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Category Fun Hobbies Personal
A great day and I reallly recommend it for those trying this sport for the first time. The weather was fantastic and the venue was perfect. There were lots of stars there including Spencer Smith world and Olympic Champion with the Planet X Team and Will Clarke one of the best swimmers around the world.

I was chuffed with an overall time of 50 minutes for a 500 m swim 15k bike and 5k run.

All in all it was a great last race of the season where everyone was chilled out and enjoying the massive scale and atmosphere of the place. It is the first time I have seen a triathlon with so much support and attendance from both racers and spectators...its exciting times for the sport in the UK and I have a feeling the competitions are only going to get bigger and bigger as the sport grows in popularity.




My Team won the local league thus the drinking of champagne despite the strict diet

Posted by Michael Wenn At 10:45 AM | Location Huntingdon, UK | Permalink | Comments (5) |      

Category Notes Threats
Very interesting post on Ed Brill's blog recently, though I don't think this is as unique to any one platform as Ed wants you to believe. This is just as easy to do in Domino as it is in Google and comes down to the management of security policies.

How many organizations out there are dutifully managing ACLs using groups? If an unknowing admin were to add say, the "Everyone" group to a group that was nested, at some level, inside the "LocalDomainAdmins" group, how long would it take you to discover that? How many apps would be affected? How long had it been since the change was made? My guess is that there are very few people who would have even known that it happened, let alone, what the damage was.

A deep understanding of the contents of ALL (yes I said all) the groups in your address book is incredibly important. However knowing the effect a group has on the access to applications (mail included) is even more important. The problem is being able to quickly learn what the effective access is to your applications at all times. This can be a full time job and very difficult to do on a regular basis. Just knowing that a group was changed is one thing. Knowing what effect that had is what is really important.

Exactly this issue is what led to the creation of Teamstudio's Admin Suite of solutions. If you are having difficulty knowing who changed what and when, who has access (really!) to which applications, you are not alone. Feel free to give us a call, or contact me directly at craig_schumann@teamstudio.com. I would be happy to show you how we can help.

Posted by Craig Schumann At 4:13 PM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (3) |      

Category IT Trends
IBM surveyed more than 2,500 CIOs and compared what executives at companies with high-profit growth are doing vs. those at low-growth companies. The results are interesting.

Highlights include:

Do you integrate business with technology to innovate?	High Growth: 64%	Low Growth: 33%
Do you focus your time on providing core technology services?	High Growth: 23%	Low Growth: 40%
Do you aggressively turn data into actionable information?	High Growth: 58%	Low Growth: 36%
Do you expect standardized business processes?	High Growth: 61%	Low Growth: 50%
Do you manage change successfully?	High Growth: 61%	Low Growth: 43%

The full report can be obtained at www.ibm.com/ciostudy.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 9:17 AM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Worst Practices
According to s Business Software Alliance survey, these are the 10 industries most often reported for software piracy:

1. Manufacturing
2. Sales/Distribution
3. Service
4. Financial services
5. Software development (Surprising?)
6. IT consulting
7. Medical
8. Engineering
9. Education
10. Consulting

Question: Are these really the worst industries for software piracy? Or do they simply contain the most whistle-blowers?

The September 14 issue of Computerworld has an interesting article on the topic.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 8:06 AM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Community
As a marketing person, I often hear how we need to avoid the word enterprise when describing Teamstudio products or services. The word is an overused marketing phrase that has lost most (all?) meaning to most IT professionals. But a quick read of the Computerworld Web site might indicate otherwise.

Gmail’s recent outage early this month must have been extremely frustrating for their customers as this outage applied to both the free version and the Google Apps email Service. This isn’t the first outage either. If you recall, there were widespread crashes back in February and then again in May of this year.

Maybe the use of enterprise when describing Lotus Notes, products from Teamstudio and others has a place after all.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 6:14 AM | Location Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Good Practice Risk
The role of Technical Director (TD) at Teamstudio is responsible for pre-sales activities as well as post-sales implementation and training services. We have an opportunity to learn about a lot of Lotus Notes implementations. When asked a general question about our clients, The TDs will usually respond with “it depends”. Our customers are quite varied, and surprisingly unique from one another in a lot of ways.

Since we have a variety of products to help our customers understand who has access to what, who has accessed what and when, as well as what Notes agents have access to, we tend to learn a lot about our customers Lotus Notes/Domino environments, applications and processes.

One area that is more consistent across our customer base is with regard to data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities. It is surprising to me the number of customers we talk to who either have not implemented a DLP plan or are unaware of such a plan. You might not think your company has much in the way of confidential data, but one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Think about what exists on your company’s servers, databases, laptops and file systems across your company. You may not store credit card information, but every company has financial statements, sales projections and employee lists that are valuable to someone outside your organization.

If you haven’t already implemented a DLP solution, it’s worth a look. Not only can this save you from a very expensive and painful data breach, but it can also help you with your data discovery requirements.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 7:56 AM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Good Practice
Years ago, most companies operated a help desk to assist computer users when they had problems with their hardware or software. (Frequently they didn’t’ know the difference.) The help desk was staffed with entry level employees and given no tools to help them with their job. Through no fault of their own, they earned the nickname “helpless desk”.

Today the term Service Desk is used in place of Help Desk. At least part of the motivation for this change is to avoid the negative reputation of the help desk. But the difference is more than semantics. These really are different things.

Help Desk

• Incident management
• Maintenance of asset inventory
• Separate from the business
• Create and maintain knowledge of applications, etc.
• Possibly provide self-help capabilities such as a knowledgebase
• The may have a technology-based service level agreement (SLA)

Service Desk

• Includes everything that is part of a help desk
• Integrated into the business
• Responsible for incident management, problem management, change management and configuration management
• Business-oriented SLA
• Operating Level Agreements (OLA – How the Service Desk will work with its internal support partners.)

Which one do you have? Both desks have a place. One is not necessarily right and the other wrong. However in setting proper expectations among your users, you should call it what it is. Members of the Help Desk and Service Desk organizations have a hard enough job without getting set up for failure.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 10:12 AM | Location Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Good Practice Build Process Risk
Sandals. Not a mission critical piece of workout gear, but if you want to avoid a nasty fungus.... Two days earlier I saw one of our account managers at the gym in stocking feet - he forgot his sneakers. But he has two pair in his trunk. (Side bar - at our office in the US, you are very likely to run into some Teamstudio person at the gym. There is another company in our complex where you are very likely to run into one of them on a cigarette break down by the pond. Talk about corporate culture!)

Anyway, I have been to the gym dozens of times, but sometimes something gets left off. Have you tried running with a dead MP3 player? It turns out that any manual process, like getting ready to go to the gym or releasing a new update of an application, can occasionally have missed steps. No matter how often you do it, no matter how well documented your procedures are. Missing a step in the gym prep routine isn't usually a big deal. But missing a step in releasing that application can be. I know one of our customers didn't have that single property to Require SSL connection turned on, and ended up having to pay for credit protection for thousand of customers.

I am sure you all have your own horror stories. The moral of the story is if you can automate your release procedures so that you can have a repeatable process where nothing gets skipped, you should. It also turns out we have worked with a lot of companies to do this, and could probably help you as well.

Posted by John Kingsley At 7:42 AM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (1) |