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December 05 Time to Go From HereOK, I've had enough of Spaces. It has troubled me over the past couple of weeks just how often this site is down. And then posts just don't happen...
I've also been looking for an inspiration to blog a bit more of late, and have decided to come up with a bit of a kick: This blog is off to Wordpress. After some annoyance about not being able to find an ideal name, In Cider Knowledge will continue and with new impetus, for a bit!, at http://ick2.wordpress.com.
I'll continue to post any major FirefoxADM/Group Policy Firefox Extension stuff here as well as at the new blog, but bye bye from here. Update your RSS feeds! November 13 Web 2.0: The Blind Technology RushIf you ever read Brian Kelly's excellent UK Web Focus blog, you will often come across comments by myself. Almost always, I am taking the role of the grumpy naysayer, attacking many of the notions of Web 2.0, as presented enthusiastically by Brian.
The funny thing is, as Web 2.0 technologies go, I am a keen and long time user of the sort of tools which people lump under the category - I have been regularly contributing to wikis since 2002, had a blog since 2004, have a page on Facebook which is a significant part of my social life, have messed around with a lot of mash-ups (such as the mapping posts I made on this blog) and use countless services which are regarded as Web 2.0. So why grumpy?
Well, let's go through the services I use. I started to contribute to our wiki at work because we decided in our organisation that this was the best way to flexibly disseminate and update information for those people who needed across a very devolved structure. I started my blog in 2004 primarily as a development diary for those people who were interested in or using FirefoxADM. I got a page on Facebook because I was out at the pub and at parties and friends and, more importantly, good looking girls were asking that question "do you have Facebook?". Saying no was a bad answer... Even the stuff I did for the mashups was my attempt to see if I could produce a better version of the mapping site the University of Edinburgh used. Every Web 2.0 technology I use is used because I had a reason to use it.
The fact is every time you choose any technology first and then try to figure out a reason to use it, it does not work. This is not just with Web 2.0 technologies, but ANY technology - people don't go to DIY shops and buy hammers and then get home and then figure out what things they can hammer, they have a problem in their home and go out and buy the right tools for the job.
Yet, it is all too common with Web 2.0 technologies that people are encouraged to adopt them without this reasoning in place, and often when there is a reason it is the circular argument of "because its Web 2.0"! The granddaddy of these is the blog. People, teams, organisations are told "you should blog" and they are encouraged and encouraged to set one up. The problem is, all too often, they have nothing to say. So, they get told they should blog at a Web 2.0 conference and get back to work the next day and enthusiastically go to Wordpress or Blogspot and set one up, and start off with a "hello world, this is my blog" post. Then a day or so later, a real post of meaning, something they are getting off their chest. Then, time passes, maybe a third post a week later and then one or two more sporadic posts and the blog dies. Even worse are those organisations who indoctrinate their blog into their policy when they have no reason to blog. Libraries are particularly bad for this, having had it rammed down their throats that they must blog and wiki and use all these other Web 2.0 tools to be "Library 2.0". These librarians often have no reason to blog than the FUD of "you'll be left behind as Library 1.0!", so library blogs are forcibly created. Unfortunately, because they have nothing really interesting to say on them, they become full of nothing more than the same content that used to live under the news link on the library's home page.
Interestingly, also on Brian's blog, he points to an library-targetted OCLC report he contributed to on the use of these sort of technologies. Some of the quotes are quite interesting:
Very interesting. I wonder if we are now starting to see a maturity of Web 2.0 as people move away from a belief they have to implement certain specific Web 2.0 technologies and actually start to think of how and which ones can be used to be a worthwhile contribution to the services people use and run.
Its got to be better than it is now... November 11 The Measure of ChangeI previously mentioned that Change Management was a part of ITIL, and one of the major areas for me as someone who makes more and greater changes to the setup and application layer of the University Managed Desktop at the University of Edinburgh than anyone else.
A lot of the learning process from being on the course is that the organisation is putting a lot more thought into how we have a process for this change management, especially bringing in ideas from ITIL such as forward schedules of change, a change advisory board and documented processes. I'm glad of this, as this has been something I have pushed for. Up until now, what has happened is that I tended to be the arbiter of these changes, and I went through my own (documented) process of change and announcement.
One thing that has fascinated me about this is that this is another area where ITIL suggests these processes get setup but does not prescribe what that process should look like. This is the way it should be, obviously, because each organisation is different. If you talk about application support and managed desktops, a common method in Universities is to only make major changes to the core set of applications once a year. A good example of this that I have mentioned in this blog is the situation with Firefox, where we only change a major supported version (eg. 1.0, 1.5, 2.0 or soon, 3.0) once a year, during the so-called quieter summer months. Then through the year, as patches are released, they are tested and then deployed. However, in other organisations things are quite different. I know a common methodology in some major banks is to have quarterly releases of the desktop, and have very little change inbetween each update. I have to say, I am growing to like this idea more and more - you release a desktop, rebuild everyone's machine to the new version and then for 3 months you can develop and extensively test the next iteration and release it. Arguably, it couldn't work in a University environment, but with Universities now having more and more going on during the summer, maybe the one-update-a-year idea is growing old.
But that's for the Change Advisory Board to decide! September 22 Speaking IT Common SenseOne thing that I think will be pretty big over the next year is ITIL. ITIL has been around for the best part of 10 years, so why big in the next year? Simply, people have been waiting for ITIL version 3, years in composition, to be released.
I have mentioned ITIL a couple of times before on this blog, most recently after I attended an "ITIL Foundation" course earlier this summer and posted some thoughts here. I talked about it then as "documented common sense", and probably didn't make the best case for people attending the course! However, time has effected my opinion of this course. I have to admit, when I was on the course and then after it just finished, I saw ITIL almost like an extra few boxes to tick when starting a new service. Actually, the opposite has happened: because the processes, practices and framework in ITIL make so much sense, when you see services (either new or ones that have existed for some time) in your organisation and you see they don't have a change management process, for example, it seems like a whacking great big hole in the quality of that service. If they are services that you are involved with, it gives you the momentum to fix this big hole in the service. This has happened to me, where with one major service I am heavily involved with and that effects pretty much every student and member of staff at the University, I now feel the communication of changes within the service is too weak, and as such I am looking into how to radically overhaul it. It might seem strange but without the ITIL course, I doubt I would have seen this. It effectively gave me the ability to properly stand back from a service and see it objectively.
However, there is something even more significant. I have found a remarkable thing when talking to others who have been on the course, especially in meetings: the language. When you are talking to other people who have been on the course, the language is now interspersed with vocabulary we picked up on the ITIL course. So, we talk about things like "incident management" and "change management" and both know what we mean by this. This is a massive boon because it means we know exactly what we are talking about when improving services and get on with actually improving services. The vocabulary is also important because to me, the term "change management" is now native, understandable, but to someone who hasn't been on the course, its confusing and scary (eg. they think: the "management" part means filling in forms and making everything slower and is nothing more than a hassle and "change" is never a good thing). This is one of the key reasons that organisations need a good strategy for ITIL adoption. It needs to be part of a multi-year strategy of adoption and you need to get a good set of people onto a Foundation course. These MUST NOT only be from Management layers, because you are dealing with services and many of these services can only be helped by having people onside on the "front line". Get a few up further than this and they can teach the rest - at least the basics, the framework and the language!
The reason organisations are looking towards ITIL now is that Version 3 has taken some time to come out, finally coming out early this summer. However, it doesn't take away from probably the biggest reason many organisations will be looking into it: it works. This is not a management fad. It has a long standing reputation worldwide. The other big reason is that a few years ago, many companies suddenly had IT Governance slammed into them thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and ITIL is seen to be a major way to both enforce the practices and processes as required by SOX, whilst adding the extra benefit of making for a generally more high-quality service. IT Governance isn't going to go away, so its best that companies use the right framework.
Now, all I need, is a ITILv2 Foundation to ITILv3 bridging course... September 15 Its All In The ProcessEarlier this week, whilst waiting on other processes to complete I started to play with the Shared Document feature of our team's Sharepoint Services install. We put this in place earlier this year after one of my colleagues in the team played with it and convinced us it was a good idea - a system to help track changes, track what each other was doing (especially as we had a new job share post in the team) and allow us to have internal task lists, and with Sharepoint Services being essentially a free "role" built into Windows Server 2003. I was pretty sceptical but had no better ideas so agreed we should give it a go. Over the past couple of months, my scepticism has been allayed, as I have found it more and more useful. Certainly, the 2 team members in the job share have found the blogging extension to it almost essential to their job, as there is no overlap in their hours.
In the last week, though, I have been looking at how we can use the Shared Documents feature and have been very impressed - not so much by the technology itself, but by how it manifests itself. The Document Lifecycle is, especially in Office 2007, a first-class citizen. You can open, check out, modify and check in content all from within Office. It works almost as smoothly as opening and saving to disk (I say almost because checking in and checking out files is a bit of a foreign concept to most, at least at the start). You can also add the likes of tasks, notifications and permissions which are major requirements for collaboration. On top of all this, in the 2007 version, Office has clarified the process of document preparation, to make processes like mark-up removal, adding data protection, signatures and compatibility checks, more naturally flowing (thanks to the ordering in the new Office button menu).
The point here is not to say anything particular about how good or otherwise Sharepoint or Office 2007 is, but to say, it is a good example of the sort of process we need to be thinking about. At the moment, a lot of Web 2.0 services are based on a very old school method of creating your document/data in your software application and then once complete going to the web site, browsing to where you saved it on your hard drive and uploading. I think it is becoming all the more clearer that desktop/software and cloud/services are not mutually exclusive paradigms, and if we want to get the very best of both, we need to think of the best processes to make the differences between the two much more smooth, to the point where users might not even be able to tell between the two. We also need to be minded towards making sure the services give us the flexibility we need in a two-way direction. It is only then that we will find an approach which fit our needs and allows our users and our systems to be as productive as they can be with these services. August 16 Web 2.0 - A Year OnI first wrote about Web 2.0 on this blog almost exactly a year ago with this post. Looking back, I talked about Web 2.0 as a kind of threat, "competition" for the services IT Services provide, and suggested IT Services risked becoming irrelevant if the services did not match or better these sort of services. In my opinion, the relevancy would come by realising what we can work with and what battles weren't worth fighting. Reading some blogs and news items of the time, I think that was a pretty accurate snapshot of where we as a profession were a year ago. How have things changed?
One strange thing is that its almost as interesting to talk about what HASN'T happened, as what has. To be honest, when I was giving my theory that Web 2.0 "equates to one of the biggest changes in the way services are delivered" since the Web itself, I expected a whole lot more to have happened in the past year than it has. I did expect Web 2.0 to take off in a big way in the past year; I expected to see by now what I would call the "Web 2.0 software stack" - in that users will log into any machine and then go off to Windows Live or Google and from there, their entire software experience is based around that web service: email, IM, VOIP, Documents, Presentations, Storage, etc. Why hasn't things happened quite to this extent?
Firstly, the technology wasn't and, dare I suggest, isn't mature enough. Or powerful enough. If you analyse, for example, Google Docs (Writely), it is now barely better functionality-wise than Wordpad or the equivalent application on other platforms. There is no doubt that the likes of Google are currently developing these apps to make them better but I wonder just how powerful they could make an application running in a web browser, across the Internet. To be honest, I think you can only go so far before edging at the security and performance boundaries. There is no doubt to me that these boundaries will offer less features, be less responsive and end up giving less productivity in these applications than in a traditional desktop application.
One area that grown over the past year is the concept of Enterprise 2.0. The whole area of "Enterprise 2.0" has really matured in the past year from being an idea championed by the likes of Andrew McAfee (who, well, coined the term) and Dion Hinchcliffe to having real possibilities. There are real steps being taken forward. However, if you search Google for "Enterprise 2.0", you will see that there are still a lot of baby-steps occurring, and a lot of people still figuring out where this area needs to go. Its important to note though that Enterprise 2.0 is not really a revolution - it is more an organic development of understanding how Web 2.0 can fit into the very rigid structures of an enterprise environment and is being crafted into the latest take on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). One offshoot of this is that Enterprise 2.0 tends to be less burdened with the more extreme and ridiculous ideologies that Web 2.0 has.
For myself, a complete pragmatist when it comes to IT and technology, this is important. I look back over my posts of the past year and see myself go through a similar maturing from what could be defined as Web 2.0 thinking to Enterprise 2.0 thinking: I like a lot of the ideas of Web 2.0, but many of the practicalities don't fit an organisation/enterprise environment, therefore there needs to be a different take. When I blogged about "IT Services 2.0", it was very much angled towards this idea of Enterprise 2.0, more than Web 2.0.
So, for the year ahead? Over the next year I expect, actually, very little. By the middle of 2008, you can expect to see a lot more Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 applications get targeted towards the enterprise but the current problem is that everyone lacks a clear leading platform to work against. And that is the area that will form up in the next year (and it wont be Facebook!). But that's for another post. August 02 Group Policy Extension querySomeone contacted me to ask me a question about how to use the Group Policy extension to set a proxy url for their organisation. Because of the odd way this whole spaces thing is set up, I couldn't reply to his message! Anyway, worth posting for everyone who has been trying it to see how its done.
If you download the Group Policy Extension zip, you will see an example ADM template. Install the extension (better to install to %ProgramFiles%\Mozilla Firefox\extensions and not the user's profile) and apply the admin template to your local group policy and set the home page to whatever and you should see it sets and locks that.
For the proxy, you need to set 2 preferences: network.proxy.autoconfig_url and network.proxy.type. The first is obviously the url of your proxy and the second is type, which you want to set to 2 (set it in the Administrative Template as a string, not a DWORD). You need to set both to get them to work. So, just add those entries to the Admin Template in the same way as the browser.startup.homepage entry and it should be good to go.
Anyway, an ADM template to do this will look like:
CLASS MACHINE
CATEGORY "Mozilla Firefox Group Policy Settings" KEYNAME "Software\Policies\ADM\Firefox\Locked"
POLICY "General Settings"
PART "Homepage" EDITTEXT REQUIRED VALUENAME browser.startup.homepage END PART END POLICY POLICY "Proxy"
PART "Type (set 2 for autoconfig)" EDITTEXT REQUIRED VALUENAME network.proxy.type END PART PART "autoconfig url" EDITTEXT REQUIRED VALUENAME network.proxy.autoconfig_url END PART END POLICY END CATEGORY You can tidy it up and make it a lot more "user friendly"!
If anyone has any questions about this or anything else Firefox Group Policy related, feel free to contact me at the address to the left of the page: mark(dot)sammons(at)ed(dot)ac(dot)uk (replace the dots and ats obviously!)
July 28 Firefox Enterprise Working GroupI should have mentioned this before but got carried away with blogging about Web stuff!
I am participating in a really exciting venture. Mike Kaply of IBM and many Firefox improvements, has managed to seriously kick the whole enterprise market into gear by organising the Firefox Enterprise Working Group. This venture, which you can read more about here, has managed to bring together several people with experience of Firefox usage in the enterprise (and education). I much appreciated that Mike asked me to be involved and I give as much time as I can, gladly.
The great thing was that there were a number of really large companies contributing to the first conference call of the Working Group, indicating that a lot of people are serious about this. Equally important was that it had buy-in from people at Mozilla Corp on the call. Oh, and of course, we educational establishments are important too! I'm, personally, really excited at the prospects.
The first call was titled "Experiences" and was to give people the chance to express what happens in their organisation.
The first people to talk was "Team A" (obviously, a lot of people on the call need to keep anonymous because competitors are also in on the call). They are a massive company, a Fortune 100. Their contribution was really interesting and they have also uploaded a case study about their environment. Several interesting points made include that they use Mission Control for their configuration management. This surprised me because Mission Control is actually an ancient Netscape management tool from about 8-10 years ago tailored for Netscape 4. It doesn't surprise me that it works, given how much Netscape code runs through Firefox's veins, but interested to know how they came about to use that. At a guess, maybe they had it for Netscape 4 and several people are experts in it, or have even modified it over the years, and they've found it fits their needs for Firefox. As I understand it, the configuration management part actually works very similarly to the way FirefoxADM works - except it gets the prefs and lockPrefs from the LDAP-based Mission Control WebApp as opposed to the Policies part of the registry. It IS better than FirefoxADM, especially because you can update over the internet and can update on-the-fly, but personally, I prefer the group policy approach (though I obviously would seeing as I wrote FirefoxADM!). I'd like to thank the guys from Team A, because their experiences were really interesting, and got me thinking, especially with regard to how they deploy plugins as extensions.
I talked next. I'll say more in a post once I've uploaded my case study to the wiki - early next week hopefully if I get approval from my manager. What I will say is that apart from the nuances of education, such as the fact you can only really update major applications once a year during the summer, it surprised me how close my experiences were to Team A. Our deployment procedures are similar, if less formal. Oh, and whereas Team A have security teams signing off patches, and several core engineering teams involved in making sure Firefox and its plugins work, here its...well...me: I sign off patches, package Firefox, package all the extensions on all browsers and make sure of its readiness. However, the turnaround times are similar for minor and major updates.
Mike Kaply also talked about his experiences at IBM. He made some really good points about intranet applications and the fact that whilst compatibility with Firefox is becoming more and more of a common feature, for bought web services sometimes the compatibility is only added in, in a version beyond which you are using. Therefore, it becomes a case of persuading the business that Firefox compatibility is worth the cost of the upgrade. I think in an educational establishment, where there is more of a build not buy attitude, this is less of a case (and it helps when you have people like me badgering the Applications division for the compatibility!). At IBM they use, unsurprisingly, Kaply's Client Customization Kit mainly. So 3 organisations, 3 different approaches - I wonder what the others are doing?
There was a lot more talked about in the session, which Yuriy does a great job of describing here (excellent blog about Enterprise 2.0 too). Overall it was a really great first call and I came away really buoyed up about the possibilities of where this could go.
If you are reading my blog and are using Firefox in an enterprise environment, go to the wiki and post your experiences, post your thoughts or if you want, email me (address on the right there) with your experiences, issues and wishes and I'll do my best to raise these things. And if you can join in on the call or the IRC channel please do so - its really important that while we've got the ear of Mozilla Corp, we let them know what is wanted, needed and I really do believe that it could lead to Firefox becoming really big in the enterprise market. Exciting times ahead... July 18 The Unwanted Invasions of FacebookI never expected the topic and arguments in my previous post to be justified so quickly! Yesterday, this story broke:
I see this as very different a situation than the Facebook threats at Keele. In the Keele case, all the students were doing was criticising the University, and seeing as they pay a lot of money to go to these institutions, it was wrong to threaten those students. However, in this case, the students are learning the hard way everything I said in my previous post: things put up on Facebook are not private, and things that are put up there can and will come back to haunt you. There is a beautiful quote in the Telegraph report of the story, from the University spokesperson: "The perception is that this site is private. But it is not and everyone in the modern world has to adjust to that.".
In a way, these students have found this out in a not too bad way. If it wasn't the Oxford deans who found these photos first and made students tighten their privacy on facebook or better still take the content down, then it would have been an interviewer doing "research" on that student as a potential employee, where the research is done via searching Facebook, Google, Bebo, MySpace et al (and they DO!). This slap on the wrist from Oxford staff is better than being turned down for a job because the employer thinks you are a potential trouble maker who plagued the residents of Oxford with anti-social behaviour...
The reaction of the students in both the Keele and Oxford cases makes one thing abundantly clear, though. The Oxford Student Union President makes it clear how students see Facebook and that is "the ethos of the site" is a "community for connecting friends". In other words, Facebook is about life at University (friends, lovers, socialising) and not University life (studying, lectures, exams). In that these two areas are so well defined, it should be possible for student bodies such as the Student Union to come together with the University and draw up some "rules" on appropriateness for the University to involve itself in the Facebook (or whatever Social Network is in fashion) community. Personally, I'd want the University to stay as much out of it as possible, as they are mostly an unwanted invasion into the students' space.
I do hope one thing, as an aside. I hope a lot of those in Higher Education institutions who hype Web 2.0, stop and take a long hard look at this situation. A lot of the hype of Web 2.0 has been by their definition of "user-centric" - instead of creating tools and portals at the University, port and outsource your services to the tools and sites the users use. The release of Facebook Apps API left many frothing at the mouth with the possibilities (I'll come back to Facebook as a platform in a post soon). I've never bought into this idea (especially with web sites - students have figured out they can SHOCK! have more than one site open at a time, so having Facebook in one tab and the Web Portal in another is not really a user-crippling inconvenience...). This definition of "user-centric" has, essentially, been derailed because it forgot to factor in one important component: what the users actually want! And all the evidence in this case is, such developments, such involvements are simply unwanted. July 13 Permanent Footsteps in the Internet SandThe year was 1996. At the time (and still so), I was heavily into electronic and dance music. I was coming up to the end of my first year at University and had an idea. Down in Oxford, at the start of May, there was a big dance music festival called Tribal Gathering organised. The lineup was amazing. Me and a friend got tickets and made plans - this was the perfect event before we knuckled down to our final exams of the year. Then, barely a couple of weeks before the event, the license for the event was not given, citing "traffic concerns". My plans and what was effectively my holiday for that year, was ruined. My sense of outrage was massive, but tipped over the edge a few days later when it was announced The Who were going to be playing a massive event that summer in Hyde Park. That is a big park in the centre of London. Where were the "traffic concerns" here? The whole thing looked like yet another state-sponsored attack on dance music culture.
At the time, I often wrote on a Usenet newsgroup called, uk.music.rave. It was, despite the name, a newsgroup for all dance music. I spent a lot of time on the group doing the rather sad but useful activity of track spotting - people would post asking if anyone knew a tune which has this or that sample and I had a good knack of remembering the name of tunes. Soon after the Tribal Gathering debacle, I posted a rant about the event blaming everyone from the organisers to the police to politicians. Soon after, exams and flat hunting matters meant I forgot all about it.
Many, many years later, I was in the pub with some friends having a regular drink when one of them pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and, to me cringing like I had just been wrapped in fibreglass, he started to read out the rant I posted. For my friends, this was amusement and me getting slightly embarrassed. They especially took great amusement at me, these days darkly cynical about the world, signing off the message with the acronym, PLUR (which I find amazingly has a wikipedia entry...). How had this happened? Simply put: In 2001, Google bought the Usenet archive from DejaNews and made it simple to search. My bored friend searched for my name and found my post.
I never considered that 7 or more years after I wrote the post, it would come back to haunt me. Usenet was one of the earliest "user generated content" parts of the World Wide Web and Internet to be archived in such a way where you can identify a person's posts, profile them if you want. Now consider the Web of today, and in this area, it starts to look, frankly, scary. Take Facebook as an example. Users these days not only supply a LOT more information to this service, but supply a lot more intimate details, down to their list of friends and even who they are dating and their religion. Even worse, an attitude has sprung up on Facebook where, as I suggested in my post about Keele University and Facebook, people regard messages and groups on Facebook as akin to pub talk. The situation is not helped at all by the rather poor definition of privacy these sites have. I've been experimenting with accessing data from the site whilst not logged in on a test machine and, to my surprise, knowing some URLs, I can extract a load of data from Facebook (and even logging in is rather insecure, using just HTTP as opposed to SSL and HTTPS). All in all, as most technical people will tell you, the difference between putting something up on Facebook and something up in the public domain is pretty damned slim.
Working at a University, I truly believe it is our job to advise the students who are using the likes of Facebook about the dangers, about the possibilities that something written on the site, maybe even in jest, could come back to haunt them in a possibly awful way years later on. Seeing some of the stuff I've seen on Facebook, we're talking about the likes of the difference between getting jobs and not, the difference between being labeled a team player and labeled a troublemaker. Or worse. I believe we need to open their eyes to the fact that these services might seem free but these companies will always try and find new ways to exploit this data for profit. Of course, this should be tempered with explaining the "no such thing as a free lunch" principle - they will get a certain amount of targeted advertisement and profiling and this is the price you pay for services like GMail, Hotmail, Facebook and Bebo. Simply, just be as clear as possible about this from all angles.
The problem is, if an institution is looking or has adopted these sites for their services, will they be willing to tell their users these realities? What if, such as an outsourcing to a Google or Windows Live, you are not giving your users any choice in the matter of whether or not to adopt these services? The privacy aspect of adopting these services simply isn't being held in high enough regard amongst the people who decide on the matter at institutions because they keep seeing the word "FREE" in front of the service. Free to the University, maybe. But at what cost in the future to the users? July 03 Web 2.0 And The Lack Of IT StrategyThe more and more I hear of institutions using Web 2.0 and the hype around it, the more and more this nagging, agitated feeling I get. Simply put: When it comes to Web 2.0, where's the strategy?
It seems to me that people are adopting Web 2.0 services, "free" services, with no real strategy of where they want to be regarding this service, 1, 2 or 5 years down the line. There's no thought on how this service interacts with other strategies inside your organisation and, what is probably the most important thing to consider when entering into a service like this, very few organisations have an exit strategy. I think its the most important thing because, otherwise, you are effectively outsourcing your IT strategy - your services are defined by the strategies of Google et al and the whims of the financial backers of these companies who can pull the plug on what become essential services to your organisation (and taking the very valuable content you've added to that resource with them?). Or worse, start to charge for them.
The biggest mishap here is that it is not so much as people forgetting to have a strategy for these sort of services, but its justified as part of the whole ethos around Web 2.0. The argument goes like this: with Web 2.0, instead of providing services all you do is enable your users to get to the Web 2.0 services they want to use. This is them being "user focused", they argue. And this is correct, to a level. And that level is how much it fits with your IT strategies.
I'll give you an example. For many, email is the perfect candidate for allowing users to use a Web 2.0 mail service as opposed to the institution-provided solution - institutions simply cannot keep up with the sheer size limits provided by a Gmail or a Hotmail, and email is a nice standard. You can have users move over to this and all you have to do is change the email address in the relative database at your University (I'm massively simplifying this example to only talk about the technology implications). However, there are services where it cannot be in the users' best interests to let each of them choose their own services. Services like Calendaring, Collaboration Tools, General groupware, presence-based systems. For example, unless you have everyone in your institution using the same calendaring service, it becomes almost impossible to use it in a proactive manner (eg. looking at your calendar and others to decide when everyone is free to have a meeting, as opposed to a reactive method by suggesting a date via email and then adjusting based on feedback). If some users use Google Calendar, others use Yahoo Calendar, etc. your "calendar service" becomes useful for nothing more than giving reminders. The crux is, these sort of services tend to come as tools that integrate many services together. The most common example is, of course, Microsoft Outlook. And the main service integrated into Outlook, the one that stitches so much of the rest together? Email.
So, what you may find is that, down the line, for those people using gmail or hotmail accounts instead of their institutional email, you either cannot provide a good enough service or have to provide a hack to implement it for them. On the other hand, you may find that its OK and can be implemented whether they use gmail or hotmail or whatever. I'm not saying either one is right, but at least if you consider it, you have a part of your strategy for both services. And this should happen for all "outsourced" Web 2.0 technologies you adopt.
Which leaves me one big question. I wonder what Trinity College Dublin's exit strategy is for signing over their email service to Google? June 24 No re-extension for Firefox 1.5On the 5th June, I brought up the possibility that Firefox 1.5 was going to be re-extended, with the sighting of a Firefox 1.5.0.13 on Mozilla's FTP site. Well, it now seems that this is not going to come to fruition and Firefox 1.5.0.12 is actually the final release in the Firefox 1.5.* family.
Interestingly, Firefox 1.5's close relation, Thunderbird 1.5 will carry on being supported until October 18th because Thunderbird 1.5 wasn't released until April 18th, so there is likely to be a Thunderbird 1.5.0.13 and possibly more. Seeing as both Thunderbird 1.5 and Firefox 1.5 have the same layour engine underneath (Gecko 1.8), I wonder if many of the fixes they'll release for Thunderbird between now and then could actually have been easily rolled into Firefox updates? Obviously, there's a simplistic edge to that - the testing and build QA would have taken time. However, it shows that the current Mozilla policy of supporting versions for only 6 months after newer versions are released is not ideal and is quite easily picked apart.
Now, this is something that I have moaned on and on about on this blog for some time. I am not the only one to, though. Mike Kaply, who has been doing some sterling work in enterprise deployment tools for Firefox, especially the CCK Add-on, has been blogging a bit recently about Firefox and the enterprise. Read more here: http://www.kaply.com/weblog/. Mike was also a great help to me when I was doing the Firefox Group Policy extension (although it should be an add-on, now, I guess, seeing as the nomenclature for extensions has changed!).
It seems both myself and Mike have had very similar experiences when dealing with others and corporate deployment of Firefox and have come to similar conclusions. I also read he is forming an Enterprise Working Group for Firefox, so possibly a new hope there for Firefox in the enterprise. Can but hope, even if I have seen this flase dawn all too many times before... June 16 All Your Base Are Belong To GoogleTrinity College Dublin announced at the start of this week that they are switching their email to Google's GMail. This is a really interesting development. Not new, mind - Microsoft have offered a similar service called "Windows Live@Edu" for over a year, and its been really effective (the one University I know has made quite a big success out of it is Glasgow Caledonian University).
I'm an IT Services person, so naturally, I'd be against this sort of out-source, right? Not really. I can see big challenges, big issues to deal with, but as a solution, it really works - especially, as is the case with Windows Live @ Edu, and Google's offering, called "Google Apps Education Edition", you can carry on using your *.ac.uk address (or *.edu for those Americans reading, etc etc). For life. From a hardnosed University point of view, the most important advantage of this deal is simply, money. Both Microsoft and Google's offerings include email with large capacity, calendaring, instant messaging and more. Google's even offers their online Office tools like a word processor and spreadsheet (although, I have to point out, I think they are absolutely dreadful - don't cancel that Microsoft Office contract just yet...). Talking money, to offer the same sort of features would EASILY cost a big University a 7-figure sum, and probably a 6-figure sum per year to maintain. That's a lot of saved money. It also frees up a lot of resource - it would free up quite a few people who could then be assigned to another job.
It has considerable disadvantages as well. My first concern is that this sort of service seems incredibly difficult to get out of. I just had a look around my Gmail account and simply cannot find a way of exporting all my mail, short of a POP3 download of them all. I could think of a way of downloading to a dummy POP3 account which then exports the data in a format that allows you to upload to your new service, but its difficult, full of issues and frankly, not an ideal solution. Then there are all the people who use it as alumni. If, for example, you are using Google's offering, and you cancel the account with them to go to a new service (either in-house or outsourced), will they destroy all those alumni accounts? If so, you need to know everyone who uses the account to then offer them this new service later. An administrative nightmare. Also, outsourcing email and the like is a bit like letting the genie out of the lamp - its damned difficult to get the thing back in there again! Decide to pull your email back in-house is a costly business, probably more than you saved. That is if you can even get the resources - the money saved by the outsource is usually not available because, as per usual, its been "reallocated"! This could be a major issue if your service supplier later decides to change the terms of the contract. For many Universities, this final point, the uncertainty of the intentions of these massive companies who exist to make lots and lots of profit, is major.
Those are really just IT resource and financial issues. There is one major issue over and above all this: your students and staff might well not appreciate having their online identity sold onto Google, Microsoft or the sort. Let's be clear: Microsoft and Google both routinely disrespect your privacy. They make money from their data they store on you. A recent report from Privacy International exposed this, so much so that Google took the "trapped animal" response and tried to besmirched the considerable and well earned reputation of PI. One Google response by Google blogger Matt Cutts is unintentionally hilarious, but telling: they think exploiting user details for 18 months at a time before deleting their logs is taking "privacy very seriously", whereas I think it mean they don't give a flying damn about privacy. However, with the fact that most students have hotmail and gmail accounts anyway and therefore are giving these organisations this information, does it matter if Universities also give Google or Microsoft this data?
Ultimately, practical and risk point of view, I still think there are a number of advantages to an in-house email and groupware service which make it preferable to outsourcing the service. However, with Universities never having enough funding, the financial pull of these deals are incredible. For many Universities, too much to resist. For those who keep the service in-house, offering comparable or better groupware functionality is now tantamount - a race against time, a race which if lost will cause the who service to be outsourced. June 05 Or Is It..?My previous post rang the obituary of Firefox 1.5. Only a couple of days later, reknowned security researcher, Michal Zalewski, exposed them to the Full Disclosure mailing list.
Now, I wont go into whether or not I think the way he discloses these is good practise or not, but it certainly leaves an interesting dilemma. As I've pointed out on this blog in the last post, for a lot of academic institutions it is necessary to support a single major version of many products for the entire academic session. For Firefox, this year, 07/08, it was 1.5, and the hope has been that Firefox 1.5 will last just this one last month. This security issue could throw an almighty spanner in the works for those who haven't completed their testing.
There is a silver lining, I noted: A 1.5.0.13 update on Mozilla's FTP site?
May 31 Firefox 1.5 - Now REALLY deadWell, Mozilla have finally gotten round to releasing the latest patch for their browser: 1.5.0.12 for those running Firefox 1.5 and 2.0.0.4 for those running Firefox 2. The significant point is, this is the very last security patch for Firefox 1.5.
In a way, I'm going to miss the plucky little 1.5. I was so disappointed with the scope of Firefox 2.0. I couldn't see that it added anything particularly interesting that would affect my everyday browsing, and also managed to break a whole bunch of extensions!
From a point of view of deployment in educational institutions, the extra month they added onto the support of the 1.5 version of the browser, which I mentioned here, was much appreciated. June is when the real updates for 07/08 start and it allows you to put in a nice and fresh 2.0.0.4 onto your desktops or into your deployment images. And then quietly warn user support that they will suddenly get lots of calls from annoyed users whose extensions no longer work... Keele-HauledOne of the things I find totally fascinating about Web 2.0 and Social Networking is just how far many institutions are from "getting it".
The latest example is a stunning lack of nouse from the University of Keele. This episode started with a couple of groups on Facebook - one suggesting that a Keele lecturer was not very nice (except they used a much, much harsher turn of phrase) and another group which was basically protesting that the Vice-Chancellor of Keele, recently got a pay rise which the students felt did not match her performance. Keele responded in the dumbest way possible, sending a threat of legal action and expulsion to all students.
The fascinating part about this is the students' and University's response on BBC News. The University said there were consequences for these comments as there would be "in a factory" (the fact Keele compares itself to a factory speaks volumes!). However, the President of the Student Union made the point that these sort of comments have always been made in pubs and the like. There's a key point - the University appears to want to live in blissful ignorance of any criticisms their students have, because all that will happen is the same criticisms will be voiced, merely in pubs or other domains where the University can't legally threaten them. What did Keele achieve, then, by these threats? Simply: that lecturer's name has been splashed about the media as being not very good, attention has been brought on the VC's pay, the university's reputation has taken a hit and they have put off people from applying there because they feel they will be treated like dirt there, and their freedom of speech undermined. Well done, Keele bosses!
Back in November I attended a Web 2.0 Conference and was struck by how much the students regard Facebook as an essential tool for their student life. Now, I am on Facebook (with a shocking lack of friends in comparison to many!), I can see why. We, at educational establishments, should not be talking about it as this threat, an external body only controllable with legal representation, but instead recognise how important this tool is, and how it improves the students' experiences of their life at the establishment and how that will lead to them recommending others or even becoming donors as alumni. As for criticism, be glad you saw that criticism because it gives you the chance to improve yourself and your service. I saw this only yesterday when browsing the University of Edinburgh network. Someone posted that they wished our email service had a Notifier like GMail does. Its now on my "things to look into". I wouldn't have found out about that desire, something which could really improve the quality of service, if it hadn't been for Facebook.
Now all I have to wonder is, where is Keele? Or is it a acronym from something like Keep Emerging E Learning Elsewhere? May 23 DefaultingA user of the Group Policy Firefox Extension managed to find a cunning problem with it last week. Damn!
Unfortunately, the "set as default" functionality has a small flaw. Well, actually, its a huge flaw for those setting boolean values. The problem is, with boolean, if Firefox's default for a value is "TRUE" and you use the extension to set the value to "FALSE", if the user sets the value back to "TRUE", the next time Firefox runs it looks at the value and thinks, "the user hasn't set that value, so I'll set it to the default the extension says". So, it'll constantly be set to "FALSE" on every run (hope you understood that!).
I am looking into this. Things are pretty hectic for me because I have finally bought my first flat and am in the process of moving. However, I'll try and find a late night to crack this one. May 20 ITIL: IT Services meets Common SenseLast week I got the chance to study for my ITIL Foundation certificate. For those who haven't examined ITIL, it is a framework for best practise in IT Services - not solutions for IT Services, but practises. I have heard ITIL described as nothing more than "documented common sense".
Everyone in IT Services uses common sense, so its surely pretty pointless? You'd think that, but the truth is IT Services is incredibly lacking in common sense. One of the fascinating things about this course was at the start you are pretty cynical about it, and look at some of the examples, some of the explanations as "that doesn't really count for us, because we do things differently here". As the course carried on, this started to changed to being more, "I can understand why they are saying that, it does seem better that way" and as you thought more and more about it, it became "hang on, why the hell don't we do it like that?".
It is because of this, that in order to bring in ITIL practises in an organisation, you need to get buy in from a lot of staff and not just managers. A big reason for this is, simply, ITIL could make IT Services basically more boring, because there is better incident management, more control of change management, more documentation. It alters the culture of IT Services.
One of the most interesting areas I found was Change Management. Users know exactly how bad many in IT Services are at this. They are using their computer one day, happy, turn it off and then switch it off. They turn it on the next morning and a message comes up as Windows boots that something or other is installing. They log in and a message comes up and every time they run a program an error comes up. They and a hundred others phone support, who don't know about the change. Someone from support goes to the computer eventually figures out the change and then goes off to try and find the person who made the change, who is oblivious of the hell they have caused. Change Management is about controlling the entire process of changes from authorising the change request, organising the creation of the change, the stages of testing, documenting the change and communicating the change. Its also really interesting to me because no one make more or bigger changes to the circa 10,000 machines in the Managed Desktop at the University of Edinburgh. I like the concept of Change Management because I am quite the opposite of the gung-ho guy making unannounced changes and the Change Management process I currently adhere to is a dangerously paranoid quadruple checking of every step before and after I have made the change (which is why I never make changes on a Friday, or else I'd spend my weekend concerned about the change I made!).
Service Level Management is another area I find interesting. The main aspect of this are Service Level Agreements (SLAs) - contracts between the IT Services and the customers that define services provided, the level of service, metrics judging the service and what is expected of both IT Services and the customer in provision of this service. What is interesting about this is that many IT Services organisations have had this sort of thing for some time, except they tended to be one sided (the onus has only ever been on the IT Services side), toothless (written with find-in-the-air metrics and with service levels defined which are easy to match) and often the customers don't know they even exist. What is interesting about SLAs is that they are agreed between the customer and IT Services and so, both sides know the boundaries. It allows for better control of the services, allowing better services for everyone though sometimes at the detriment of the well-placed individual. A good example of this is a file store. Let's say you give everyone 100 MB quota on this file store. Let's say 5% run out of space but they know someone who in the past has up-ed their quota. They phone this person who does this for them. However, what if the file store physically runs out of space - the person using only 50MB tries to save a document and gets a "Disk Full" error? The 95% can legitimately complain that IT Services are not matching their SLA for that service. That's not to say you can't help the other 5% out, its just if they want a better service, they need to provide the resources for it. In other words, pay more! Of course, it you find that 20% or more run out of space, it may be a case you need to look at Capacity Management , look to find the resources to buy in new servers so next time you renegotiate the SLA, you can offer 200MB or more.
The course I did was 3 days long and pretty intensive and what I've said above is barely scratching the surface. After all, I haven't even mentioned probably the most crucial part: the CMDB, I haven't even mentioned the Service Desk, Incident Management, Problem Management, and many other aspects of it. If you happen to be in Service Management, don't just get yourself interested in it - its crucial that you get the entire organisation behind the idea. Its an idea that could change IT Services radically. May 04 Firefox 1.5 and the Stay of ExecutionAs I suggested here, it looked as if Mozilla would budge on their plans to kill Firefox 1.5 on the 24th April. They certainly left it late to change their mind - that happened on no less than the 24th April, the day it was meant to be killed. Talk about a last minute stay of execution!
As I suggested before, Firefox 1.5.0.12 is still in the works and supported for Firefox 1.5 will end once that has been released. According to Mozilla's schedules, the release of that is scheduled for May 22nd, so a few weeks before the reaper comes along to finish it off.
Be warned though, after that, Mozilla will use their automatic update mechanisms to move people forcibly from Firefox 1.5 to 2.0. If you don't want that, make sure your users aren't getting automatic updates. Koniningingdag?...Koenigdag?...let's just say: Queen's DayA personal post, this.
I just have to say, I have just had a brilliant very long weekend in the Netherlands, where on the 30th April they were celebrating, koninginnedag, or as we say in English, "Queen's Day".
I've uploaded a few of the 50 odd photos I took at the weekend to my photo album here on the blog.
I have to say, I absolutely adore Amsterdam - this was my third time over in Amsterdam and every visit I love it more. The people there are great, so friendly and welcoming, even when its clear your Dutch is more like Double Dutch! I also have to say, as a red blooded male, the ladies there are WOW - the Dutch ladies are beautiful!
The Queen's Day party seemed to go on for at least 3 days and nights - from the band we saw in Nieuwmarkt on the Saturday to Koninginnenacht (the night before Queen's Day) where there were frantic parties going on all over the place to a wander through Vondelpark early on the day itself seeing the many stalls where people were selling their goods and children played instruments and sung and danced to raise money (all street trade is allowed just on that day and, so I heard, in Vondelpark is restricted to stalls run by children - except the adults usually are there just to keep an eye on them and run a fair few of the stalls!). After Vondelpark, me and my friends I was staying with wandered off to the hectic party in Leidseplein, got some food, and then eventually headed off to the massive party with a crowd of 80,000 on the museumplein. That party went on till 10pm - unfortunately I didn't stay till the end because the wife of the couple I was staying with had to work and frankly, I was already sunburnt to a crisp!
I have to say, I had an amazing time and it was more fun in such a relaxed, stressless environment than I've had in some time. So, thank you Amsterdam, for a wonderful, wonderful party, a wonderful place and I hope I'll be back soon!
And I still can't pronounce "koninginnedag"... |
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