaching problematic individuals and poor performers.

This one was a high performing, ambitious, young professional. If one should always be looking for their replacement as a way to facilitate their own upward mobility, this person was to be my replacement.

I shouldn't be surprised, given that their departure is identical to a career mistake I wish I could take back. Hubris. I was going to get my way come hell or high water, and if it meant I had to quit to show how serious I was, I was going to do it. So, out the door I went to a 45% raise and better vacation and benefits and less stress. And I liked it for exactly 9 months, at which point I began to loathe it.

This employee has taught me a lot over the 5 years I've mentored him. They challenged me when I've been less than intellectually honest, when I've been less than engaged, when I've bordered on doing something rash in the name of righteousness, when I've been unnecessarily rigid in my beliefs or decisions.

Leading this individual has also reinforced to me some lessons I had already learned.

Problems will always get fixed. Maybe not on the time table you'd prefer, and maybe not without having it brought to light and guarded repeatedly, but they do get fixed.

The grass is never, ever greener. The only reason this person went to another employer was because it was different. They might as well have gone to McDonald's. I've heard the pitch, the rationale, etc. - it doesn't add up. Bottom line, whether or not they were right, they believed that they were undervalued and that this fact would never ever change. Sounds awful familiar.

Hopefully I'll be able to remember and believe these lessons over the next 5 - 7 years, because there are periods of time where it's very, very difficult to keep going down this same road. I know that doesn't make my condition unique. I'd be perfectly justified in leaving, just as my departed employee was. That doesn't make leaving a good idea.

Now I have to identify who will be the next leader - either someone I have working for me already, or someone who we bring on-board specifically for the purpose. It would be tough for me to go somewhere else at this level never having lost a key employee. I'm actually looking forward to the opportunity to use this event to change some things for the better.

Hoo boy...

2008-05-14T09:50:00.003-05:00

We're mid-way through our VMWare implementation project. It's been a very good learning experience for everyone. A couple of minor hiccups with an application here or there, but nothing unmanageable.

Part of this effort will involve migrating services currently running on NetWare 6.5, on to Novell's OES 1 SP 2 platform running on SLES...we've already replaced every other NetWare server in our environment with an OES server.

As you may recall from previous posts, we've been very disappointed with Novell's handling of patching for this "flagship", "enterprise class", "best-of-breed" operating system. In a word, it's a joke. Since we all value our jobs, we've decided it would be in our best interest NOT to adopt an automated or scheduled patching process for any of our OES servers...way too little quality control, way too much instability, and an utter disregard for the concepts of "stable" code bases.

Last night, that decision proved to be remarkably prescient.

We needed to see what happens when we migrate an NSS volume connected via iSCSI from a NetWare host to an OES/SLES host. So, off to the lab to build out a couple of simple servers. The NetWare box was built on a simple workstation PC in about an hour or so. The OES server took over 6 hours, and over 4 of that was waiting for the RUG update to finish (our standard process is to patch the server once, prior to productionalization, and never do it again once in the field).

We continued following our standard process for build-out after the first RUG update, which included kernels and all other manners of calamity. Once the second RUG update process completed, another reboot was in order.

Then it happened. TTY hadn't started. Absolutely nothing loaded that required a file system.

Upon further investigation, the SATA hard disks in our IBM x206 server - which, at install time, were designated as SDA1 and SDA2 by SLES, were now appearing as HDA1 and HDA2.

That's right. Running a patch process changed the paradigm for the hard disks in a running server, leaving the system unbootable.

Now, you might imagine how difficult it would be to address this issue - remotely - on 50 servers in the field. Even with the RSA cards we have and the boot-to-ISO capability, we'd be looking at untold hours wasted, recovering from an issue caused by Novell's complete and utter failure to act as responsible custodians for their product.

I'm now more convinced than ever that Novell lacks the leadership, and indeed the brainpower it once had, required to engineer and support an enterprise network operating system. The incredible legacy Drew Major created at Novell has been squandered, irrevocably. This is a company that has announced they won't have the first support pack to fix long acknowledge, significant issues in their latest version of the flagship operating system product until nearly 18 months after it's release.

What more reason do customers need to abandon Novell, with haste? All of the arguments of superiority Novell enjoyed at Microsoft's expense have been eradicated - not by Microsoft's improved product quality, but by the decline of Novell's product quality.

Certainly this will seem overly pessimistic, possibly bombastic, and over-reacting, to some of the more ardent red-blooded IT folks (and the indifferent). I am guilty of being passionate about the quality of service I deliver to my customers, and about holding others to the same expectations I have of myself - especially the vendors we've selected, especially when their performance goes into decline. This is the case far too often in our industry. It's inexcusable, and I cannot help but think a combination of Wall Street pressures, greed, and ignorance have all conspired to chip away at the foundation of our industry.

The cost and complexity of operating an enterprise IT infrastructure are growing exponentially, and in too many cases, completely without reason or justification. Nobody is concerned with making efficient, quality software any longer. Promise the world, ship tons of install DVD's, and if it doesn't work, shrug your shoulders and passively blame the customer for having either deficient requirements or deficient skill sets.

If our industry continues at this rate, the entire nation will have a very difficult time of competing abroad.

Calling On Behalf Of...

2008-05-08T11:13:00.004-05:00

I seem to be getting more and more telemarketing calls that start off with "Hi, I'm (insert name here) calling on behalf of (prominent vendor)."

Immediate bristling and rise in blood pressure occurs here.

I can't help it. It's just preposterous, to me. What can the hit rate for cold call prospects be - 0.1% tops? I have to suffer because a sales organization has run out of real work to do and has resorted to beating bushes and shooting at anything that flies out?

The puzzling part is that I have a Microsoft account team; I know who all of them are. They know what we need, and what is off-limits. I guess it's kind of an "oopsie" moment when I ask them to clarify what "on behalf of" means.

Me: "So you're with Microsoft?"
Them: "Yes."
Me: "Because I have a Microsoft account rep, who I just spoke to in e-mail yesterday about this. You're a Microsoft employee?"
Them: "On behalf of Microsoft, yes."
Me: "Well, I deal directly with a Microsoft account team. Thanks." (click)

The call today found me a bit less tolerant.

Them: "I'm so and so calling on behalf of Microsoft, working with the Exchange team, and would like to ask you a few questions."
Me: "Well, I deal directly with an account team at Microsoft; I don't deal with partners."
Them: "Well did you about Microsoft's security product called Frontline?"
Me: "Yes, we're not using it."
Them: "Well did you know that Microsoft has partnered with Nortel and (someone else)?"
Me: "They partner with just about everybody, yes."
Them: (pause) "Okay, then thank you."

Flabbergasting. What in the world can they possibly expect to come from a cold call, much less a cold call that has you hiding your own company's identity behind your partner's?

It's a good thing for Microsoft that there exist a lot of unknowledgeable, uncritical decision makers with large budgets and a susceptibility to FUD.

A Tale of Two Analysts

2008-04-30T08:38:00.002-05:00

Now some 14 months post-release, it's abundantly clear to all but the most severely dunderheaded IT wonks that Vista will be on the podium of the Microsoft Failure Grand Prix. Not sure exactly where it will stand relative to Bob and Windows ME, but it's certainly not distinguished company to keep.

As I had stated (not predicted, because it wasn't a guess), in January 2007:

The first (well, pair) indicated that IT Execs weren't sold on Vista, and questioned whether or not Vista presented a realistic ROI case for companies.

I'll save you some reading. IT Execs aren't sold on Vista because it doesn't present a realistic ROI case.

Well, it turns out I was right. To wit, rumblings from the very top of Microsoft have been felt in faraway lands as rumors of Vista's successor are being released, and hints that VIsta should have been aborted mid-term slowly escape.

Dell, HP, and Lenovo have all been pressured by their enterprise customers into providing Windows XP via downgrade righs beyond the June 30, 2008 deadline Microsoft imposed for halting sales of XP. That's right, customers would rather use XP - even if they have to buy a premium Vista license to do it.

I don't know about Steve Ballmer, but that's how I spell failure.

More interesting was the completely divergent track two of the "industry's leading" analyst firms took in penning recommendations to enterprise customers regarding Vista.

The Gartner group proclaimed that Windows is "crumbling". That's right, Gartner actually said something disparaging about a very prominent technology product.

Forrester, it appears, prefers the Kasey Kasim approach - keep your feet on the ground, and yada yada yada.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9080758&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1

"Vista is an inevitability, for a number of reasons," said Ben Gray, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. He then ticked off several, including Windows XP's announced retirement and unsubstantiated talk about Vista's successor, Windows 7.

Mr. Gray invoked the wrath of Kahn in the comments section of this article. From being labeled as too ignorant to possibly hold the position he serves, all the way to questioning the integrity of Forrester. And rightly so. He is completely out of touch, and it is an embarrassment for Forrester to have this person writing on their letterhead.

One thing is perfectly clear - I was not alone in my view of how Vista would fare in the marketplace. It's done horribly, and Microsoft's attempts to pressure companies into using it have backfired. If they don't hit a home run with the next version of Windows, we may look back on Vista as the beginning of the end for Microsoft.

Two For Two

2008-04-29T16:30:00.005-05:00

Two proposals for projects and capital expenditures in my new role, and two approvals. I've had very valuable help from my manager in fine-tuning (or totally revamping) parts of the proposals so that they're appropriate for the audience. We've done very well it would appear...despite a very tight economy and conservative holders of purse strings, we've approved nearly $250,000 of new projects.

The exercise of doing both is something everyone agrees should be commonplace for CapEx requests. I've been able to show both proposals will save real money, providing enhanced capabilities for free plus generate a return. It took a little effort and brainstorming, but it was far from impossible.

A lot of techies know when they've found the right thing to solve a given problem...the challenge is to get them to put it into terms that make sense to businesspeople. Technology hasn't been about 1's and 0's for a long time. If you want to be a technology professional, you need to link technology solutions to business problems, and sell them in non-technical terms using real numbers. If you can't do that, well, there's probably a call center hiring someplace.

Internationally Known

2008-04-21T14:55:00.002-05:00

What a great tool LinkedIn has become for me.

Like anything, you get out of it what you put into it. I've taken some time to dredge up the names of faces I've met throughout the 15 years I've been a technology professional, and have been elated to find so many of them on LinkedIn. Reconnecting and catching up with former colleagues has been quite a joy. I only wish that more of them were on the service; I hope I've not lost all contact with those individuals.

Interestingly, participating in the Q&A section of the site has allowed me to establish connections to individuals I'd have never otherwise met or known. In particular, I'm now connected to someone in the Netherlands, someone in China, and have made the acquaintance of an individual in India. I have been able to provide career advice to a young professional searching for his way, and have been fortunate to receive many letters of thanks from both the question's authors and those who have found the words helpful.

The best thing LinkedIn has done for me, however, has nothing to do with their service. Realizing what LinkedIn really does happened in stages. There was the "What is this, really?" stage, then the "Wow, this could be a great showcase for me" stage, followed soon afterwards by the "Who else is on here" stage. Not long after that, a tiny dose of panic set in - how many people that I've known would be happy and eager to accept my invitation to connect? Any bit of self-doubt you had growing up in a cliquey school system comes rushing back. Fortunately, over 100 individuals I've known (and have recently met) are now connections; but the lesson taught by a desire to grow your network has been learned; Treat *everyone* you meet as if you'd like them to happily accept your invitation to connect.

Return of the Mac

2008-04-16T09:11:00.000-05:00

A little over 12 months ago, I was fortunate enough to begin piloting an Apple MacBook Pro. It came with a 17" glossy display, 2GB of memory, pretty fast processor, and most importantly OS X Tiger.

After only a few weeks of use, I was so completely acclimated to the amazingly simple, elegant, efficient, effective design of the Mac that I began looking for ways to use them instead of Windows machines. Sadly, that effort stopped with Apple telling us they're unable to (and uninterested in) service broken systems on-site within any kind of SLA. This basically relegates Mac's to giant companies operating in a single campus, or companies with savvy IT hardware techs at each site - few of which are progressive enough to consider using Mac's.

After about 6 months, I started to forget how to use Windows as efficiently as I had before. What's funny about that fact is this; I held a job as a youngster which involved use of a character based point of sale system. I knew how to do everything with it, and could get around it with lightning speed - often helping my co-workers when they got stuck. Less than a year away from that job, I couldn't even tell you how to sign in anymore. It was completely gone.

The learning curve is so flat with Mac's, that you don't really have to "train" yourself to use them. It mostly involves forgetting many of the ill habits formed by using Windows. When you go back to Windows, you get frustrated very quickly at the stupid, work-losing default choices various buttons present.

Given that Gartner has recently declared Windows as "collapsing", my hope is that Apple gets over itself and creates an Apple Enterprise operating company focused on being a real alternative to the Big 3. I'm fairly certain that end-user software is slowly going to become OS independent, in one of a number of ways.

Nevertheless, I'd have been updating this blog more regularly were it not for Google's interference with the blogger.com service. It simply would not let me log in using the credentials I made to create it. After some rapid (and unrepeatable) clicking, I finally found a screen that would let me re-enter the e-mail address. I will endeavor to update the blog with more frequency going forward.

Year in Review

2008-04-16T08:56:00.005-05:00

Since it's been nearly a year between updates here, I should point out what's transpired.

Most significantly, I was promoted to Director of IS&T Infrastructure Services late last year. This essentially means I have full custody of the teams responsible for all desktop, server, and LAN/WAN environments - in addition to our support services. I hope eventually to back-fill my position, but much of that will depend on organizational issues above my pay grade (to borrow a term from some of my former military employees).

We're returning to Dell as a customer, after being so frustrated by the behemoth of IBM that we can simply no longer deal with them. To wit, we're replacing a 3 year old BladeCenter system with three Dell 2950's configured to run VMWare Infrastructure 3. We've also upgraded our Network Appliance FAS-270 to a FAS-3020, including the addition of 7TB of new disk - a process that was a bit more turbulent than we'd have hoped; vet your service providers carefully. That should give us plenty of capacity, and opens up a host of brilliant DR capabilities which we're excited to pursue this year.

We've also decided to put literally everything we do on the table for discussion. Decisions to either change or stay the course will need to be defensible, but everything is fair game. E-mail, file and print, networking services, etc. It's very exciting actually. Exiting this process, we'll have full and complete confidence that we're doing what's best for the business.

A more exciting development is the uncertainty surrounding some of the systems which have been outside my control. I'd have been far happier if we could have made the sale so to speak, and fully leveraged the investment in our ERP solution - the reality is that we didn't, and I think we're starting to face that fact by asking "how else can we tackle the problem"? It's a great opportunity to get much more closely involved with the business we support, and that type of experience is what I'm very much looking forward to in order to further my own professional development.

Finally, it was a great shame to see Martin Buckley leave Novell recently. I certainly do not fault him for doing so, and not just because I've made his acquaintance. Novell has deserved every bit of the intellectual capital loss they've experienced over the past few years. They are an organization which appears devoid of new ideas, leadership, and increasingly, relevance. The few bright spots within Provo are growing dimmer by the day. Plenty of blame to go around, for sure - Novell represents a master class in how not to run a technology company.

Why To Sell NOVL, Part 2 - OES Patching Issues

2007-05-21T08:34:00.000-05:00

In January, I posted an entry out of raw frustration resulting from a series of experiences and announcements with and from Novell. The straw that broke the camel's back was related to their misguided BorderManager / Novell Security Manager statement (So long, linux - hello, NetWare). However, a huge heap of the load was due to the unbelievably poor method Novell chose for applying patches to OES on SLES.

In October of 2006, during an executive briefing I attended, I had raised this issue to a Novell OES product manager. I'm no longer certain what this title entails, since there's an awful lot of product managers at Novell, and they don't seem to talk to one another.

The product manager's expression was one of simple acquiesence - he understood that our request to split patches into several channels (rather than one, as it is today), was one that made sense and would be very simple to implement.

Fast forward 4 months, and we're in January - still no separate "stable" or "critical" OES patch channel...everything's still coming down in one big clump.

Fast forward another 4 months, and we're in May - where we've just completed another conference call with another OES Product Manager who agrees that ZLM is a poor method for applying patches to production servers, and who thinks the concept of splitting OES patches into multiple channels is a valid, actionable idea.

Novell have committed to us that they'd let us know by this week if/when they can make this happen, and if not, why. The alternative is to wait for OES 2, since that's when they intend to make this 'better', but in a way that leaves OES SP2 adopters in the cold.

It seems that there really are very few people who have made the leap from NetWare to OES on SLES as we have. Our move was one of necessity - NetWare wasn't stable enough to run the mix of services we needed on a single platform any longer. In speaking to a Collaboration SE last week, we agreed that Novell could do a better job of reducing barriers to adoption - like putting placeholder scripts on OES systems that mimic the look & feel of the old C-Worthy interfaces we enjoyed (like DSREPAIR, MONITOR, etc). Even if it doesn't look the same, it can at least tell you what options to put on the command line or present a menu of common tasks.

CoolSolutions has such a script for DSREPAIR specifically - originally written for eDirectory on Solaris, by an enthusiastic user. It's a brilliant idea, and eliminates one big reason that people have for not going to OES on SLES.

If you had to get training to learn a new server OS, would you pursue a niche product like OES, or would you just sell out and run Windows like everyone else in the world?

There's lots that Novell still doesn't understand about the market and their customers, unfortunately.

That said, we were treated to an overview of new features in OES 2, and from the sounds of it, we could really make use of those enhancements. Still waiting on more details, but our fingers are crossed.

Everything You Know About Desktop Security is Wrong

2007-05-21T08:26:00.000-05:00

This is what Ivan Kristic told an audience in Australia at their annual AusCERT conference. Kristic should know a thing or two, as he authored ''The Official Ubuntu Book". Here's some of the more interesting things he had to say during his keynote.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9020061&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1

"Everything you know about desktop security is wrong. Desktop security is about the user not protocols and algorithms," he said, adding that 75 percent of machines are infected with malware.

"Today, there are more than 100,000 known viruses, not to mention spam and phishing and that is because we rely on users to make choices about things they don't understand."

To reinforce his point, Krstic showed how a user interprets a pop-up dialogue box that appears on their screen.

"To a user it simply says: "Blah blah, technical terms, I don't understand, blah blah."

"Then it will ask the user to press 'yes,' 'allow,' or 'permit'.

"Of course they will click on 'yes,' 'allow,' or 'permit' because it rewards them by letting them get back to work. We are training users to ignore security and rewarding them for it," Krstic explained.

Kind of makes the Mac ad where PC is constantly interrupted by a security "agent" a lot less humorous, doesn't it? Kristic asked "how did we get here", probably in reference to Linux specifically. The answer would be, "By following Microsoft." Instead of doing the hard work of either writing secure code to begin with, or the somewhat more difficult work of setting default behaviors with security in mind, Microsoft shoves the entire burden of system integrity to end users who barely know how to set headers and footers in Word.

I have no expectations that Microsoft market share will erode significantly this decade, but if past performance is an indicator of future behavior, I think it's safe to say that Microsoft will never get it...leaving itself open to marginalization by whomever gets this stuff right. Easy. Inexpensive. Secure. Feature-rich. Powerful. Fast. It simply has to happen.

Staying Red, Part 2

2007-03-30T14:13:00.000-05:00

Back in May of 2006, I wrote about the fact that Ken Muir had taken over the GroupWise product at Novell and how his presence there alone caused us to place on hold our disdain for their flagship collaboration product.

Today, Ken commented on that post and asked if I'd provide an update on our experience with GroupWise since 7.0 SP1. Despite my other issues with Novell's general direction and execution, as hoped, GroupWise has been polished into a state nearly befitting a crown jewel.

We run GroupWise 7.0 SP1 exclusively on Linux, and since my days here, our GroupWise systems have never been as stable or feature rich. SP1 was a home run for Ken and his team, proving that he's able to lead and deliver excellence in both gilded halls and gloomy basements.

As you've no doubt read, I've converted to a MacBook Pro recently...it's now my sole production computer. I've cleared my desk of the IBM T42p, the docking station, second monitor, external keyboard and mouse, etc., in favor of two cables - the Mag Safe power supply, and my external speakers. Sure, I had to deploy 802.11g access points, but people have been asking for that anyway (grin).

The Mac client for GroupWise isn't bad per se, but it's not on-par with the features in the Windows GW7 client. It's very much like GW 6.5 on Windows, but slower (thanks again, Java). I know Ken intends for GroupWise to be feature-identical on all platforms, and I sincerely hope that happens soon with a native-binary version of GW on OSX. I must however say that a recent e-mail discussion with Novell's John Dragoon was a bit more tepid toward Mac's than Ken and his group. Ken, I sincerely hope the pro-Mac mindset prevails - at least until SLED is a realistic competitor in the non-Windows space.

During the Mac evaluation, I was using their native Mail application (along with Mac's iCal and Address Book) over IMAP. I was frustrated by the way iCal in particular looked for appointments from Mail, and quickly found myself missing features like "Forward as Attachment". What GW lacks in visual appeal, it more than makes up for in functionality.

I wasn't in attendance at BrainShare this year, so I cannot speak to the new release of GroupWise and what it intends to do with regard to Exchange/Outlook feature parity and collaboration in general (much more important than keeping up with the Redmond Joneses to me). Ken provided some links, which I've included below, for those who may find themselves among the masses abandoning the S.S. Microsoft.

GroupWise "Bonsai" Demos - http://www.gwava.com/gwavacast/?p=14

Friday BrainShare 2007 Keynote w/ GW Demo - http://www.novell.com/brainshare/general_sessions07.html (about 1:10 minutes into the stream)

Per Ken, "As always, you and all customers have an open line to me. kmuir@novell.com"

Ken remains excited for Novell's future, and in so far as he's able to rally people elsewhere in the company around his principles and standards, he's probably right to be. There's still a very, very long row to hoe in Utah.

Of Fruits and Vegetables

2007-03-26T12:26:00.000-05:00

For several months, my VP and I have been having somewhat informal, tongue-in-cheek discussions about adoption of Mac systems. We've been so frustrated by Dell (in the past), and now IBM, in addition to being faced with an avalanche named Windows Vista, that we're ready to look at any alternative.

I'd evaluated SLED 10 from Novell late last year, and found it to be somewhat half-baked. I had to re-install GroupWise twice, and rebuild the entire system three times in the span of about a month. Simple stuff like dual-monitor support and switching wireless networks from work to home were exceptionally cumbersome on my IBM T43p eval system. I gave up and went back to Windows XP on my now two-year-old T42p.

So, the frustration had been mounting again, and I offered that I could get a MacBook Pro to evaluate from Apple's refurb store for relatively cheap. My VP wasn't at all hesitant to OK the endeavor. And so now, here I am, updating this Blog on a shiny new-to-me 17" Glossy MacBook Pro. 2GB of RAM, 8x SuperDrive, AirPort Extreme wireless, 160GB HD, 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo processor, etc.

I can sum up my impression of the MacBook I've been using for the past month in one word. Unbelievable. This is EXACTLY how technology is supposed to work. Call Steve Jobs whatever you want, the end result is the most evolved, refined, performant, and impeccably crafted work of functional art ever to communicate on a LAN. EVERYTHING about it is art. EVERYTHING about it's interface and operation is frighteningly simplified. It's as if Apple has been studying human behavior for the past 20 years, and developed an OS interface that plugs directly in to your psyche.

The challenge isn't in learning how to use it, the challenge is in learning how to break it. The shackles we bear from years of Windows use are tough to shed, but the feeling is very rewarding when you eventually do something you'd have thought wasn't possible. This is what drag-and-drop is supposed to be. This is what plug-and-play is supposed to be. This is what a computer is supposed to look and act like. Forget everything else you've been using - I've used them all, too, and I'm here today to tell you this: they're all toys.

Sadly, the vegetables in this story are the vendors in the enterprise management space. I know far too little about how to manage Apple equipment. Perhaps I'm well ahead of the curve for the first time since beta-testing ZEN 1.0...but I don't think I should be. OS X is a mature operating system, not some garage-based skunkworks project. The mystery to me is that vendors like Novell, etc. haven't woken up to the fact that they build the eggs from which these chickens will hatch. Apple won't find mainstream adoption in heterogeneous environments based on the state of our industry today. That can only mean two things...1) a lifetime of a Microsoft-based, super-homogenous, mind-numbing, unrewarding IT as a whipping-post approach to IT, or 2) a lifetime of an Apple-based, equally homogenous, mind-numbing, smash a square peg into a round hole approach to IT. Neither is very attractive.

Here's hoping the fruits can influence some of the vegetables to grow some seeds.

Wasting Energy on Energy Preservation

2007-02-21T09:42:00.000-06:00

The ridiculously myopic Energy Preservation Act of 2005 mandated that Daylight Savings Time - a predictable fixture for longer than I've been alive - would be modified to start sooner and end later.

Hilarity ensues.

Unlike the Y2K issue, EPA2005 approached rather unexpectedly. Much like Y2k, however, it highlights the remarkably poor, closed-minded job software companies do at planning and developing software.

As one might expect, nothing is immune from the DST change. And, as cynics would bet, patches for this issue wouldn't be available until mere months before the change was to take place - spinning IT departments into instant crisis mode. "Yes, we would have fixed this sooner, but *none* of our vendors got it right." Keep in mind that this was the Energy Preservation Act of 2005. It's now firmly 2007, and we're just now in possession of all the patches we require.

So, again, the entire IT industry looks like a bunch of children who couldn't plan their way out of a wet paper bag. This should be a very, very easy problem for IT departments to fix. OS vendors would simply issue patches that contain the new DST start and end dates...we apply them...end of story.

W r o n g .

Turns out that very few applications rely on their host OS to tell them the correct time.

. . .

So, the fun begins. The insidious plague - the scourge of mankind - the boil on the face of IT known as Java - keeps it's own time. Each JRE keeps it's own time. And as you've read here before, seems like Sun has never embraced "backwards compatibility" as it applies to Java. So in short, just about everything we have that runs on Java needs it's own patch. Nice.

It gets worse.

Novell GroupWise needs patches too. Again, it runs on servers whose time MUST be kept in synchronization with one another. I understand that WebAccess might need to know the new parameters....actually, no I don't. I also don't understand why the GroupWise SMTP server, or GWIA, can't just ask the OS "Hey, what time is it?" now and again. I don't understand why the GroupWise CLIENT, which runs on WINDOWS, which KNOWS THE TIME, can't figure out from the OS itself what time it is, let alone the DATE.

It all confuses me. It's all ignorant. It's an embarrassment for anyone other than an OS vendor or hardware platform vendor with a proprietary embedded kernel (like Palm, RIM, etc) to require patches for the changes to DST. If you have custody over an IT shop of any size and haven't figured out NTP, you're a bozo and need to turn in your resignation right now. If you're a software developer and think that YOU know better than anyone else how to track time, you need to smash your computer with a sledge hammer and never ever touch one again. The sooner, the better.

In the mean time, those of us whose laps receive the problems and challenges that nobody else has the guts or brains to tackle - the enterprise IT professionals - will dutifully go about cleaning up someone else's mess....again.

Computerworld's "Vista" About Face

2007-02-05T15:09:00.000-06:00

Interesting how the tone & tenor of Computerworld regarding Windows Vista has changed post-launch.

An article on Vista today begins like this:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9010188&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1

Microsoft is losing consumer operating system market share to Apple for many reasons, but most of those reasons can be oversimplified thus: Mac OS is simple, and Windows is complicated. That's why it may be such a costly error for Microsoft to make the Vista upgrade such a confusing mess.

Until today, even experts couldn't tell you off the top of their heads the differences between each of the many Vista versions -- or even how many versions there are -- or what the basic requirements are for the Upgrade versions. Ordinary consumers are baffled to the point of paralysis.

I have to say that my next PC will probably be an iMac, as my 8-year-old HP Pavilion is showing it's age. The 24" version is particularly stunning. That said, a MacBook Pro isn't out of the picture.

Back to the press...in Big 12 country, the Sooner State is again a bit ahead of the curve...pity for them. Listen to the way Computerworld opens this article:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9010230&source=NLT_PM&nlid=8

Unlike most large organizations, the University of Oklahoma plans to deploy Windows Vista on more than one quarter of its 65,000 PCs by the end of this year.
Because of those early migration plans, Dennis Aebersold, the university's CIO, is already well versed in the new operating system's volume activation features.
But Aebersold was disappointed to find that Microsoft Corp. has yet to release its Volume Activation Management Tool, which the school needs in order to use a proxy server to centrally activate multiple Vista desktops via a single connection to Microsoft's systems.
To meet Microsoft's requirement that Vista be activated and validated on systems within 30 days of installation, the university also plans to use an internally hosted Key Management Service developed by Microsoft to support automatic activations.
But Matt Singleton, the school's director of IT services, voiced concerns about that method of activation as well. He said Microsoft's KMS offers no user-based authentication, so to enable students who aren't connected to the university's network to activate Vista, the IT department will have to customize its firewall rules to allow only authorized users to access the system running the KMS.
"We believe the new volume-activation process can be beneficial for license compliance purposes," Aebersold said. "But the existing tools need more work and should have been released sooner."

Sooner...(chuckle).

Regular readers of this blog (all of whom have too much free time on their hands) will note that I view just about everything from Redmond as suspect...it's the stuff from Speen St. that I usually trust a bit more. In my opinion, Computerworld's coverage of Microsoft as it applies to Vista has been all over the map - especially as it applies to their electronic content - to the point that one could make a good case against them as a reputable, independent journal.

Having corresponded with Don Tenant, I know he'd find this troubling and unacceptable. I hope he has a chance to see how wide an arc his publication has travelled with regard to it's "positions" on Vista.

On SOA and Windows Vista

2007-01-29T09:46:00.000-06:00

There have been a couple of headlines recently in a Computerworld "First Look" e-mail I receive at least once a day during the work week, that I found humorous in a "well duh..." kind of way.

The first (well, pair) indicated that IT Execs weren't sold on Vista, and questioned whether or not Vista presented a realistic ROI case for companies.

I'll save you some reading. IT Execs aren't sold on Vista because it doesn't present a realistic ROI case.

There's absolutely no compelling reason to dive into Vista and the accompanying support & engineering issues it will cause, much less Office 2007 (which completely and arbitrarily changed a very familiar user interface to one that is, well, obfuscatoryd at best), when 95% of corporate users don't use 10% of the product's capabilities. It's no secret that most people need simple formulas, a spell-checker/grammar-checker, maybe mail-merge, and that's about it.

OpenOffice is a technology looking at square miles worth of fertile black soil in which it can grow. Microsoft, just like Novell, have finally leapfrogged their customers by a significant enough distance to give it a real opportunity. Microsoft seem to think that people are so keen on SharePoint that they'll move heaven and earth to get better integration with it. I'm not sure they've seen the numbers contrasting Office seats to SharePoint seats, but I'm pretty sure it's a damned big gap.

Fortunately, Computerworld has finally been changing it's spin on the Vista story to one reflecting the skepticism that exists rather widely within the professional ranks, from one that had praised it (in nothing short of a biased manner) as the second coming of distributed computing. I almost stopped reading these e-mails because they were becoming an incessant Vista lovefest - something I don't think Don Tenant would particularly relish, but something I don't think he oversees directly.

The second article was buried as a "Tech pick", and was titled "What's holding back SOA?".

"Since about 2003, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been touted as
the network-based, next-generation computing environment, replacing the
client/server architecture of the 1990s.
Industry leaders like Bill Gates have made brave predictions about a future in which their applications will live across the Internet, and developers will meet specific needs by combining functions from these networked applications on an almost ad hoc basis.
So what has happened in the past three or four years? On the surface, it might seem
very little. "Looking back, a lot of people were talking about this, and even among the vendors, you hear a variety of interpretations as to what SOA will be and what you will need," says Ettienne Reinecke, group chief technology officer at global IT solutions provider Dimension Data."

Well, duh. SOA represents a remarkably esoteric theory for how you can keep developers from 'reinventing the wheel' - not just theirs, but any wheel. It's not anything you can buy, just a suggestion for stuff you should do if you develop a lot of web software. (Mainstream, eh?)

Ideally, if you're Amazon.com, you wouldn't need to write software that handled credit card transactions for your website - you could use someone elses (a bank, for instance), which they've offered as a "Web Service".

The problem is twofold - first, you have to ensure that just about everything you've ever written can be compartmentalized in such a way that software others in your company write *and* software others in the world write, can use the components of your code that they need without having to rewrite it themselves.

Secondly, you have to figure out how you will determine when someone makes a request of your service, what information you need from them, what you'll send back, how you'll secure the transmission of that information, etc. Of course, the methods you work out here will need to be the same for everyone who may potentially ever use them, and vice-versa.

So the question answers itself. It's not going anywhere because, much like EDI, there are only a fraction of companies and people in the world who can understand all of the details that go into making SOA work, and who can use SOA in such a way that the time invested in using SOA is significantly less than the time it saves future development efforts.

If you only develop software for your own company, why in the world would you care how reusable your components are using Web Services standards or protocols? If you do care, and you have the resources to understand and implement SOA principles (because SOA isn't a product, it's an idea), what are you waiting for?

Tech writers love to latch on to SOA and predict that it'll be "everywhere" and be "revolutionary", much the way Steve Jobs predicted the Segway scooter would change the way cities are built, and very unlike the way Bill Gates thought nobody would ever need more than 640k of RAM in a personal computer.

I guess boring, accurate stories don't sell magazines. Pity, that.

Why to sell NOVL

2007-01-26T08:42:00.001-06:00

The 'break' over the holidays has been very refreshing, at least until this week. A half-dozen small issues & developments served to remind me that some things will never change. I typically speak out against the pessimistic mindset that causes people to stop challenging their environment, limitations, etc. Today, a little part of the optimist in me is dead.

At my own company, we've gone from projections of excellent financial performance across the board to a "batten down the hatches" mantra where any expenditure must be absolutely necessary - somewhat frightening for a company as static, mature, and large as ours.

Worse yet, at Novell, the message regarding the death of Novell Security Manager by Astaro as a product offering was bred with the announcement that the formerly deceased BorderManager on NetWare would be reincarnated. BorderManager is a notoriously bad enterprise firewall product - bad in that it had great potential that was amputated by horrible design decisions (not the least of which was running an IP-based appliance on a kernel to which IP is foreign). So now it's back, and as of 2/1/07, you won't be able to buy a Linux-based firewall product from Novell...the world's leader of Linux solutions. Eventually they'll have a Linux-based product that does some of what BorderManager/NSM does, but that'll be much later. Worse yet, as owners of NSM, you'll have to re-purchase Astaro should you choose to remain on that product.

Bind this with the as yet unresolved problems of OES Linux patches coming down in giant snowballs filled with new issues top-to-bottom (suddenly, things break, and YaST - the big SuSE differentiator - has to be mothballed if you use RUG); GroupWise's continuing decline in market share (now roughly 5%) and growing feature gap relative to the major e-mail systems (SharePoint anyone?); the utter inability for Novell to have capitalized on any of the positive momentum with which they were bestowed in the Linux space...and the piece de resistance - my sweetheart product, the cornerstone of my career as an engineer, is decoupling itself from eDirectory.

That's right - ZENworks will no longer support eDirectory natively.

You'll hear it referred to differently, but they're basically eschewing eDirectory, ConsoleOne, and iManager in favor of their own mini-directory and web-based management interface. It will presumably synchronize in some fashion from eDirectory, but will definitely present brand new challenges from the standpoint of delivering applications for those of us who have "followed the rules" for the past decade.

The culmination of these recent discoveries combined with the wisdom of hindsight have led me to the following conclusion. Novell is a company without leadership capable of governing and channeling their product development efforts. They develop methods and technologies, and run them unbridled to their logical ends at a pace 4-5 times faster than customers can adopt them. Their history is rife with examples (except for GroupWise). Novell Portal Services - dead before it had a chance. DeFrame (the ZEN component that seamlessly integrated delivery of terminal-server based applications) - similarly fated. (Sounds cool, doesn't it? Well, you can't have it anymore). SilverStream / exteNd - not exactly pushing this anymore, are they. Don't worry, you'd never have been able to do the stuff they showed at BrainShare anyway.

If you're still carrying stock, you missed your chance to bail out and take the tax break before 12/31/06. So you have two choices. Bail out now and send a message, or wait until your tax picture for 2007 becomes clearer and bail out then. But whatever you do, DON'T hold NOVL long hoping for a turnaround. It won't happen. Ever. Not Ron Hovsepian, Chris Stone, or Jesus H. Christ himself could change the culture significantly enough in Happy Valley to keep Novell from shooting itself in one foot as it sprints ahead of it's customers with the other.

It's a sad day when someone like myself - a former Novell employee, and long-time champion of their vision & product set - says to his VP (of our Novell products) "If you told me tomorrow to get rid of all this crap, I'd say 'fine'." You fight for the people who fight for you - the people who back you up and make you look good for choosing them. It's just not a fight worth choosing anymore.

Underground

2006-11-17T09:24:00.000-06:00

Wow, it's bright up here on the surface. :-)

We've been underground with projects to replace/upgrade NetWare with OES on SLES, improve our management processes for those new systems, and replace our MCI/Verizon Frame Relay network with a Sprint MPLS network - the latter of course involved us rearchitecting our Cisco VoIP infrastructure. Still to come, migration of our internet from a 6MBps Verizon pipe to a 12MBps Sprint circuit...lots of IP address, firewall, and routing considerations to plan for there.

Despite the busyness (not business), interestingly, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to continue investing myself as fully as I had previously into my work. I really do care quite deeply about the performance and success of my group, but most especially this company. I hate thinking that we pour 100% of ourselves into establishing world-class services on a shoestring budget, and that those efforts aren't appreciated or even leveraged by the businesses we support.

I find myself increasingly looking for ways we can use what we have developed by way of processes and skillsets, and branch out into servicing other customers - ideally, customers who clearly see the need for IT but are incapable of developing an IT competency themselves.

Short of that, it will continue to be very frustrating to have worked so hard at developing capabilities, which management is unable or unwilling to adopt as tools to facilitate positive change.

Moving Up?

2006-08-09T13:19:00.000-05:00

A little anyway...I'm in my first hard-walled office of my career. It trailed my promotion by several years, but it's still welcome. Kind of getting used to the new digs, and that it serves to remove me somewhat more from the organic discussions among my team. I'm getting more exercise now, so that's a plus.

I've been working around vacations (others and my own), so things have been a little out of whack for the past month or two. School is about to start again, and we begin the implementation phase of our Netware-to-Linux server replacement & migration project tomorrow.

We've also been working tirelessly to finalize the deal for our wide area networking and voice services contracts. The kick-off for the three-year project (contract) was two weeks ago, and we're ready to place orders. Our HQ bandwidth will jump from 6Mbps to a full DS-3 (45Mbps), and each of our sites will at least double their current bandwidth as well, as we move to Sprint's MPLS network. Oh, and we save money doing it.

The next couple of months promise to be fairly hectic, but hopefully at the end of it all, we'll see a much more stable, much faster, and hopefully MUCH lower-maintenance environment.

Interesting Perspectives on the Jack Messman Departure

2006-06-23T12:20:00.000-05:00

I read a message this morning from Richard Bliss on a news group to which I subscribe, which cast a unique light on what it was Jack Messman actually did at Novell.

"I've applied the "Wait 24 hours before replying" rule to some of the comments that have been made about Jack's departure. I would like to comment, since I was there when he came on board as CEO and watched the impact his tenure had on Novell.

Before Jack came on board, Novell, NetWare, and GroupWise were heading for a cliff. I joined as the head of marketing for GroupWise in April of 2001. I was told by the current management that GroupWise was dead and that my job was to simply help ease the transition of its death. I was given $50,000 for a GLOBAL marketing budget to market the product. And had to battle Product Management that said GroupWise 6 that had released in March of 2001 was the last release of GroupWise. 75% of the Product Managers and Engineers on the product had just been let go. At the same time NetWare 6 was launching with a multimillion dollar marketing budget. NetWare was king and GroupWise was a little bug in the corner.

Then Jack came in and things began to change, in a hurry. One thing he did was to make some very tough decisions. The company was heading in the wrong direction with a full head of steam. No one wanted to hear that NetWare wasn't the future, no one wanted to believe that Novell shouldn't be taking business away from Channel partners by being in the technical services business. He had to reverse disastrous decisions of his predecessors. One being the consulting business. The administration prior to him coming had decided to jump into the consulting business and completely shut down many revenue opportunities for channel partners, Jack reversed that. Which meant, unfortunately, that good, solid, Novell consultants had to go find new jobs.

He is the one who brought Chris Stone on board and oversaw the adoption of Linux. He had to keep rabid NetWare loyalists at bay at the same time move the entire company to a new direction. And he wasn't getting a lot of help from anyone, since, at the time, everyone thought he was nuts to be doing the things he was doing. He launched a multimillion dollar marketing campaign, one of the first for Novell in a decade and something everyone had been screaming for years to see.

Lots of people were let go, which was a good thing for the company but a personally bad thing for the individuals. But I sat in meetings with him where he held managers at Novell accountable for the first time in years. I saw him defend GroupWise from his own GroupWise management team which wanted to kill it.

I am not one to jump on the band wagon to kick a man on his way out. He was brought in to make some of the toughest decisions Novell has ever had to make in the history of the company. And now, he has helped make the next transition smooth for Ron as he comes in. You don't get to be the CEO of billion dollar organizations by being an idiot. You get there by doing the hard things.

Ron Hosvepian is the ideal person for the next phase of Novell's growth, so it is a great thing for Novell and especially for GroupWise. Ron is a big GroupWise fan. He and I have had several occasions to talk about the product, its impact in the market, and its future with Novell. I have been with the product since 1989, and I will tell you that things have never been so good. That the future of the product is bright with Ron at the helm, and it avoided the rocks of destruction due to deft steering by the outgoing CEO Jack Messman.

Richard Bliss
VP Marketing
GWAVA"

This is certainly unique to most customers. However, most customers were also not Novell Consultants in a prior life...I felt compelled to shed some light from my vantage point as well.

"Richard - thanks for writing this...it's always interesting to see another side of an issue, and this one was not very visible from the perspective of the customer.

What I will say, having been a former Novell consultant, is that I too came to believe that Novell shouldn't be in the professional services business. It wasn't because the people who were put in charge handled it like a cheap prostitute (do what you want, then discard it when you've had your fun), and it wasn't because we were stealing food from channel partner's mouths.

I wanted to see most of Novell's professional services given away. This was because much of the work we were doing was implementations at new customer sites. With respect to the channel, the reason we were doing so much of this work is because channel partners couldn't. The channel as a value added partner is a complete myth in my experience...few if any actually add value beyond moving boxes. Furthermore, those who can actually perform well have nothing to fear from Novell or any other competitor.
Novell purposely priced themselves at nearly double the going hourly rate for channel-level consultants. The emergence of Novell Professional Services wasn't a matter of Novell competing with the channel or stealing business - it was a matter of customers buying complicated procuts, and needing help to get them implemented properly.

To come full circle with that thought, my contention was that Novell should be giving away the services of people like myself in the role of a consultant to new customers with qualifying purchases - the costs should be wrapped into the product. The purpose of that would be to eliminate a significant barrier to adoption for companies who are big enough to need enterprise-grade products, but which may not have the expertise on-staff to implement them.

Our sales leads came from Novell salespeople. The companies worked with Novell to identify a solution, not a partner. Novell doesn't deal directly with as many customers as the channel does. For companies like mine today, we deal directly with Novell because there are no channel partners near us that have any competency in these products. Not suprisingly, there are fewer active Novell channel partners - you can't blame this on Consulting though (perhaps in another thread).

In an interview with ComputerWorld, Hovsepian himself identified the fundamental problem Novell faced (and still faces), but specifically as it applied to consulting.

CW: In hindsight, do you think Novell's acquisition of Cambridge Technology Partners was a mistake?

RH: No. I think the execution could have been done better. We didn't get a timely integration done. We confused our go-to-market model with our business model. What I mean by that is we took the business model of consulting and mixed it with the software business model. We translated that into, "OK, that means we sell consulting now." What it really should have been is using consulting to leverage our software products.

What he's saying is that Novell mistakenly turned the Consulting branch into a group of mercenaries, when they should have been used to talk to customers about their business problems and how Novell could help solve them. Those solutions would end up selling products, rather than simply trying to sell products + the help needed to get them installed. This is another area where Novell had capabilities that the channel simply doesn't, in virtually every case.

I don't blame Jack Messman or the CTP acquisition for the departure of many consultants - I know the names of the people who were responsible for the fatally flawed execution against the consulting model, and so do people like Gregg who were there with me. I also don't believe that Jack was solely responsible for saving GroupWise (pre GW6.5, I was perfectly ready to switch to NetMail and attack collaboration from another angle - I remain in 'wait and see' mode regarding the viability of GW7 as we go forward, but am cautiously optimistic).

I blame Jack for allowing the company and the board to become disengaged from each other, and the customers. That kind of leadership isn't easy either, I'll admit - but it's necessary. Jack probably would have served better as a COO, working with and answering to a 'proper' executive figure. In the end, I think it will become clear that Hovsepian is "the man", and were it not for all the things we've griped about for the past few years, Novell wouldn't have him in this position today."

Loyal readers will hopefully be able to see the truth of these posts, and let this information help them make informed decisions about their interaction with Novell going forward.

Wishes Granted

2006-06-22T08:27:00.000-05:00

As Novell customers are probably finding out, Jack Messman (the walking corpse that had been Novell's CEO) has been kicked out of the airplane where he will pull the ripcord on his golden parachute. Also given the boot was Joseph Tibbetts, Novell's CFO.

The message with this information came from Ron himself, via mass e-mailing. The story will soon appear everywhere, and it will certainly be interesting to see if the market and industry views this to be as positive an event as I personally do.

It's no secret to readers of this blog that I felt Jack should have gone a long time ago. I had joked with co-workers that if we went to BrainShare '07, we'd buy a few hundred T-Shirts that said "SACK JACK" in huge letters, front and back. Looks like our wish was granted earlier than expected, but later than it should have been.

Shoulda bought that NOVL stock when it was below $6.....

Novell Open Audio and Cool Blogs

2006-06-21T11:20:00.000-05:00

The Novell Open Audio team recently hosted an interview between Ted Haeger and Martin Buckley, which was pretty informative (in no small part because one of my questions was addressed therein - I now await the arrival of my "I Ask Tough Questions" T-Shirt).

I encourage any current ZEN customer to take a listen, and pay attention to the Cool Blogs. Good discussions going on there in a pretty open manner - I hope that the input they're receiving is being thoughtfully considered and contributes to meaningful change there. It's a good way for us customers to make sure our voices are heard by people of influence.

The Empire Strikes Out

2006-06-19T10:43:00.000-05:00

If our recent experience is to be a future indicator of IBM/Lenovo's performance, we're in for a very long and painful three years.

The earlier lull in my posting to this blog was due to participation in our tri-annual desktop replacement project. All desktop hardware is kept on three year leases here, and the replacement of that equipment is a pretty intensive effort. (Of course, we use ZEN very successfully to streamline and simplify the deployment. Over 350 PC's in 20+ locations, across 15 business days - not a single end-user file or application missing).

This time around, as you may recall, we switched from Dell to IBM hardware - this was just as IBM had sold off their desktop and laptop business to Lenovo. All of the equipment we're buying still says IBM, but we order through reps who have Lenovo business cards & paychecks.

So, on to the problems.

FAR too frequently, issues with hardware are met with "out-of-stock" stories from IBM/Lenovo, followed by part ETA's ranging from 5-10 days. We have 4 hour support contracts on all of this equipment, which apparently means a tech will be on-site within 4 hours to tell you that it's not getting fixed that day.

I know that Dell has been roundly rogered for it's support of late - certainly it's decline was one of the reasons we pursued an alternate vendor - but their desktop support looks like the 2nd coming of Christ compared to the B.S. we've been fighting with at IBM.

The latest instance of these problems have been embodied by two unrelated system board failures. Fans come on, drives spin up, but the system won't post. Both times, technicians over the phone indicated the problem was the motherboard. Both times, they quoted a parts ETA of over one week. Both of these incidents have occurred in a span of about 3 business days.

I'm turning up the heat rather briskly on our Lenovo reps - next will be IBM Global Finance. Perhaps the thought of reposessing 350 PC's that we are no longer paying for will help to get someone motivated to find a solution.

Training Value

2006-06-16T12:16:00.000-05:00

My team and I are largely people who learn by OJT (On-the-Job Training). We learn about things by running into obstacles that pop up when trying to make them work...once we get around the other side, we have a better understanding of how it's built.

My team is also pretty small; we survive by being able to learn and adapt very quickly. There has yet to be a curriculum offered that is both A) comprehensive, and B) quick-paced...those that come close are usually C) too expensive. We do this for a living though...we can overcome a lack of training with enough 'seat time'.

That said, I acknowledge that there's value to be gained from purposeful, in-person training. The problem is that in-person training largely caters to the lowest common denominator (meaning it's as slow as the slowest student in any given class).

I'm firmly of the opinion that the 'halcyon days' of NAEC's charging $2,000 per student / week for OS and admin training are long, long gone. In Tulsa, for example, there hasn't been a viable training center for at least 4 years. I think it's because the courses are rabidly overpriced.

Even Novell's own ATT courses are priced extravagantly relative to the material being covered. $2,500 to lose an employee for a full week, to get drowned by one product? Is this stuff really that complex?

There has to be some middle ground - cheap, quick-paced "boot camp" training for people who will figure out implementation in their environment if they get a good, thorough overview of the features (capabilities and shortcomings).

I recently talked to BrainStorm about performing end-user training in our environment, for GroupWise 7. Having read their website, it looked like they could perform on-site training for the GW7 client at a very reasonable rate. Apparently, their website was out of date. When I countered the quote I received from their sales group with text from their own site, it was quickly changed to eliminate references to that pricing model. The new pricing model is nearly 5 times as expensive as we were originally led to believe, which completely shatters any value proposition their offering may have had.

The lack of a compelling training story has a domino effect for Novell in particular...if people can't justify the cost of training, it doesn't mean the product doesn't necessitate it. It just means that people can't make the dollars and cents work. Eventually, these people (e.g. Novell Customers) will have to ask themselves if it wouldn't be easier to use Microsoft instead? You may pay more for software, but hardly anyone is willing to hire people that don't at least know Windows and it's associated components.

Lobotomized monkeys can keep most mid-sized Windows / AD systems up and running. College grads with IS majors, however, probably don't even know how to spell Novell.

I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it - neither Novell or the partners who work with them will enjoy a renewal of success until the most significant barriers to adoption are removed. Novell should take some of it's cash stockpile and aggressively incent customers to attend training by paying for it. If necessary, they should kick in short professional services contracts to help new customers adopt new products - roll it into the product pricing somehow if they can. As everyone knows, the longer you've productionalized a system, the harder it is to get off of it.

Training shouldn't be viewed as a 'product' that needs to be 'profitable'...that mindset immediately detaches it from the products around which training is based - and it's the real products that pay the bills. This isn't to say that training should be given away - but it should be run in such a fashion that it's contribution to the bottom-line is negligible. I know this will probably offend 'training centers', but honestly, you add no value by getting some can't-hack-it-for-real drone to read stuff out of a book. If you want to charge a premium for your training, that should be off-set by the experience and quality of instruction. Far too often, my team and I have been participants in or audited classes where we were the smartest, most knowledgeable people in the room. No way...not for $2,000 or more a week.

Novell should know that it's hard enough to get in the door - whatever you do, once you're in, don't give people easy excuses to throw you back out. Those are already in plentiful supply.

Knowledge as a commodity

2006-06-15T11:21:00.000-05:00

If union guys were scared that automation (robotics) would obviate them straight into unemployment, so should Google and the Wikipedia scare knowledge workers.

One of my team members brought me a RAID controller from a failed Dell server (go figure!), and indicated it needed a replacement. This was a sandbox system without warranty, and nobody wanted another PERC.

Not having fiddled with hardware in a while, I went to the Wikipedia to search for "PCI". I looked at PCI, PCIe, and PCI-X articles - all of which had photos. From them, I learned that PCI Express and PCI-X aren't the same thing, and that the card I had in my hands was PCI-X. This allowed me to spot the right replacement part in about 10 minutes, including a call to our preferred vendor.

I know plenty of hardware guys that I could have asked "What's this thing?", but they were busy - and I didn't need them.

Fair warning. If the "value" you're currently providing is largely due to things you know (which others don't), you may want to be ready for a new career or retirement in the next 5 - 10 years. I firmly believe that knowledge has been commoditized - moreso every day. All people will need to know, is how to find it. The value those people will need to add is the ability to take knowledge and do something meaningful with it (e.g. solve problems). That's not knowledge, that's talent - something that can't be commoditized.

At least I don't think so...(grin)

Why the Cold Calls?

2006-06-13T15:27:00.000-05:00

Some days and weeks are worse than others, with some predictability, but being the "decision maker" or "person in charge of IT" for an enterprise (according to the receptionist for the company's main telephone number) will earn you quite a few unsolicited phone calls.

Some are indecipherable. Some are bravado-laden, and some are frought with stammering and uncertainty. Some are from companies I'd heard of, but most are from nobody's. None of them are made with an intelligent human being on the other end.

I've established a heirarchy, detailing the rank of common sub-human life form career paths. It is as follows:

Multi-level Marketing Disciple
New Copier Salesperson
Used Copier Salesperson
Copier technician
New Car Salesperson (domestic models)
Used Car Salesperson
Door-to-door salesperson
Cold-calling technology salesperson / technology recruiter
Telemarketers
Multi-level Marketing Leader (e.g. Amway's DeVoss & Van Andel, Arbonne's M0rck, etc)

In my opinion, this group sits just above convicted felons, and just below the guys who mop up the floors of adult theaters in New York City. As you can see, cold-calling telemarketers are nearly at the bottom of the list.

No offense.

Anyway, one of my great weaknesses is assuming that people are not in fact that ignorant. If I could get over this fundamental belief, I'm certain I could become a multi-billionaire. After all, it's the perception of customer ignorance that convinces vendors that calling people out of the blue and taking up their time to talk about stupid crap that they had better already have in hand on the off chance that they are in the market and would like to talk to you is actually a sound business development strategy.

The day I have to cold-call 'prospects' is the day you find me hanging by my tie from a water pipe above the drop ceiling.

Savvy Investing

2006-05-25T16:03:00.000-05:00

Just over five years ago, Novell acquired Cambridge Technology Partners for around $266 million.

Yesterday, they sold the renamed consulting branch - Celerant - for about $77 million.

Now, call me silly, but I thought the idea was to buy low and sell high.

Looks like Novell basically paid close to $40 million a year just to get rid of Eric Schmidt, and replace him with an even more misguided and incapable buffoon (aka Jack Messman). Good work if you can get it.

I've said it a million times - Novell has an absolutely wretched history of execution against a strategy...I continue to believe more and more firmly that this is due to Novell's complete misunderstanding of the corporate landscape. If you've no clue what the problems are and where the markets are, you're going to have a hard time developing a meaningful strategy.

Never one to complain without providing suggestions, here then are mine for Novell.

1) Sack Jack Messman.
2) Remind all of the new CxO's that there's NOTHING about which they can be complacent.
3) Start giving away professional services to get your products in the door, or reimburse the channel to do it for you.
4) Stop with the idiotic advertisements. Nobody understands what you're talking about. Don't print this garbage just for the sake of shutting people up who complain that you don't advertise.

What the hell does "Software for the Open Enterprise" mean??? Why would an executive at any firm want his 'enterprise' to be "open"? Does anyone have a significant problem with their enterprise being "closed", or do they have problems improving efficiencies and delivering value? Messages that are this muddy are a complete and total waste of time and money. Take a cue from IBM or Apple for the love of God, I'm sure they'll share their marketing people.

Here's the text, verbatim, of Novell's ad in Computerworld from 5/22/06:

"DEFINE YOUR OPEN ENTERPRISE

In my Open Enterprise, I can add applications, platforms and users without adding costs, problems and barriers.

Multiple operating systems. Distributed servers. Proprietary hardware. Without a data center solution capable of integrating and managing them all, you're losing time, money and productivity. Data Center solutions from Novell cost-effectively consolidate, manage and support all of your disparate systems on the most mature, scalable and secure Linux OS available. So you can centralize system management. Run leading business applications with the power of LInux and open standards. Lower costs. Improve service levels. And turn your data center into a profit center.

Data Center solutions from Novell.
This is the way to build your Open Enterprise."

I'm a Novell customer with just about every product under license, and I have no idea what this ad is selling. Worst of all, above the vacant gaze of some stuffed shirt, is a brain map with more meaningless jargon like "open", "build", "speed", "high performance", "immediate", "leverage legacy systems", "blatant". Who in the #^&*@ approved this idiocy???? It's sickening. Stop it.

Those are my suggestions. Print them out and use them to start your next fire if you will. I for one hope SOMEBODY in Utah starts to get it.

Staying Red

2006-05-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

As you may know, I have bled "Novell Red" for quite some time. However, experience upon experience has caused not only me, but other deeply rooted Novell bigots to question the intelligence of remaining a Novell customer.

GroupWise in particular has been a very frustrating product to own and operate, especially over the past two years. We've had serious discussions internally about migrating away from it in favor of, well, anything else that will work.

Enter Ken Muir, the former ZENworks golden child who decided he wanted a new challenge and left that product for the GroupWise arena. Recently, I was fortunate enough to have a brief but in-depth conversation with him (via e-mail appropriately enough) about the fundamental issues I see throughout Novell from the perspective of a customer.

While I cannot share the details of our conversation, suffice it to say that I for one am willing to give Novell the chance to demonstrate they 'get it' again. This chance will be manifested in the form of GroupWise 7 SP1, which is expected to release sometime in the next month or two. When it ships, we will implement it in production - on Linux - and use it as the starting point for server hardware replacements that we must conduct nationally.

We continue to have successes and issues with OES SP2 on SLES, but every day provides another opportunity to learn. My hope is that the issues we encounter continue to be resolved by education, rather than becoming bug-finding expeditions (as we have been doing presently with other Novell products).

It's a difficult, difficult time to stay loyal to Novell. I keep asking myself, "If we were all Microsoft, how much time could we devote to other initiatives?" My experience tells me that we'd be swapping one set of problems for another. Microsoft OS'es aren't nearly as high-maintenance as the press would have you believe, but they do have maintenance requirements. They also have numerous feature deficiencies which we somewhat take for granted - this is what I fear the most. The decision to use Novell vs. Microsoft for your core infrastructure is never apples-to-apples. There are tons of considerations, intangibles, and dependencies, and these differ wildly in every organization.

For now, at least, we will remain Red.

Vista Delayed - Where's the Outrage?

2006-05-04T20:50:00.000-05:00

Recently, there was reportedly a statement released by Gartner indicating Microsoft would again delay release of it's Vista product. I didn't dig deep enough to figure out why, because it doesn't matter.

It used to be a big deal for me, as a Novell die-hard, when Microsoft effectively announced to the world that "this whole big OS development thingie is, well, darned tough to figure out, and, well, sometimes it kicks our little wet Seattle butts."

This was glaringly evident when you could set your calendars by Novell product releases. Every three months, roughly, you could count on a pretty significant product release.

Something interesting happened to all of us as we've matured in our profesisons. Quality started to matter - a lot - especially when we found ourselves without it.

Novell's insane rush to meet these ridiculous, blue-sky deadlines for product releases didn't result in better products. Quite the opposite - the quality of Novell products across the board has declined rapidly. All too often, product groups re-prioritize based on objectives that don't think nearly far enough ahead, and wind up releasing software that is a complete mess. NetWare. GroupWise. ZEN for Servers. BorderManager. Novell Portal Services. All of these products used to be great. Or at least full of promise. Now, some of them are either garbage, or soon to be deceased.

Only GroupWise is too stubborn to realize it's a dinosaur and needs to reinvent itself to remain relevant, but e-mail as a platform is one of the hardest for companies to replace. By rights, on it's merits, it should be a relic of a past long and thankfully forgotten. Sadly, it's not.

I'm surprised most of all by my own indifference to any announcement that the ship date for Vista will slip. I think to myself "Let it slip, if that means it'll be right when you finally ship it." This is a lesson Microsoft seemed to have learned over the past 10 years, and I'm glad they have. It's a lesson I wish very much that Novell would get through it's thick, old, dinosaur skull.

Vinyl vs. CD - A Digital Advocate's View

2006-01-30T13:24:00.000-06:00

This is really, really off topic.

But it's cool.

I bought my wife a good, German made turntable for Christmas. She has old LP's from her childhood that have sentimental value, and I have 78 laquer records my grandfather listened to in the 30's and 40's through the 70's of greats like Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington.

Much of what we have is old, and sounds typically record-like. Hissing...pops...distorted high-end, etc. My wife did have a couple of LP's that were 'modern' and stood a chance of sounding good, though. Billy Joel's "The Nylon Curtain", for example. It was a little dusty, but sounded unlike any CD I'd listened to.

Keep in mind that I'm a child of the 70's - I never had a turntable that wasn't in a tiny blue box with a huge white tonearm. Now, I have a really good home theater / sound system - if LP stands a chance of sounding good, it'll be on my rig.

We found a small shop that sells used LP's, and they had a fair selection. Three or four Billy Joel albums, a lot of Beatles in great shape, Doobie Brothers, Chicago 17, Police (The Singles), Smithereens 11, and a Billie Holiday album that was really good.

The Smithereens album was basically unplayed - it looked immaculate, as did several of them. We happen to own the same album on CD as well. I've listened to both - the LP on my new turntable, the CD in my Pioneer DVD player (using S/PDIF optical connection). The CD has more SPL, and I suppose you can say it has better dynamic range (bigger difference between quiet passages and loud ones). I can blast the CD until glass rattles, it sounds clear as day.

However...

The LP sounds like I'm listening to the band perform. It sounds live...like I'm there. It's most noticable with strings ("Blue Period" on Smithereens 11 opens with a cello or something - it sounds 100000x better on LP than CD), and on the low end. CD's sound muddy by comparison. On LP, I can make out each note the bassist is playing, and the kick drum punches you in the chest at far lower SPL's than CD.

In my mind's eye, I know why this is true. It's the same reason that TV and movies don't look as 'real' as life. It's not about resolution or anything like that...it's about reassembly. In life, music and motion come to us instantaneously via our senses - you cannot measure the gap between one 'frame' and another, because there aren't any...it's one continuous feed, called reality. If you stop a movie on one frame (especially a moving frame), you see blurs. Or, you see that an object has moved from one spot to another between frames - even if barely, it's there. No matter how fast you capture the pictures, movies are basically high-speed still frames. Each still frame misses something - the difference is what we call reality.

The same is true with music. CD's bombard your ears with "still frames" of audio, at a rate of roughly 44,000 pictures per second. You're hearing what the sound measured on a microphone at 1 fraction of a second, played back very very frequently. What you get is a pretty good picture of what was being recorded. Unlike video however, it's possible to record audio in such a way that there is no loss....hence, analog LP recordings.

I always blew off LP bigots as unnecessarily esoteric. The convenience, longevity, durability, and quality of CD's are unmatched. I'm a music lover, and I love CD audio. But I love LP audio more. It takes more care & caution, and you appreciate it more when you hear it. All the garbage you hear from CD bigots about LP's being scratchy and filled with static-pops are made by people who've either never heard LP's, or never heard them played on good equipment. This argument & information is lost on them. If however you're an open minded lover of audio & music, I hope you too find the chance to splurge on a high quality turntable & sound system, and invest in some well preserved vinyl. You won't be disappointed...how often can you say that?

A Knock Against IBM

2006-01-04T15:30:00.000-06:00

We've deployed a number of IBM eServer x206 systems throughout our company, as well as about 4 x306's. To date, we've only had three issues with them in the 6-9 months they've been in place. Unfortunately, each one has found IBM tripping over their own shoelaces trying to meet our 4 hour response SLA.

Part shortages, staff retirements, etc. have all contributed to a far-below-satisfactory experience with the x-Series support model. Our servers have been in the midwest, southwest, even in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Repairs that should take a few hours, end up stretching into days.

Given the number of server systems we have to replace in the coming months, this had better be a series of unfortunate events - not a preview of woes to come.

Dell is out...if IBM fails, I guess it leaves HP/Compaq and Gateway (ugh).

How does this OES thing work?

2005-12-13T08:46:00.000-06:00

We're trying to figure this question out. Again, simple lab install of a product using the newest available media...problem after undocumented problem have cropped up, and nobody within our reach seems to have any concrete answers (or blame to lay).

We're on the cusp of a pretty big project, and the timeline is severely compressed. We don't feel confident enough in NetWare to support the project long-term...so, unfortunately, for the first time ever, we have to decide between OES (about which we know nothing yet), or Windows Server.

Novell have been sent a series of flares and distress signals (and we are a 'reference' / success-story account)...unfortunately, we've been let down by the sales organization as a whole in bringing focus to our plight.

Good thing my rolodex is filled with the names & numbers of old friends who still roam the Provo halls. With a little luck, we'll get the help we need to translate our significant NetWare expertise to the OES/SLES platform combination.

ComputerWorld IT Management Study Released

2005-11-10T09:13:00.000-06:00

I recently participated in a study conducted by ComputerWorld, asking questions about IT management and strategic vendors, etc. The results were forwarded to me today, and I found them to be pretty interesting.

Of particular interest was the fact that Dell and CDW - two vendors that are well known in the market, but with whom we've not had great experiences - appear to be less important to companies the larger they get. Companies below 1,000 employees find Dell and CDW to both be very strategic, but beyond that, neither has made enough headway to be frequently considered a "top" vendor.

IBM on the other hand, is virtually off the radar until your company reaches 1,000 employees in size. If that's you, there's a 50% chance you would name IBM as your "top" vendor.

I once developed a PowerPoint deck entitled "Why Dell Doesn't Get It - A Summary View from a Customer at a Crossroads", and dropped the bomb on our Dell account team when they showed up for a visit one day. It outlined the atrocities they had committed toward us in the form of product design and support of our strategic OS platform, and in overall product quality.

From that day forward, our rep never showed up without first confirming a projector wasn't awaiting him in the conference room. That PowerPoint deck made it to a bunch of people at Dell, and we continued to give them opportunities to do the right things for us (fix problems they caused us). In the end, Dell took the position that an expenditure on their behalf to help correct a significant set of Dell-admitted issues with their RAID controllers was greater than our value to them as a customer.

We're no longer Dell customers.

Concerns about Novell - Layoffs, etc.

2005-11-09T11:43:00.000-06:00

I've had the opportunity of late to provide commentary - directly and indirectly - to Novell regarding their long-term viability. This topic comes up as a result of their recent layoffs, which as I had stated earlier, do not surprise or concern me greatly.

Here's some excerpts of what I've said on the topic of Novell and 'execution':

"Nobody will tell you that Novell's problems are technology related. Unfortunately, marketing alone isn't going to fix the most significant problem facing our Provo friends. There are a lot of sacred cows at Novell, and very few people there are brave enough and/or sufficiently empowered or incented to slaughter them in pursuit of the greater good.

If Novell suddenly happened upon the ultimate advertising campaign, all of the underlying issues within the organization - the self defeating corporate architecture that has been built there over years and years, the lack of communication, direction, and ability to execute - would come sharply into focus.

...

I've no doubt that Novell is committed to keeping GroupWise around for a long time, because tens of millions of seats renewing each year pay a lot of bills. I'm also excited to hear that consultants are replacing Exchange with GroupWise. My fear is that without a significant series of changes at Novell, none of that will matter.

Novell's problem is that they are no good at engaging medium-to-large companies as strategic partners. As others have noted, Novell is great at developing products that allow IT groups to spend less time on tactical activities - once these solutions are in place, there's very little on-going sales opportunities. To be a strategic partner, you need to be able to provide simple, effective, solutions that add value, not just help to avoid costs. ZENworks is primarily a cost avoidance investment -
it doesn't make duties disappear, it just makes them vastly simpler and less
expensive to perform. To a large extent NetWare was kind of in this boat -
you could perform the same duties for a larger number of users, with fewer IT
staff (or in less time). Cost avoidance.

GroupWise could be a strategic platform for companies, but neither Novell or any other third party have been effective at developing applications that meet the "strategic" test. The fault for this situation can be widely dispersed, but Novell doesn't make money by finding fault or assigning blame. GroupWise could and should be the foundation for document management, workflow, intranet publishing, knowledgebases, customer self-service, etc. All of these things add value, because they make non-IT employees (e.g. the business) more efficient. They are all, therefore, strategic. And yes, I know that GroupWise has a DMS capability. However, if it's something that two former consultants, a CNI, and a CNE can't get working reliably, it's too damned hard to use.

In all my years dealing with Novell, I've never seen or heard of anyone presenting GroupWise as the foundation for a BPM/re-engineering/intranet/document management strategy. I have sat through hour long demonstrations of nifty client features, while nary a word is spoken about back-end management. I've also sat through demos where every feature was positioned against Outlook.

For a person in my position (Manager of IT for a $1.5 Billion company), this kind of thing is maddening. "Better than Outlook / Exchange" is not the same as "great" or "exceptional". I don't use Outlook or Exchange. I don't care how great the client is. What can I do with this tool to provide a strategic benefit to my company? I will immediately take issue to anyone who argues that this is forefront in Novell's marketing strategy, because we have challenged Novell's sales and SE teams for years to differentiate themselves - they have failed at every opportunity.

For Novell to be relevant, they need to be able to sell themselves as strategic partners to VP's, SVP's, and CxO's. Nobody in the boardroom cares how nifty the client is, how many seats you've sold, or the cool indexing features in the DMS system. Companies don't have document indexing problems, they have business
problems. When Novell figures this out, discussions like this will be a
thing of the past."

I followed that commentary with the one below several days later, aimed at a Novell employee who still thought the onus for finding additional value with GroupWise in particular, lay outside Provo:

"As I've stated before, if Novell wants to become/remain relevant to larger enterprise organizations, they should be developing presentation decks right now titled "Improving Business Processes with GroupWise", or "Enterprise Strategies for GroupWise Document Management".
Novell has continually barraged customers with product features, leaving it to them to figure out how best to implement them. All around you, competitors sell lesser products as point solutions, with the added benefit of re-use for other purposes. If you're relying on the channel to be the "value add" part of the equation to large enterprises, you're kidding yourself. My company, like many others, doesn't deal with the channel because they rarely ever truly add value. Looking at revenues, etc., I think the question "How's that working for you?" is valid here.
One of the most significant sacred cows in Provo wears a nametag called "Channel Partners". Slaughter it, butcher it, and serve a big steak lunch in the quad behind Building H. When everyone's done eating, go back and figure out how to sell your products as value adds / strategic assets to companies yourselves."

In response to this, I was told by that Novell employee that the "channel program" probably isn't going away, because Novell has too many smaller customers to sell to directly. It will however be changed significantly. I was told, however, that the team responsible for marketing GroupWise is definitely focused on selling it in the form of point solutions.

My reply:

"...please know that I wasn't advocating Novell sell directly to every customer, but that you not rely on the channel to make your value propositions to large enterprise customers (as has been done for some time). As a former employee, the argument I heard against this wasn't the size of sales force required, but that acting in this way would alienate channel partners. I found this to be alarmist and
unfounded - companies like mine have always dealt with Novell sales directly.

We've not seen GroupWise effectively positioned as much more than a mail product. It's issues like this I'm interested in seeing fixed - not only for myself, but for the health of Novell as a company."

It's amazing to me how much Novell professes to care about and invest in GroupWise, given how little they do to reduce adoption barriers in large enterprises. This problem isn't GroupWise product-specific though - it's pervasive throughout the company. I certainly hope that changes...soon.

The axe falls in Provo

2005-10-31T10:30:00.000-06:00

As I indicated in a reply to a comment earlier this month, rumors regarding Novell layoffs are rarely false. Sometimes the figures are wrong, and the timelines aren't well known, but both are easily guessed.

Thursday, Information Week reported that the big red "N" will in fact be eliminating around 1,000 jobs. The good news to me, is that many of the jobs on the block are in the Consulting branch. The acquisition of Cambridge Consulting was done more for Jack Messman than for their bench of consultants - these people had very few practical implementation skills that could translate to Novell products, and the reputation & quality of Novell Consulting in America suffered as a result. Making matters worse, much of the Consulting group's management were replaced with Cambridge staff - these people had very different, borderline incompatible views of Consulting's role within Novell and to their customers. Their departure is long overdue.

I'm not certain what the signifigance of firings in the SuSE group in Germany may be, but I expect these are redundancies which have developed post-acquisition and are to be expected.

What does concern me is that Novell is losing market share, losing customers, not servicing existing customers well, experiencing flat stock price trends for years on end, and yet is still accumulating cash reserves. In fact, the reported $1.6 billion of cash-on-hand is nearly double what it was two or three years ago.

One of the principles of personal finances is that you don't save aggressively when you're paying off debt - you eliminate the debt first. Novell is being fiscally prudent, but is being irresponsible with its handling of debt in the areas of market share and PR.

I hope that some of the 1,000+ job cuts also spell the death of some sacred cows which have been roaming the halls of Provo for far too long.

And on another front...

2005-10-27T10:13:00.000-05:00

Our kind & friendly IBM account rep stopped by yesterday to see how things were going. We have a couple of pain points with our newly purchased TSM solution, which have two separate month-old "Crit Sit" incidents open...but as we continued to talk to him, it became evident that there were deficiencies at virtually every turn that needed to be addressed. New PC imaging process issues, pSeries performance issues, tape library/FC issues, etc. To talk about it out loud made it sound worse than we perceived it ourselves, which is counter to the normal scenario for us.

Vendors must hate dealing with us. The reps are usually nice enough, but if there's a crack anywhere in the foundation behind them, we're going to find it and challenge them to fix it.

Red-headed step-child syndrome

2005-10-24T11:57:00.000-05:00

Not too long ago, I was Red. I used to wear red underwear. Bled red. For a while, I even ate, drank, and slept red. I wasn't alone, either. I used to know dozens of customers - hundreds of people, who were every bit as Red as I was.

Most of our vendors even fancied red, although you always got the feeling they were kind of cheating on their main squeeze when they were with Red.

I'm not talking about being a communist. I'm talking about being something much, much more heinous - a Novell customer.

Now it seems, Red is somewhat out of fashion. Faded. Unkempt. Losing teeth, or something. And I'm not so certain I want to be Red anymore.

Novell is one of the most confounding organizations I've ever come across. I've been their customer. I've been their employee. I've been their partner. And it never ceases to amaze me how good they are at defeating themselves.

I've told people privately, and am willing to tell the world, that Novell will never become the company it can and should become until it learns there's no such thing as a useful sacred cow. It's likely that Novell will never learn that lesson while headquarted in and recruiting from Provo, Utah. I'm sorry, it's a very nice place to visit and live, but the gene pool is only deep at one end in Utah - technology.

As anyone can attest, Novell's problem isn't - and has never been - technology. Novell's problem is the systematic construction of self-defeating business models and practices.

In one half of the house, you have people churning out the most amazingly insightful and useful technologies the IT industry has ever seen. In the other, you have people so hell bent on maintaining product release schedules and developing innovative sales incentive programs that they become a black-hole for great ideas.

I have proof. You may have forgotten their names, but I haven't. Remember Novell Portal Services? NetMail? DeFrame? Those are a few of my favorite casualties.

Were the technologies bad? No. Did something better come along? No, but sometimes something different came along.

So where did they go? Great question. The answer is simple - Novell couldn't figure out how to sell this stuff, or indeed what to do with it at all. Some products stepped on the toes of other products...in which case, no matter how good one was, the bigger one prevailed. Pretty smart.

It gets worse. Novell's strategy and direction - when somewhat more tangible than a box of mud, changes pretty frequently. This is confusing to partners, who need to follow if they are to provide support and feed off the customer base.

When the vendor is confused, the partners become confused. When those partners are confused, they do what any smart entity does. Evaluate risk and reward. Without enough customers crying for Novell support to outweigh that vendor's cost of continuing to provide it, vendors will drop it like a hot rock.

And drop it they have.

Try to find a single backup solution that supports NAS, SAN/FC, Near-line storage pools & tape libraries, AIX, Solaris, Windows, Linux, and NetWare 6.5 Clusters. Bakbone? SyncSort? Tivoli? Veritas? Try them - I dare you. TSM's documentation for NetWare 6.5 Clustering support was copied & pasted from the Microsoft documentation. SyncSort is in the backup software business exclusively, and they couldn't figure out how to get their stuff to work reliably in a lab!

But don't stop there. Try to find an enterprise monitoring & management console that runs on or integrates with NetWare, and will scale to monitor & alert on more than 55 devices. Try to find more than one vendor who provides IP telephony integration with GroupWise.

Try to find enterprise grade contact databases, CRM solutions, call center solutions, networkable-MFC machines, printer drivers, even business-card scanners that know about or directly support NetWare, eDirectory, or GroupWise.

Try to find a single web-based or Win32-based console to administer all the parts of your Novell infrastructure!

Novell doesn't even use it's own products in-house. NetWare/OES runs a scant portion of their enterprise. GroupWise is on the way out. ZFS hasn't been part of their monitoring solution for years - the IS&T NOC uses mostly home-grown or third-party software.

Got eDirectory, GroupWise, Oracle, Active Directory, Cisco IP Telephony with Unified Messaging, and want the Novell "Zero Day Start" solution? Get ready to hire a consultant to do some breadboard patchwork driver development...at least two of those components are totally foreign to Novell's IDM solution despite their significant market penetration.

Some of Novell's own products are incompatible or losely integrated with one another. How is that possible? Everything Microsoft writes is compatible with every other thing it writes! What gives? From my view, the problem is that Novell doesn't understand the most significant law of Human Nature (I think I wrote on this earlier). "People do what they are incented to do." And in Provo, people are not incented to help out their friends in other product groups.

To the contrary, they play their cards best when they avoid contact with other product groups alltogether. Financially and intellectually, they're in a battle against their fellow employees. They are fully incented to deliver the best individual product they can - even at the expense of their peers. To hell with integration or compatibility, to hell with ease of use, to hell with whomever is already working on a similar solution.

Instead of competing against a standard of greatness, they're competing against each other. The problem is, nobody is winning.

I once e-mailed Chris Stone, asking him to please read Good to Great. He replied, indicating that he had, and agreed with many of the ideas therein. I almost bought stock in Novell that day. I was convinced that Chris Stone could knock skulls in Provo, and get rid of the idiots who keep running great technologies and ideas into the ground because they don't know how to make money from them. Apparently, I was wrong about Chris (or I was right, and he just got tired of fighting).

So to top off the facts that their products don't often work well (or live well) with each other, and that vendors are running away from them faster than Edwin Moses, with the fact that their support model is based on information that can't be less than 15 years old. Product support and upgrade protection are sold separately, and in very finite quantities - the only self-proclaimed "enterprise software vendor" to have such an arrangement in my experience.

The short of it is that you - as a Novell customer in good standing - may have a significant problem with a Novell product and not be able to get support for it from a Novell technician. A pretty significant barrier to adoption if you're considering becoming a Novell customer, or considering renewing as such.

Now mix in a myopic sales & marketing organization who can't make any of this stuff relevant to anyone but a deeply technical IT Manager or group of Engineers, and you have a recipe for long-term atrophy & disaster.

Message to Novell - I don't care about your new patch utility, I have ZEN. You want to add value? Tell me about building an intranet with simple content management facilities, that fully integrates all the Novell products I've purchased, using a point-and-click GUI and requires no code (and if you mention exteNd I'm going to tear your arm off and beat you with it).

As easy as it would be to lose faith and jump ship, I won't. There's hope on the horizon. New blood being infused into the company is sick and tired of the stupidity, and they aren't going to take it anymore. NetWare is recognized as the abominable lopsided wheel it has become, and all eyes are on Linux to carry the torch. I'm willing to stick it out and see if life is better as a Linux shop than a NetWare shop. I don't imagine how it can be any worse, but I'm obviously not good at predicting the episodes in which Novell shoots itself in varying parts of the body.

I can say that it's remarkable how good or bad a company appears to the customer, based solely on the quality of the account executive. Fortunately, we seem to have been placed into the hands of a pretty good one recently. I hope for Novell's sake that ours is the first of a growing breed.

I need a drink. Wonder if I can get a vendor to buy me a Guiness...

Oktoberfest in Tulsa

2005-10-23T09:59:00.000-05:00

This certainly has nothing to do with IT Management, but it does deal with the other half of your waking life that needs attention.

The Tulsa Oktoberfest celebration is one of the top 10 in the country according to USA Today. That distinction is rightly earned. It's cheap to get in, it's huge, authentic yet diverse, and even with a 7-year-old in tow, it's quite a lot of fun.

If you find yourself with the hankering to drink great German beer (Spaten lager is quite good), eat sausages and gigantic desserts, and do the chicken dance every 10 minutes, you'll find a few thousand other like-minded individuals on top of the picnic tables under the big tent in Tulsa each year around this time. It's over far too quickly.

Oh well, back to the grindstone.

The Great Java Lie

2005-10-12T12:37:00.000-05:00

I'm certainly not the first person who has said that promise of Java in the enterprise was more of a dream than reality.

The oft-touted Sun cliche' "Write once, run anywhere" should be followed by an asterisk.

*Depending on the version of JVM on your customer's PC.

I'm not quite certain if the blame can be placed solely on one entity, but in my mind, most of the blame falls on Sun Microsystems - Scott McNealy and Eric Schmidt, specifically - for being either very dishonest or very inept.

What we in the enterprise are seeing is an increasing number of vendor websites that carry with them exacting requirements for the JVM they expect to be installed on local PC's. As it happens, most of the requirements are for fairly old versions of the JVM. In other instances, vendors require versions of Microsoft's JVM - not Sun's, even though Sun wrote the damn thing to begin with.

Want proof? FedEx's website will not print to a locally attached label printer without JVM v1.3.x. Two other insurance websites require varying versions of 1.3.x - not the same as FedEx, mind you - in order to process employee benefit claims. McGraw-Hill requires Microsoft JVM version 3805 to be installed on your Windows 2000 SP4 PC if you wish to access their Construction Dataline service.

These companies are unabashed in dictating technology requirements to me, their customer. They "wrote once"...So if you want to "run it anywhere", you're damn well going to use the JVM around which their code was written.

Somehow it's my fault - the customer - that my company uses more than one vendor for unrelated services, and that they can't figure out how to architect a website with simple old HTML and server-side code.

They were told to use Java - they were sold a lie, and they bought it whole hog. They were told, "People can use your web services at home, at work, on their phone, on their refrigerator, their TV, everywhere!" While that may not be false, it's certainly not completely true.

Let's face facts.

95% or more of all internet traffic originates from or is destined for a PC. Not a toaster. Not a phone. Not an E15000.

Just a simple, standard, utterly ubiquitous Personal Computer.

So the problem is, I can't manage more than one version of JVM on a PC to be used by the browser - any browser. Nor should I have to.

The reason this problem exists, in my opinion, is because Sun has been utterly incompetent. With regard to managing features and functionality as they expand and refine Java, backwards compatibility is a phrase they've never heard.

Vendors specify a version of client-side Java software to access their website, not because they like it more, but because it's the only one that works. Sun hung these companies out to dry, by making significant-enough alterations to the JVM that a developer's code no longer works.

Who is to blame? Tough to say. The code can't be that bad, it works with a certain JVM right? If it doesn't work with a later version, how is it the developer's fault? Even so, who am I (a single customer) to tell them get their act together? It's easier for me to install a different JVM than it is for them to completely rewrite their website.

I admit that I've considered the problem to be our fault...maybe the issue is a combination of factors under my control - Windows 2000 SP4 and a million patches, Internet Explorer 6 and all it's patches, Windows entropy, etc. Maybe we won't have this issue on our new Windows XP machines (although I have no idea why not - the vendors are specific in telling us what JVM we need).

I just know that I should be able to download the latest JVM, install it on my new PC's using a standard image, and anything developed in Java up to that point in time should work.

It doesn't though. And when it doesn't, it's not my fault...just my problem.

I really and truly feel sorry for Google. Eric Schmidt has a history of turning everything he touches into finely polished, almost gilded, pieces of crap.

Take Novell for instance.

Schmidt made Novell relevant again by making TCP/IP a native protocol in NetWare. Then, in one fell swoop, he set it marching off the cliff by forcing Novell's internal developers to use Java for new products. The result? Servers that crash more than ever. Separate pools of memory for Java that are nearly impossible to manage. Products that can't co-reside with one another on the flagship NetWare platform. Customers who have cried for and lacked a unified administration console for upwards of 7 years. The list goes on and on.

The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, and the tree from which he fell and has lived his life is one that's hell-bent on ruining Microsoft. He's not interested in making things great, he's interested in being better than Microsoft (which, incidentally, any great organization could do handily).

That said, I'm smart enough to see Java for what it means - and I'm not a developer. Java applications need to relegated to the intranet. Keep it out of the DMZ. Keep it off my PC's. Let me decide when my company needs an application built on Java - not the other way around.

Do you hear me FedEx????

Centralized Shared File Access

2005-10-07T13:02:00.000-05:00

One of the nagging requests we've received of late is from a certain group of users we have around the country. There are pockets of these users that use a vertical application, and since there's no database server, the files they work with are very large. Worse yet, the values in each file are derived from a central "knowledgebase" or "standard" - altering the standard affects the values in each file on which they're based.

This group has requested that we develop a centralized location for this standard, and further allow them to centrally share these files. Given their size, and the fractional-T1 frame relay links we have connecting locations, the request has not been feasible.

However, I've recently read of a technology that may have some applicability here. We use NetWare and Nterprise Branch Office, which does provide sync capabilities via RSYNC. RSYNC doesn't provide for an elegant solution, nor one that is capable of resolving write collisions. Furthermore, the 'solution' should be transparent to our end-user community - a consistent standard we set for ourselves when improving on or replacing technologies.

The iServer solution from Tacit Networks however, appears that it may largely solve the problem for us. It lacks eDirectory integration, but it very intelligently handles file synchronization and caching over WANs in an appliance footprint. It's caching and sync engines are very intelligently designed, and they advertise functionality & performance that are LAN-like over WAN links. This will be a product I continue to investigate and watch.

If it weren't for ComputerWorld, I might not know this company existed. If you can only subscribe to and read one industry publication on IT, ComputerWorld should probably be it.

Sweating the small stuff

2005-10-05T13:29:00.000-05:00

Sometimes it's the tiny little things that keep big plans from becoming a reality.

We're trying to simplify and consolidate our eDirectory tree, and make our remote sites easier to manage. The product we've been piloting is Novell's Nterprise Branch Office (NBO or BOMA if you will) v2.0. It has so much potential, yet it falls short in small areas that are important - and would be easy for Novell to fix.

One issue we have, is that it's very difficult to manage PC's and application distribution at sites running NBO. This is because, despite the marketing hype, NBO doesn't actually "cache the corporate tree's eDirectory". It maintains it's own separate tree, and populates it with user and group information from the corporate eDirectory tree - nothing more.

What's worse, if you use PC's with the Novell client at NBO sites, it's even harder to get that PC connected to your corporate tree via ZENworks. (We eventually found an undocumented, unsupported method for doing this, and are testing it now).

The other big problem is that NBO doesn't handle password changes or password policices in the corporate tree very well at all. We should be able to change a password in the main eDirectory tree, and that change should be immediately recognized by NBO - that's not the way it happens. If someone changes it at the far site via NBO's "Virtual Office" portal, that change should make its way to eDirectory.

The reality is that not many users actually use password self service tools proactively- certainly not in our environment, or many that I've seen as a consultant. This means the HelpDesk does a lot of password resets reactively. They can either do this from their admin console, or by opening up a web session to each server where the problem may occur (sounds like the bindery in NetWare 3.x, doesn't it?).

eDirectory and NetWare 4.x were supposed to save us from this mess. You log into the network, not the server. It was a tough concept to grasp at first, but it makes a lot of sense. NBO breaks all of that, sending us back in time some 15 years.

So much for technology making our lives easier...

Follow-up - Certifiable

2005-10-02T17:31:00.000-05:00

In the September 26th Computerworld magazine, Virginia Robbins wrote an article that essentially mirrors my position on employers who require certifications or degrees before they'll consider someone for employment.

In her article, she says:

"I have found not only that a computer science degree is optional, but also
that many successful technologists don't have any degree at all. I've had great
employees who never finished college, and I've had wonderful employees who have multiple master's degrees."

The point, as she succinctly puts it - "I've found no correlation between degree and competency" - is that the pieces of paper by themselves aren't important.

In fact, by themselves, they're not even relevant.

I'm fairly confident she believes as I do, that attitude and aptitude are the most meaningful factors in evaluating candidates. This is encouraging, because she's the CIO and Managing Director at Chela Education Financing in San Francisco, and we share an important belief for managers & executives who endeavor to build great organizations.

Certainly its easier for hiring managers to look for nice certifications, and nobody gets fired for hiring MBA's or MCSE's, but how often does taking the easy road lead to the best possible outcome?

Personally, I view companies that require degrees or certifications of their employees as types of bigots. They're effectively pre-judging candidates before they've met them, based on superficial and demonstrably irrelevant standards. (Ever met a "paper-CNE" or "paper-MCSE"? I have.)

I don't think they need to be tried in a court of law, but I do think they need to be called to the mat for this practice - publicly - and that self-respecting technology professionals should avoid them like the plague.

If you're on the wrong side of this fence (be honest with yourself) - keep in mind that people like me could work wonders for your company; and we won't come near you until you wake up and realize that talented people don't come with easy to read labels...You actually have to talk to us.

The news of late / on race & entitlement

2005-09-30T10:38:00.000-05:00

You'll recall in a previous post that I expected the investigation of New Orleans' city officials to find nothing good.

"I think it may be fair at this point to say that the governments of New
Orleans and Louisiana will be found utterly incompetent at best, and
irreversibly corrupt at worst."

With the recent resignation of the New Orleans Chief of Police and a probe into allegations of looting by NOPD officers, I think it's now fair to say that he doesn't want to stick around to be drilled by the press about his department's handling of post-hurricane security. The reality may be worse. If they suspect more severe - even criminal - repercussions as a result of their negligence, it's likely that more of those in positions of responsibility may take a similar exit.

On another note, I'm sometimes forced to watch "Dr. Phil" in the mornings on videotape - my wife owns the remote before work, and she catches up on a few shows each A.M. I at least appreciate that he finds very tactful ways to give very confused people a reality check, and am comforted that his views and advice are consistent with (or better than) my own opinions on a given subject.

The last show of which I saw a part, was on the topic of race. One of his guests was a black man that was perceived by his black friends as "too white". There were some humorous bits of video to establish both sides of the argument, but the thing that stood out was the guest's comments on Affirmative Action. I don't have the exact the exact quote, but he was very much opposed to the premise on which Affirmative Action is based. He said (paraphrasing) "I want to be advanced based on my merits."

I had written - and Blogger.com had lost - a very eloquent dissertation entitled "Mourning the Death of the American Meritocracy". It was inspired by weeks of headscratching and frustration with the overall lack of accountability and presence of an entitlement mindset in America.

In the wake of that exercise, this man's words struck a chord of hope with me - that despite his friend's allegation that you become a democrat based on the color of your skin, there are people of all backgrounds who still believe that the entitlement society is an inherently evil thing.

I no more believe that the crime and drug problem in this country is linked to race than I believe one's ability to succeed is based on it. There are statistics galore that paint the American drug problem as a predominantly caucasian issue (for instance, 80% or more of users aren't black).

However, if your only news sources are broadcast television and the local paper, it's easy to believe that black people are the main problem with crime & drugs, and that white people control the world.

This type of journalism is certainly sensational, but it does a terrible disservice to the American citizenry. It's not complete. It's often unfair. It seems to always favor the angle over the truth, because it's more interesting that way (pay attention to the Tom DeLay developments and see if you feel the same).

On the whole, American journalists hold themselves to standards for entertainment value instead of standards for integrity (legitimacy, accuracy, and fairness). I, for one, think it should be the other way around.

...then Microsoft gets it all wrong

2005-09-29T11:02:00.000-05:00

I'm really agitated that I can't post here more often than I do...but I try to ensure that when I do post, the info is meaningful.

While I earlier commended Microsoft - specifically, the Office product team - for getting it right, the remainder of Microsoft is still getting it all wrong.

A couple of months ago, we signed up for a new Microsoft licensing agreement covering our Office products. We opted for Software Assurance - which means whenever Office revs again, we'll get it for free. But Software Assurance also provides some very enticing benefits. In particular, the TechNet Concierge Chat was of interest to me. I would love for my HelpDesk to get an MS rep on-line when troubleshooting an Office issue for a customer.

I looked into getting us registered & signed up, and this is when the allegations against & stereotypes of Microsoft's security ineptitude took on a very real, very accurate palor.

I learned that this benefit had in fact already been activated for us. Furthermore, an e-mail was sent to me with instructions on using it - an e-mail I never received, because it was sent from Microsoft's mail servers using my boss' e-mail address. That's right. The process Microsoft uses to notify customers of benefit activation involves purposefully sending masqueraded e-mail messages using its customers' own addresses - instead of a Microsoft-owned address.

Any e-mail admin worth their salt won't allow someone to spoof their domain name for incoming messages. We use Postini (you should too), which blocks incoming mail sent from one of our domain names if it doesn't originate from a trusted IP address - Microsoft is not among our trusted addresses, for very obvious reasons.

Microsoft's licensing customer service reps know of this practice, but are powerless to do anything about it. What they will do, however, is verbally give you those credentials if they can speak to the person they believe is the benefit administrator. Very secure indeed.

It gets better.

Assuming you have your login information, you need to use the oft maligned Passport login service to access your benefits. Again, from a security standpoint, there are significant issues here.

First of all, I'm not Ma or Pa Kettle trying to get to my Hotmail account, or the 'Zone to play some stupid version of solitaire or gems or whatever. I'm a paying business customer. If my credentials are compromised, the attacker gets access to some better-than-average stuff.

Second of all, it's not as hard as one believes for your Passport credentials to be obtained maliciously. This is because Microsoft trusts Windows and Internet Explorer cookies to remember your password, etc. more than it trusts you to manage it. Interestingly, last I checked, there weren't any security patches released for my brain to keep me from blurting out my passwords if someone talked to me long enough.

Lastly, around two years ago, an Indian hacker proved he was smarter than the Redmond developers who wrote Passport. To prove it, he compromised literally the entire Passport database in Microsoft's data center.

The original damage estimates were hyperbolic, but it further proved that Microsoft is not very good at security architecture. Even Windows Server 2003, which was redesigned with a strict security focus, is prone to attacks that affect OS versions back to NT4. So much for the story of it having been 'completely re-written'.

Every other enterprise vendor's support and entitlement website requires simple user ID and password authentication. It's a model that is familiar to everyone. For some reason, Microsoft decided to overcomplicate it for the only customers that matter - the ones that pay for services.

To their credit, the people I've spoken to in my account team have taken my concerns very seriously, and are championing my cause within Microsoft in an effort to provide me some form of satisfactory resolution. I'll be sure to publicly commend them for anything they achieve in this regard.

In the mean time, I will remain ever skeptical of Microsoft's claims to be security-minded. The conservative IT manager will be well advised to do the same.

Health Kick

2005-09-15T16:45:00.000-05:00

In the interests of better health, I've decided lately to cut back on intake and increase the amount of physical activity I do. Simple formula, well proven, etc. I don't drink or smoke, I just eat more than I expend in exercise. Carlos Mencia referred to this matter of mathematics recently, using a pretty funny metaphor. He illustrated that one's "numerator" (mouth) is larger than their "denominator" (gestures toward butt as if to imply pooping), and results in a "remainder" (fat belly). I can relate to that.

So, I've eaten smarter over the past three weeks. Less intake. No soda or sweet drinks, just water & tea. I'm down 15 pounds, and can actually begin to see it. I'll start exercising now that I have my first ever piece of home gym equipment, and hope for the best.

What's killing me is the almost constant feeling of hunger - no matter how much water I take in. One of my employees used to run long-distance in college at OSU. He said my body knows it's losing weight (which is healthy but not normal), and is trying to provoke me into filling the furnace. Resisting it takes discipline, or chewing on straws - whichever works.

I still have an urge to snack, however, and now that I'm paying attention to Nutrition Labels, what I've found is very interesting. 3 "Snyders of Hanover" pretzels (in a bag) is roughly equivalent to 1/4 cup of peanut M&M's, which is roughly equivalent to 12 Lay's "Stax" potato 'crisps', which is roughly equivalent to a single Hostess cinnamon streussel cake...all of which have more calories (and less substance) than a good ol' pint of Guinness Draght.

Good thing I like Guinness. Anything that's been around for over 230 years has got to be good, right? Don't believe me? If you're one of those people who enjoys using statistics to justify an otherwise indefensible position, you'll appreciate the benefit Arjen's Beer Page offers up.

Beer me!

Holistic Meltdown

2005-09-13T12:59:00.000-05:00

That's the term I use to describe the farce that has become disaster relief in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Holistic Meltdown.

I think it may be fair at this point to say that the governments of New Orleans and Louisiana will be found utterly incompetent at best, and irreversibly corrupt at worst. There is simply no way you can justify the complete lack of cohesion and response in New Orleans. Mississippi and Alabama - while spared perhaps the worst - have no such similar issues. No, it's New Orleans that has shamefully - singularly - failed to take care of its residents following a natural disaster that could have - should have - been expected to have happened during any Autumn in the past 40 years.

To make matters even worse, amidst all of the ridiculous allegations that race (rather than incompetence) were behind the abysmal treatment New Orleans' residents received at the hands of the motley crew of first responders, here now stands FEMA pouring salt into the wounds of the survivors.

You'd think something as important as disaster aid, which is only really useful to people who have been in a disaster, should be as easy to register for as possible.

However, if you visit http://disasteraid.fema.gov with anything other than Internet Explorer 6 w/ JavaScript enabled, you're not going to have much luck applying for relief funds appropriated by your federal government. Somehow, your browser version is important in applying for relief. I'm not sure why your browser version matters to FEMA. In reality, it probably wasn't an intentional act. Maybe it's because the government has bought licenses for a bajillion copies of Windows XP w/ IE6, so they figure everyone has it. Unlike AOL, it doesn't come in boxes of cereal. Libraries, etc. with internet-connected computers may not actually have IE6.

It's almost comical in a Douglas Adams kind of way. Bumbling bureaucrats who have nothing left but policies & processes. A careless decision by disinterested employees of a mega-establishment, blissfully unaware of the consequences of their actions. It's almost surreal.

This however is the least of the survivor's problems. There are too many people who could really use clean clothes, a good meal, and a bottle of water that don't give a damn about a FEMA website.

Perhaps the most disturbing stories are those recounted by people very close to those providing relief. A co-worker's brother is a Pastor in the Dallas area, and helped to establish a facility where survivors could stay, be clothed and fed, etc. People have driven from thousands of miles to offer assistance to families there. One after the other, they offer housing and personal aid to as many people or families as they can.

Here's what's disturbing. One gentleman came from Mississippi, offering to take up to 15 families back with him. He would house them, feed them, help them re-establish their wardrobes & dignity, and pay $200 per day (equivalent of $50,000 / year) to the able bodied for assistance in cleaning up his home town.

Nobody came forth.

The offer was repeated over the PA system that so many before him had used.

Again, no-one came forth.

If there was ever a question that the entitlement mentality engulfing this nation's poor - fueled by the misguided, affluent liberal contingency - is a downward spiral, this situation should put it to rest for good. These people would rather live in squalor than go to work for $50k per year. LOTS of them. Even those with nothing left to lose would rather beg than earn.

Can someone from the left please read The Dream and the Nightmare with an open mind, and re-evaluate the real consequences of bleeding heart liberalism?

Being Certifiable

2005-09-08T16:04:00.000-05:00

An interesting article in the Management section of 9/5's ComputerWorld hits on a topic that has been home to a pet theory of mine for a long time.

I've not had to adjust the theory much over the 15 years I've been doing this. The theory goes as follows:

In technology, education does not equal employability.

This is a "pet" theory, because it's one that I live and prove every day. I am not proud that I dropped out of high-school at 16, but it's the truth. I got my GED, at my then girlfriend & now wife's insistence, at about 20 years old - shortly before my first step off the "IT Worker" platform and onto the "IT career" train. I've never been to college except to see people or watch events.

An employer did send me to training, and I did begin passing some certification exams. Then I failed one, despite knowing my stuff inside and out. It was the stuff nobody used anymore that I wasn't familiar with, and didn't care to spend time learning, that caused me to fail the last exam I ever took.

And that's where the theory was born. I didn't know enough about obscure networking hardware to pass a test, but I did know enough to get hired, promoted, and sent to training by a Fortune 50 company. That being the case, what is the value of a certification?

I still find it to be a fair question, and a difficult one for anyone to answer convincingly.

I went on to enjoy some good success - both at that company, and others - despite my lack of certifications. In fact, Novell hired me to be a field Consultant without being a CNE. They didn't value certifications either - not even their own.

What I have found is that companies - good ones anyway - value people in any discipline that exhibit two primary traits. Attitude, and aptitude.

Degrees and certifications aren't relevant by themselves. Companies or managers that require them before they'll interview someone are nearsighted - period. If you find a candidate who passes the sniff tests - appears apt, is personable, speaks to things such as organization & work ethic, etc., the degrees & certifications they carry should serve to set them above the rest of the crowd. They help to fill in the details of a candidate's overall picture - not draw the entire thing by themselves.

I wouldn't want to work somewhere that pre-determined the benefit a prospective employee might contribute based on degrees or certifications. When I look for jobs and see postings that require Bachelor's degrees, I kind of chuckle to myself. What the hell good is a Bachelor of Arts degree if you want to be a technologist? What if they studied Marine Biology? How can that be relevant?

I've worked beside people with enough certifications after their name to require a 10" long business card - and I didn't trust them to be behind a keyboard. I'll employ someone with boatloads of the right attitude and raw aptitude right this minute, regardless of how much experience they have or certifications they carry in tow.

Microsoft got something right

2005-08-31T15:53:00.000-05:00

I rarely, if ever, will say something like this. Microsoft got something right.

It took a while to put it together, because of other things we've been pursuing, but an innocent question today set me on a search that resulted in a remarkable discovery.

"Do we have any training material for Office?"

Well, no, we didn't. The closest we had was a CD Microsoft sent for Office 2003 named "Microsoft Office System Tips & Tricks". Good info - fast paced, and definitely a deep dive. We needed to finesse the videos to cut out products we didn't use, and chop them into product-specific components. Never got around to posting them, etc.

I looked around for that CD again, and eventually found it buried beneath some papers. Inside the mailer was a URL - http://office.microsoft.com/training/. Out of curiosity, I went there. Lo and behlod, this site has an unbelievable collection of docs, articles, and CBT material related to the Office suite.

If you've never been, you should visit. Anyone who uses Office or supports those who do should make use of this site. Better to teach people how to fish, than to catch the fish for them.

This is impressive because it's free, and it's good - two things not commonly associated with Microsoft products. At times like this it's obvious where the divisions are between product groups (there's no equivalent site for the Windows OS unless you're an IT professional looking to buy training materials). The folks at Office got it right, and should be commended. Even if it would put the Video Professor out of business...at least they're not making money off of it.

Zotob Worm

2005-08-18T12:17:00.000-05:00

Microsoft paid us a visit yesterday, under the guise of a sales call, to ask questions and make statements that generally implied that they'd pay to have partners prop up MS software that competes with our current stacks to we could evaluate the two side-by-side.

After making several casts into our pool with no bites, they asked "What keeps you up at night?" My boss answered without being specific, that nothing related to technology keeps him awake - it's all about process, culture, and politics.

My answer was different. I said "I was sleeping pretty well until Monday."

"What happened Monday?", the salesperson asked.

"Zotob."

We're not affected, mainly because of strict firewall policies and limited exposure to travelling systems. But we sure didn't have much time to react to the August 9th advisory.

Despite every Microsoft assurance since 2001 or 2002 that every line of code in Windows is reviewed, etc., the Plug and Play vulnerability in MS05-039 is present and patchable in every version of Windows from 2000 to XP and Server 2003. Zotob also proves that you don't have a 30-day grace period from the announcement of a Windows vulnerability to the presence of an exploit attack. There were less than 6 days between the release of the patch by Microsoft, and the very public effect it had on news outlet websites. In Norman, Oklahoma, the York Air Conditioning plant reportedly sent 650 employees home after Zotob pounded their facility.

When is the next Microsoft Windows OS release due? 2007.

I say again. 2007.

Despite all that, our management systems work very well. We're fully patched at this hour - something I was able to accomplish by myself with little effort. In fact, if someone called now and said there's a new critical patch, I could download it, distribute it to my 30+ field servers (one per location), and deploy it to all of my nearly 500 users, in under an hour. No lie. I'd be happy to show anyone how. Do that with SMS. Or with PatchLink. We've tried, and we're not bad at what we do. There remains nothing better than a properly architected ZENworks solution for centrally managing remote PC's in a large enterprise.

Growing Pains

2005-08-15T13:49:00.000-05:00

I find myself asking a lot of inward-directed questions lately, about complacency and challenges and career fulfillment. There's a difference between being "challenged", and being overworked.

If you think you're overworked, you probably are, and despite what others may think, this statement is fundamentally true. Being overworked is, as much as anything, a state of mind. If you really, really enjoy what you're doing, you're ecstatic that you actually get paid for it too. Spending 80 hours doing something you love is nothing...by most standards, people working 80 hours a week would be 'overworked'.

By contrast, if you have to spend even 41 hours a week doing something that is grueling, and don't see any relief or reward in sight, you're going to start feeling overworked. You're going to develop a sense of resentment toward your situation, your employer, your boss, your co-workers who don't carry the same weight you do, etc.

Vacations only serve to postpone & temporarily numb these sensations. They don't go away until something changes for the better. Either the light at the end of the tunnel gets brighter, the incentive to continue drudging on changes or improves, the duties or workload is altered to present new challenges, or you jump ship alltogether in search of something new.

The question remains, if you go through all of that and are still miserable, is the grass really greener anywhere else? The only consistent factor in one's misery - in this situation - is usually themselves. It is this place that I desperately hope I am not.

The sad thing is that, especially with talented people, companies that cannot keep them consistently challenged are not getting the return on investment that they could. When talented people get bored, you can argue that it's the fault of management that they aren't sufficiently stimulated. You can also argue that the individual's attitude and understanding of corporate life should allow them to absorb temporary (even year-long) lulls in exciting work. In fairness, reality is somewhere in between. But you can only keep a dog on the porch for so long...even good dogs.

Peter Jennings ABC Special

2005-08-11T08:11:00.000-05:00

Watched a good hour of the special that ABC ran on Peter Jennings last night. I typically do not watch broadcast network news, because of people like Dan Rather and the goofs who have trodden through NBC. I never really gave ABC a shot, because Peter Jennings was so wholely unremarkable at first glance. We didn't watch ABC much either, for whatever reason, so I never knew about many of the "Peter Jennings Reporting" shows.

I'm kind of mad, in retrospect, that I was so jaded against the ability of network news anchors to be impartial and interesting as to have dismissed Peter Jennings' work completely.

I do however have a copy of the book he co-wrote, "In Search of America", which given what I now know about his outright love for my country, I will finish reading with great interest.

Peter's life is a testament to the greatness inherent in our country, and that meritocracies work. Much of his success it seems was not due to him being exceptionally smart or talented. In fact, he did not even graduate High School. It wasn't handed to him by someone else. He didn't fall into it.

His success was attributable to qualities that each and every human being conciously decides whether or not they want to exhibit. He completely defied the "Peter Principle". Peter was motivated, principled, fair, hard-working, and was unwilling to settle for mediocrity. He did not assume that he was above anyone, and didn't assume that his audience wouldn't understand complex stories. In short, he was humble. This is probably why he was basically a well kept secret, despite the millions of people who watched his broadcasts. He was simultaneously utterly remarkable, and utterly unremarkable.

I hardly knew him, but he certainly will be missed.

ZEN and the art of Terminal Server Farm architecture

2005-08-10T13:02:00.000-05:00

We're doing some pretty damned cool stuff with Win2K Terminal Services lately. When it's all said and done, we'll have basically Citrix-equivalent load balancing and application "publishing" capabilities, at a fraction of the cost. ZENworks really does make this powerfully simple - if you know what you're doing.

Imagine logging into an RDP session, and seeing only a Novell Application Launcher window with all of your apps. Internet explorer is there, but you can't browse to or run anything but a legitimate internet URL. Same with Windows explorer. You can add your own network printers to your session, but the printers at your location automatically appear each time you log in. If you need to use an application that hasn't been installed, it automatically installs and configures itself for you.

Behind the scenes, there are no roaming profiles. No group policies governing behavior or lock-down. No published applications. No Novell Client. There's not even eDirectory - that's been installed into a separate tree, being accessed by the ZDM middle-tier service. No local administrator requirement for application installs. One password to remember, thanks to DirXML. No Citrix. No hardware load balancers. Just one system acting as a load balancer/proxy for RDP, and five AD member-servers running Terminal Services. In fact, I can scale this architecture as fast as I can image new IBM BladeCenter HS20 systems, until the proxy system breaks. I put that point at over 1,000 users, which we won't get near for quite some time. At our expected load of 400 - 500, we should be flush.

For us, it will save $100k the first year, and $25k each following year for Citrix licensing. This doesn't include sunk costs in existing Citrix licenses, which we don't have enough of to facilitate short-term growth. We replace those costs with about $40k of new ZDM licensing, and roughly $8k / year in maintenance. Anymore, Citrix's only true value-add is robust load balancing in large farms, and seamless application windows. Certainly not enough to justify their exorbitant licensing costs. I know they cram a lot of products into the bundle, but I bet if they sold those features a la carte, many of their more experienced customers would reconsider what they've been buying.

Sadly, Novell Support told us that basically it couldn't be done. Shows what we know.

"Cooling" noncertified skills

2005-08-09T12:54:00.000-05:00

ComputerWorld's August 8th edition (Career Watch, page 44) listed five skills that, from a salary standpoint, have lost the most value during the past twelve months. It reads frighteningly like Novell's strategic technologies checklist:

XML
Java
Linux
and of course, "Novell" itself.

The fifth item mentioned - ActiveX - is confusing, but what do I know.

In case you're interested, the hottest noncertified skills (25% or more growth in skills pay premiums over the past 12 months) were:

SQL Server
WebSphere
Active Server Pages
Microsoft .Net

Yikes.

Case In Point

2005-08-07T21:32:00.000-05:00

At least it's not just us.

A recent article by Dave Kearns accurately, succinctly, painted a picture of what happens when a company with good technology and poor marketing & direction forces its customers to evaluate it's direction.

Coventry University just went through this exercise. Someone - probably at Microsoft's bequest - started asking "What does all of this Novell stuff really buy us?" Nobody had a good answer, so out with the Red "N", and in with the Evil Empire.

The formula for fixing this is very easy. Nothing groundbreaking here, the model exists in plenty of places. Cisco and Microsoft have proven unequivocally that style over substance works. Neither have the best technologies, but both do the best job of selling it. Do they win every deal? Probably not. But once someone calls Cisco or Microsoft, the deal is probably already theirs to lose.

Novell's sales process - pre, and post - is more often than not, abysmially amateur. They don't know how to sell into organizations at the right levels. They can't put together an effective message to CxO level executives. Making matters worse, Novell is now incenting (pressuring) their sales force to meet their sales targets with more than 66% new business.

There are bigger problems. They can't even get people working on the same campus to talk to each other enough to agree on management interfaces, password management, OS Service Pack levels, or Java Virtual Machine version requirements (don't get me started on Java). This certainly makes it harder for sales people and SE's to make a compelling argument with new or existing customers.

Perhaps the biggest problem Novell faces is the nearly insurmountable obstacles it continually throws in front of IT professionals that need to develop skills with their products. You can go virtually anywhere and find MCSE's, CCNA's, CCNE's, etc. to administer and manage Microsoft and Cisco networks. Last week, I created a two-disk mirror by adding hot-swap drives to a running Win2K server that was low on space. I'd never done it before in my life. I understood the basic concepts of initializing disks, creating a logical volume, assigning drive letters, etc. The GUI's in Win2K made it so mind-numbingly easy that anyone who couldn't do it should never be allowed in a server room.

Conversely, try to find a CNE in a market like Tulsa. See how many people know Nterprise Branch Office or NetWare Clustering. Even in markets like Dallas and Houston, there is not a very deep talent pool. Novell training classes are very, very expensive. $2,500 a week is a lot of money for a company to invest in what currently amounts to a niche skill set. It's hard enough for companies to short themselves an engineer for a week on purpose. Put that price tag on it, and multiply it by more than one technician who would need training, and the TCO figures that Novell always touts dwindle quickly.

I want so very badly for Novell to become the company that it can and should be. It has so much to learn, and so far to go.

Where did time go?

2005-08-01T22:05:00.000-05:00

Talk about busy! Didn't even realize how long it had been since my last post.

We provided a summary of our upcoming projects to our Novell sales team, who indicated they'd be eager to brief us on their current technologies and ways they could help. We're doing some pretty exciting things with technologies from Novell, Microsoft, IBM, Network Appliance, and Cisco. Further bolsters our claim that if it works for us, it will work anywhere for anyone.

If we're successful, we will have upgraded equipment and services for all of our core offerings, and simultaneously saved the company $500k - $1 MM in one-time and recurring costs.

Maintaining productive relationships with vendors is much easier when you have executives with detailed understandings of technologies, and a team of people who closely and intimately understand those vendors' inner workings. We're spoiled. I bet there are very few customers as well connected as we are, and these are the customers that probably flock to Microsoft in droves.

Crisis mode

2005-07-11T16:13:00.000-05:00

An entire week just flew by, holy cow.

Seems like everything is a crisis, and they are, but why we have so many at once is certainly puzzling. So much for strategic planning.

Today was interesting - the brilliant folks at Novell support essentially told us that something we've been doing for going on 5 years without a hitch, should never have worked and isn't supported. What the heck could this be? I'll tell you. Using NAL to distribute - not launch - applications, to a Win2K server running Terminal Services.

...

There was an entire dot-com business based upon this functionality. I was there. But apparently, it never happened and I wasn't actually involved with it after all. So sayeth support.

This will be fun...

Great Holiday

2005-07-05T16:05:00.000-05:00

Had a phenomenal holiday. Watched some great auto races. Blew stuff up. Made noise with my nitro powered R/C monster truck, to which we strapped a faux JATO pack and watched it scream down the street shooting flames and sparks behind it. Barbequeued ribs all day, which turned out exceptionally well. Watched fireworks with friends. It's good to be an American.

If you enjoy grilling and don't want to have a different type of grill for smoking, baking, searing, etc., have a Hasty Bake Legacy shipped to you. You can't argue with results, and these things will last forever.

It's not just me - most software really does stink!

2005-07-02T15:27:00.000-05:00

An article on the cover of the June 20th ComputerWorld begins as follows:

"Badly designed software is costing businesses millions of dollars annually because it's difficult to use, requires extensive training and support, and is so frustrating that many end users underutilize applications..."

This was attributed to IT officials at Boeing and Fidelity. I second the motion. What's the answer?

Aside from maybe TESTING AND USING YOUR OWN PRODUCT, a group of (presumably equally frustrated) people came up with something called the "Common Industry Format for Usability Test Reports", or CIF. Recently, the International Standards Organization (ISO) voted to accept CIF. Vendors who comply with the standard should be able to provide this report to customers on demand. Better yet, if they write worth a damn, they should prominently tout & display these reports as proof that they know what they're doing.

Calling Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, IBM, and Veritas...start writing.

Doing the right thing

2005-06-29T11:08:00.000-05:00

Turns out that Michelin, despite screwing the pooch at the USGP, eventually was compelled to do the right thing by refunding ticket prices paid by attendees. In addition, they agreed to purchase 20,000 tickets for fans to next year's USGP (if in fact there is one).

Many good and juicy soap-operaesque links at the Planet-F1 site for those who may be interested in a motorsport that doesn't involve amateurs and hillbillies fighting amongst one another.

Having paid to attend a USGP, and hearing that attendance was roughly 140,000 people, I derived that Michelin just wrote a $20 million check. That is impressive. To put this in perspective, that's basically the entire budget for a competitive two-car team for one year in the NASCAR Nextel Cup series. Ouch.

I formally recant my desire for everyone to boycott Michelin tires. Whether or not you patronize Michelin based on their complete and total failure to prepare for a single turn on a 100 year old racing circuit is still your decision. I still won't.

Lots of companies (and people) are provided opportunities to shine, and fail to make the most of them. It's a shame that when someone or some organization does what it should, by rights, that it is 'remarkable' at all. America's expectations of companies, ourselves, and each other have often times become so low, it's outright insulting at best and racist/prejudiced at worst.

Maybe this is why it seems hard for my wife and I to find life-long friends. Our expectations of others are usually no less than those we hold of ourselves. This isn't out of arrogance, it's out of respect. I would not dare assume that anyone else in my neighborhood is any less capable of living their lives to a high standard than are we. Yet time and time again, we are disappointed - by parents who allow children to behave violently and disrespectfully toward others. By adults who have no concern or respect for anyone but themselves. By people who do not consider the consequences of their actions. By people who only half-heartedly believe in personal accountability. By entrepreneurs who openly struggle to manage their businesses, ask for help, then do whatever they damn well please anyway. By people who take friendships for granted, and who assume that friendship implies complete acceptance of their lifestyle choices.

Makes it really hard sometimes...

Work in progress

2005-06-27T14:39:00.000-05:00

Found that there is some sparse work in progress by some of those on the ZEN team on the book targeted for IT management regarding use of their product to streamline processes and develop efficiencies.

I think I know how they feel - there's a book that should be written, and they know what should be in it. Find the time to organize it and make it coherent...right. I posted a comment on their blog indicating I'd be very happy to assist if possible. It's been a couple of weeks since they posted on that blog, so who knows how much traction it will get.

For not going out of my way to watch women's sports, I'm seeing a whole lot of them. The Women's US Open was pretty compelling stuff until Sunday, and even then, still fun to watch. I'm also seeing more and more female racing drivers. How cool! Sure seems like half of the female tennis players at Wimbledon have names ending in "kova", but some of them can flat hit the ball. There's some good stories there - especially in racing. I hope they can get some more visibility.

Some days...

2005-06-24T15:42:00.000-05:00

Had to let a fairly new HelpDesk technician go today, amid numerous accounts of smarmy, arrogant comments and attitudes, breach of procedure, unprofessionalism, and a cloud of doubt surrounding some missing equipment.

He interviewed very well, seemed more than capable of handling the pressure and demands of the position...pretty sad stuff.

Each failure provides a lesson to be learned. I guess this is why most companies aren't interested in bringing in outside individuals for management positions until they've become "seasoned". Each time we have to cycle someone through our HelpDesk, we're able to learn which traits perceivable in an interview are good, and which ones are not. He had us all fooled though, which makes me at least feel a bit better.

Now we get to see whether or not IBM's anti-theft mechanisms really work. This should be fun.

On another note, it seems that Novell was able to fix the issue with their ZSM product by changing two binaries. It took developers around a week to correct, test, and release the update to us. It was not our fault at all, it was genuinely broken for over 6 years. This was just something that should have been tested and wasn't...and apparently, we're the first Novell customer to ever press them on it. Sweet redepmtion!

Sender Policy Framework

2005-06-23T17:47:00.000-05:00

Got turned on to an IETF draft standard that, hopefully, will not only eliminate some spoofed e-mail traffic on the web, but allow our outgoing mail to be accepted more readily.

The draft is entitled "Sender Policy Framework", and allows mail servers a way to check whether or not incoming e-mail originated from the server(s) authorized to send mail for that domain.

It's pretty simple to do with your DNS registrar...if it helps, I can't see a downside to doing it. Those with nothing to hide, hide nothing - right?

By the way, I've never mentioned it, but Postini is godsend to anyone who handles internet e-mail. There are folks who argue that appliances & software in their data center is the way to go - these people must have more money and bandwidth than they need.

Do the math - outsource it!

To-Do List: "Write a book"

2005-06-22T16:11:00.000-05:00

In reading another blog operated by someone close to the ZENworks product at Novell, I found a very short but interesting entry.

In short, this individual was musing about the fact that a book entitled "How ZENworks Saved My Life" could have a very real market. This person and another colleague were agreeing that a book designed for management moreso than the rank-and-file IT staff, that outlines what a sound desktop management and/or standardization strategy can do for your bottom line, would help eliminate a substantial sales barrier.

I agree. For a long time, I've argued that the net result of Novell's marketing efforts could be captured in the phrase "all the wrong people get it".

There are lots of good technical guides on the product, but the 1's and 0's are only about 25% of the picture in my estimation. Having been at a number of organizations that shaped their policies and processes around use of a management suite such as ZENworks, this book seemed to write itself in my mind. The rest would be Mozartian "scribbling and bibbling" so to speak.

He said 'one day it might get written'. Hate to seem as if I'm about to plagurize an idea, but I had actually started writing such a book about 4 years ago and was stopped by a career. I think my title was something along the lines of "ZEN Nuddhism" - I was younger then. Perhaps I'll be the one who writes it, or at least one who contributes largely to it.

I think such a book should be required reading for IT managers, CIO's, CFO's, etc. It really is hard sometimes to make the connections between standardization and return on investment if you've never seen it happen. I'm continually surprised at how many IT shops are still doing things the hard way. If management realized how much time and money are being wasted by IT staff working hard instead of working smart, they'd likely suffer an involuntary bodily reaction of some kind.

I'm not advocating that costs be cut and people be fired - I'm advocating that spending on IT be made and measured at a level that can actually generate a return, not simply considered a recurring expense. Not every IT manager knows how to convey this story, but any IT manager (or CIO for that matter) worth their salt will know that selling it to their organization is mandatory if they are ever to reach the next level.

Too many resources

2005-06-21T14:19:00.000-05:00

You know a company has too many resources when they develop an entire suite of products from scratch, aimed at 2% of the corporate IT market.

IBM's ThinkVantage Tools are, largely, very well written and certainly add value over the Dell garbage we had been buying until recently. For notebooks, it doesn't get much better than IBM Access Connections. This is a great technology that simplifies IP and wireless connectivity to an "Even-the-CEO-can-do-it" level. The Rescue and Recovery tools are very well done, easy to use, and actually could serve to get a PC back up in the event Windows will not start. Kudos to IBM for this.

However...

IBM is going to market - not aggressively mind you - with some rather half baked tools that offer similarly-intended functionality to products such as ZEN and Altiris. The development of Image Ultra Builder, as well as their "app distribution" and "asset management" tools, indicates to me that IBM may have too much time on their hands.

As a consultant, I've seen plenty of different organizations. I can't think of a single one that would select the IBM TVT suite for managing images or application distribution.

Why not? Because they aren't free. If you have to pay for something, you might as well get what you want. Be it Altiris, SMS, ZENworks, etc - there are a number of commercial products that do exceptionally good jobs of delivering applications, managing images, and capturing inventory.

Granted, the market for these utilities should be quite large... but faced with the mature offerings already available... I just... if you can't do it better than the other guys... seriously, why bother?

I wish I had IBM's problems.

"Significant Architectural Change"

2005-06-20T13:31:00.000-05:00

Well, after having been host to a Novell employee for two days (actually very long nights, fortunately not for me), we've confirmed what we have believed all along. Our issues with the ZENworks for Servers product surrounding the Monitoring components have been attributed to a long-standing defect (the code was dated 1999) which had never been addressed.

The situation is basically that, when using the IP Ping agent to monitor devices, ZSM is very erratic and unreliable at reporting when services are actually up or down. You can generate hundreds of false alerts over a very short timespan, and the problem is easy to reproduce.

The source of the problem is quite laughable. Those who know ManageWise know that it was written and sold long before TCP/IP came into prevalence within corporate LAN's. The TCP/IP Ping monitoring component, again last updated in 1999, sends pings out in some type of sequence, and - get THIS - expects to receive them back in exactly the same sequence. If they come back out of order - something OTHER than first-out-first-in - viola! False alert!

I wish I was kidding.

It makes sense, sort of, that this problem would have existed. IPX was rarely ever routed across WAN links. Usually, only big IT shops had something like ManageWise in place. They usually only wanted to monitor local services - in fact, in some cases, they only could manage local services. Really big IT shops had network groups that used OpenManage or something along those lines. Using it to monitor a large WAN with slow links was just never considered.

What doesn't make sense is that the feature remained in the product all this time, and that the problem was never again tested for or uncovered.

The solution, as the title of this post implies, requires a "significant architectural change". Which is to say you evaluate each ICMP reply based on it's merits, not the order in which it arrived back at the server (why would this concept be so foreign?).

A number of software developers in Bangalore will be working to correct the problem over the next few days - hopefully it'll bear fruit and we will have again facilitated a fix to the ZSM product that nobody else ever found or yelled about loudly enough.

Why hasn't this problem been found in 6 years? Based on what we know, there are but a few rational explanations for the situation as it had evolved:

Hardly anyone else is using the product - or this portion of it - in production.
Those that are, might be in single-campus environments where all of the remote links are high-speed.
Others have tried to use it, unsuccessfully, and gave up - perhaps citing excessive difficulty in it's configuration or faulting their own abilities.
Still others may have found the problem, opened incidents, and got nowhere - again, disheartened, they punted in favor of another solution.
Nobody tested this in a real-world network (we are also solely responsible for the "Unnumbered Links" fix that is now in ZSM).
Novell very plainly does not eat their own dog food, despite any claims to the contrary you may hear.

Ask someone at Novell's IS&T if they ever clustered GroupWise on NetWare prior to OES. Ask them if they use ZSM to monitor & manage their network. You'll be surprised how little of what you buy is actually used by the people who make it. That's not the way I would run a business, but hey, that's just me.

It's not unreasonable for us to feel like we're beta-testing product when we uncover problems like this. Again, if technology companies develop for worst possible case - which is honestly not that much harder to test around - they are able to accommodate any case. Heaven forbid anyone spends some additional time to get something right.

Apologies in advance to whomever coded this thing way back when, but everyone responsible for this oversight between 1999 and mid-year 2005 should be blackballed from ever developing, testing, or managing a software product ever again. This is just so simple and obvious to anyone using the product, that it's oversight is paramount to wanton neglect.

Boycott Michelin!

2005-06-19T16:40:00.000-05:00

I just witnessed the travesty that was the United States Grand Prix at Indianapolis, and I can only say that I'm very glad I wasn't able to go this year.

I had attended the 2000 and 2001 GP's, and found them to be amazing spectacles of engineering and driver talent. Nobody who knows what it takes to put a competitive F1 car on the grid would ever claim that it's not the pre-eminent form of motor sport in the world. These machines are magnificent works of engineering art. If you're a techie and you like racing, F1 is for you.

What happened today will be spun and politicized by all sorts of people, but the bottom line is this. The idiots at Michelin got it all wrong. They owe everyone with a ticket to the race a complete refund of their money and travel expenses.

Figure 140,000 people at around $500 a piece to lodge and buy a ticket to the event...I think it'd have been much cheaper for them to have brought a tire to the race that could handle a 6 degree bank at 185 MPH, even if it was a little slower than the Bridgestones. No, they realized that there was no chance they could win, so they all quit. Like a bunch of spoiled 3-year-old's. Tres' French.

Since you will probably never see a refund check from Michelin, the best you can do is to never buy a Michelin product of any kind ever again. This shouldn't be asking too much. First of all, the company is French...enough said. Second of all, if they can't be trusted to make a tire that can last 350km while spending probably a grand total of two minutes during the race on a simple 6 degree banking at speed, I'm not sure we should trust them to make the tires on our family's cars that will go 30,000 - 50,000km.

Bridgestone got it right - their tires performed very well, and would have lasted 100 laps (the race was 73 in total). Amazing that Bridgestone (who owns Firestone) has the "reliable" tire, and Michelin suddenly is scared of their own shadow.

Buy Bridgestone. Buy Firestone. Even if you hate the commercials (I know I'm sick of them by now). Send a message with your checkbook.

I just hope F1 will be welcome in America again - it sure seems that quite a few people have tried very hard to ruin it for us.

A note on Gordon Ramsay...

2005-06-15T10:51:00.000-05:00

Incidentally, every manager who struggles with getting more out of his or her people and has had no success with using "the carrot" may want to see how effective a motivator "the whip" can be by observing the aforementioned Gordon Ramsay at work on BBC America or Fox's "Hell's Kitchen".

His affinity for swearing aside, he demonstrates that passion about one's work and a refusal to accept anything less than perfection can effectively lead as an example that people of substance will follow.

The challenge is to get people to go beyond the boundaries they've set for their own capabilities - so few people set limits for themselves that allow them to truly shine. Ramsay is adept at getting people to shatter their illusions of their own limits and capabilities, even if his methods are found to be questionable. You can't argue with results. This guy was England's "Chef of the Year" for 9 years running. If you know how hard it is to get three Michelin stars, you understand how good he is at what he does.

Being the Squeaky Wheel

2005-06-15T08:23:00.001-05:00

After having an issue with a ZEN product open with Novell Support for over 6 months, we're finally getting some real attention to our problem. The issue relates to the ZENworks Server Management product - specifically, the Ping agent that lets you know when servers / services are up or down. It's acted flaky for over two years, across three versions of product, two hardware platforms, and two versions of NetWare OS.

A bona-fide Provo resident will be here to ensure that neither we nor Novell Support have missed anything, and will climb on the phone with developers in Bangalore, India to figure out what the heck is going on here.

It's good when you can get that kind of attention, but it's bad when you need it. I wonder how many other IT managers feel like they're unwitting Beta-testers for software they've purchased. We feel that way a lot - with all sorts of products. It's one thing for a vendor to tell us "You did it all wrong." We hardly ever hear that. We always hear "You have it right, it should be working." Yet it takes months sometimes to figure out what is broken or why.

I don't know how software with such easy to find deficiencies ever makes it out the door of these companies. My favorite chef, Gordon Ramsay, likes to say "Keep your mistakes in the kitchen." The ability to do that implies that someone - who knows what they're looking at - is actually reviewing every aspect of the product. Just like a chef would.

I'd rather get served a great meal 30 minutes late than to have utter garbage put before me on-time. The mentality that says "meet your dates at all costs, and fix it in a Service Pack" is nonsense.

The mentality should be "get it right the first time, at all costs". 99% of the time, schedules and deadlines are artificial creations in the software development business. Many products are so complex that facilitating a 3-month development and release cycle does nothing but dilute the quality of the product. It's the IP networking equivalent of using a very small MTU setting on a robust backbone. Projects, like ethernet packets, have a minimum overhead. The more payload you deliver under that overhead, the more efficient the mechanism becomes. I'd love to see development and release cycles move to 6 months - especially at Novell.

Hello, world.

2005-06-14T14:10:00.001-05:00

So I finally decided to do the Blog thing. Why, you ask, bother? Well, I was inspired. In a recent ComputerWorld article (May 30, 2005 - Vol 39 No. 22), Patrick Thibodeau quoted a Sun Microsystems executive as saying (about Blogs by CIO's)...

"If a few of those guys started [Blogging], you can darn well bet that we would be reading them. I sure would."

What this disconnected Sun executive doesn't realize is that not a lot of CIO's have the time, aptitude, or inclination to Blog. It's unfortunate, but true. They'll come along eventually.

However, CIO's are also usually very seasoned (at companies the size of those Sun is interested in), meaning the whole concept is a little foreign and possibly uncomfortable. The next best things to CIO blogs are the blogs of the people reporting to those guys.

That's where I come in.

I have assumed the moniker of ZEN Master, after having the title jokingly or lovingly bestowed upon me by coworkers at Novell Consulting. I am not the only ZEN Master any more than Phil Jackson would be, but I wear the title with pride. ZEN, for those who don't know, is a (brilliant) suite of products that - properly implemented - dramatically improve the ability of IT groups to serve and support their customers.

I've not worked for Novell for a number of years, but my career has been closely tied to the company and it's products for over a decade. I'm not a Novell bigot - in fact, I'm usually one of the first people to tell you where Novell's got it wrong and what I think they should do about it. Rather, I'm a fan of what works best. It just so happens that, in a number of cases, what works best are Novell products (although the instances of this being the case are dwindling).

The company I work for does about $1.2 - $1.5 billion in total revenue each year. It has offices in nearly 100 locations throughout the southwest, south, and east coast. All of the IT functions are centralized - there is no IT presence in any office outside the Headquarters. In many ways, we represent "worst possible case" for our vendors.

The upside is that this IT staff is good. Far above average. I should know, I've been around a bit. We regularly push the limits of every product we touch.

In short, if it works well here, it will work well anywhere. If it has a weakness, we'll find it.

For quite a while, my wish is that IT vendors would plan around environments like ours instead of the pristine, blue-sky lab environments that are so delicately crafted and maintained. There are probably 10,000 A+ certified techies that could build a Novell "Super-Lab" like environment to stress test networks and applications. Sure it wouldn't have the bells and whistles, but the point is this - figuring out how to provide services to a single campus or multi-campus enterprise is a walk in the park. Figure out how to make a product work well in an environment with as many variables as ours, and your product will work well anywhere.

The most annoying thing we find is that, most of the time, if a product doesn't work here, it's because the vendor has spent too much time focusing on all the wrong things. Usually it's something like a vendor who decided to include configuration options that look and sound neat, but are thusly architected in such a way that they cannot be implemented without additional hardware.

Try to deploy Patchlink in a 100-site WAN without implementing a new server or internet caching appliance at each and tell me how you fare. So much for increasing ROI, improving simplicity, reducing maintenance, etc. You're hopping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Apologies to Dell, IBM, HP, Compaq, etc...your business model shouldn't depend on the endless proliferation of crappy software. I think if software vendors spent more time figuring out how to architect their products so that they did not require more hardware, the world of IT Managers and vendors alike would be a happier place to live and do business.