You're Being Throttled

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...

...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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.