John Dolan

XO Buyer beware

It's hard to know how good a relationship is until you have your first fight.  That's when everything comes to the surface.  Do they really care, or are they simply providing lip service.  The same is true of a phone/data vendor.  You never know how good they are until you have your first set of issues.  If someone tells you how great a phone vendor is because they've never had any issues, don't pay them any attention.  They are still in the honey moon phase.

One of my clients just moved to a new location.  They decided on XO as their phone/data vendor.  I can't tell you enough how grately I regret that decision.  XO has provided some of the worst customer service I have ever experienced.  The Data line was over a week late, and they still haven't completed the port of the phone numbers which they had weeks in advance!

Through it all they demonstrated no sense of urgency, no desire to go the extra mile and no desire to make any effort to make it right.  A great example is that when we pointed out that based on the timeframe they explained, we should have the line live on Monday rather than Wednesday, it took about 4 emails before they finally came out and said "we don't work weekends."  After 3 urgent requests to have a Reverse DNS entry set-up, they finally responded with an 800 number to call and provided an incorrect account number to reference.

All of the phone lines still haven't ported over and they are still asking if dates 1 week out "will be convenient for us."  No it's not convenient!  Can you at least demonstrate that you understand the pain we are in?  I would love to post the emails I've received from them, but I'm cocerned about legality, so I'll just leave you with a friendly caution.  I would rather have BellSouth DSL with one analog line before using a T1 and PRI from XO.  Buyer beware.

Metadata and why you should care

A good thing is happening, especially among Law Firms and Financial Planners.  They are becoming increasingly concerned about the metadata that is left behind in their documents.  Microsoft Office, Word Perfect and Adobe leave a tremendous ammount of metadata in their documents.  This metadata can reveal information such as who has edited the document, comments that were added and then removed, deleted content and so on. 

There are a number of options for removing metafata from a document before it leaves your office.  Below are a few:

1. Install a program such as CutePDF and send out all documents as pdf's
2. Install the "Remove Hidden Data tool for Office 2003 and Office XP" utility from Microsoft.  This will provide you an option under the File Menu to "Remove Hidden Data" under the file menu.  Simply click this button and then save document before sending out.
3. If you are using WordPerfect, go to http://support.correl.com and look-up answer 753605.
4. Install a 3rd party app like the Metadata Assistant from Payne Consulting or ezClean by SoftWise Consulting.

Windows Mobile - Tilt

After 6 months of waiting for Verizon to release the i760, their Windows Mobile 6 Professional cell phone, I gave up and switched to AT&T.  The phone I purchased is the HTC Tilt.  I am loving it.  A number of features have really made this phone a delight to use:

• HTML Email
• Integrated Search capabilities
• Built-in GPS (I'm using TeleNav software)
• Decent camera
• Tilt Screen (I thought it was more of a gimmick but has turned out to be very useful)
• Scroll wheel
• TouchFlow technology let's me scroll through webpages, emails, etc with a drag of my finger.  Not nearly as cool as the iPhone's, but useful all the same.
• PCMKeyboard - This is an awesome touchscreen keyboard that enables you to effectively type with your fingers.

There are only a couple issues with the phone that have been a bit frustrating for me.  One is the occasional lock-up requiring a soft-reset.  The second is that the screen cuts out about 10 seconds into a phone call.  You have to hit power button to bring it back on.

I've made a few minor modifications to the phone to help make it a bit more useful.  I'll provide the details below for those of you so inclined.

The first thing I did was a hard reboot of the phone and then performed a soft reset before AT&T installed all their custom software.  This provides a much cleaner phone.  I then edited the registry so that I could use the Push-to-talk button as a programmable button.  I then default HTC Home screen which provides easy access to a quick-dial feature, weather, volume settings, a program launcher, and a music player (AT&T removes this).  And the last update I made was installing an RDP client so I can connect to servers from my phone when needed.

Here are some technical details that may be helpful:

Enable PTT Button

Download and install the MobileRegistryEditor from http://www.breaksoft.com/Blog/Utilities/2005/1/Mobile_Registry_Editor.aspx.  Connect your phone to your computer and then run the application.  The registry keys you'll want are:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shell\Keys
   Add a new key:   40C6
   Add a string under the key called "Name" with the value "Button 6"

   Add a new key 40C7
   Add a string under this key called "Name" with the value "Button 6 (hold)"

Note:  None of the names should have "" in them.

HTC Home Page
Download from http://pocketnow.com/images/brandon/HTCHome6.cab

PCM Keyboard
Download from http://www.pocketcm.com/keyboard.php

Exchange 2007

This week I began the process of migrating Viant's network to Exchange 2007.  Like most of Microsoft's 2007 releases it's a different paradigm.  Like Office 2007 I'm willing to put up with the changes because all in all I really like the direction it's going.

Here are a few items I noted from the install:

1. My 15 to 30 Outlook 2007 brownouts immediately went away.  Glad to have a potential solution to this issue!
2. OWA for 2007 rocks!
3. I'm looking forward to hitting ActiveSync on my cell phone.
4. The pre-reqs on the installation wizard are more of a strating point than an exaustive list.
5. Install IIS beforehand (but not SMTP or NNTP)
6. Install MS patch ... (Hopefully I'll remember this later)
7. If you're at all like me, you'll want to move a few mailboxes over to Exchange 2007 and test it out before moving the rest of your mailboxes.  Well, if you do this, you may have some mail flow issues.  You need to note this MS article for the fix:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6297510c-7022-4702-83e6-a213a93d46e1.aspx which tells you how to create a two-way connection between the two servers (Use the New-RoutingGroupConnector cmdlet to establish a connection between a Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 routing group and an Exchange Server 2003 or Exchange 2000 Server routing group when the organization is running more than one version of Exchange.)

Sample command:

[PS] D:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Bin>New-RoutingGroupConnector -Name 2003to2007 -SourceTransportServers 2007MailServer -TargetTransportServers 2003MailServer -Cost 100 -Bidirectional $true

Hope this helps.  Happy hunting!

Computer selection - Apple vs. PC

If you told me 1 month ago, that I would be overly excited regarding a Dell computer coming in the mail, I would have laughed.  For the last year I've been working mostly on Apple computers.  I love the PowerBook I have been using (dual core processor, 1.5 Gig of RAM, etc).  The computer is snappy, comes in and out so sleep mode without hesitation.  I reboot it once every week or two.  The integrated search is amazing and the operating system is more robust and more stable than the Windows OS.  Do applications crash?  Yes.  Does it just work? No.  But it does tend to work just a little better and so I've been mostly pleased.

So, why am I going to a PC?  A few reasons:

1. Parallel's and Fusion are not seamless and I don't want to use BootCamp every time I need a Windows application.  The answer to all of my points below is just use Parallel's.  That is great in theory, but using Parallel's is not the same as running Windows on a physical system.  There are performance issues, there is the lag to start-up the VM, and then there are other items as well.
2. File Synchronization - It's very easy to take an offline folder with you on a PC.  If your computers on a domain and you are heading out of town, you can easily select a folder and make it available offline.  On a Mac you have to manually copy the file to your desktop and then manually move it back.
3. Entourage has some issues:
   
   1. Task Syncing - Task management is foundational to everything I do and so it is critical that I can quickly get to my tasks regardless of the platform I am using (e.g. Windows Mobile, PC, Remote Desktop).  Entourage does not sync tasks back to Exchange and so I have not been able to manage tasks well from the system I am using the most - my Notebook.
   2. Public Folders - I can't view tasks in public folders, and the syncing mechanism for public folders is not as clean in Entourage as it is in Outlook.
4. Apple works great when you do what they want you to do, but it often will not let you do what YOU want to do:
   1. Apple Mail will not let me forward an email as an attachment.  This is especially an issue when reporting spam.  I have to go into the message, view long headers, then forward the message.  Sure, it's great that when I get a few email messages as attachments in a single message that they automatically unpackage it for me and just show me all the text of the messagaes.  But what if I wanted the messages divided?  They have no option for viewing it as it was sent.
   2. I can't easily move the Swap File, User Folder, etc to a different partition.  There are so many reasons this is a worthwhile thing to do, especially on an Apple, but they make it phenomenally complex.
   3. The Integrated Search is awesome, but what if I only want to search for PowerPoint documents created in a certain date range?  Well, I could mostly make that happen, but an Advanced Search feature would sure be nice.
5. Where's the Task Manager?  Sure I can run "top" from the terminal, but it sure would be nice to have a Task Manager type utility that allows me to change views by a single click and easily dig in.
6. My buttons keep getting switched around!  When I connect to Citrix a copy is <Ctrl> <Shift> C, in Terminal Server it is <Ctrl> C and from the OS it's <Apple> C (I think).  So, if I'm copying from a Terminal server to the desktop I first use the one shortcut and then have to switch back to my apple shortcuts.
7. I like my Windows utilities.  If I were more of a linux guy, I wouldn't care about this one so much.  But I'm used to my Windows network scanners, Disk utilities, etc which means I have to TS into another system on the domain or run Parallels to get use of those (and unforunately Wi-Spy doesn't seem to like running in a virtual environnment).
8. Entourage's search features are miserable.  Searching for items in Entourage is nowhere near as please as searching in Windows.  Of course Entourage does have the advanced search which is great, but it's an extra couple steps to get to and so I rarely use it.
9. Apple does not effectively utilize Categories (this is certainly debatable) and their use of categories does not sync back to MS Exchange (even in Entourage).
10. To be effective in iWork, you need to learn to navigate the inspector, which can be cumbersome, I far prefer the Ribbon in Office 2007 or the standard interface in Office 2003.
11. I feel more productive on a PC.  I feel more creative on a Mac, but I feel like I'm better able to get things done on a PC.  This of course will vary by user.
    

Now there are some items about the Mac I will very much miss:

1. Mac Mail's intergrated search - Microsoft's integrated search is nowhere close to Mac Mail's integrated search.  I tend to use Entourage more than Mac Mail.  However, there is no search that is in any way comperable to Mail's search.  It is quick, easy to use and tremendously effective.  If only Mail had integrated Calendar and Tasks that would sync with Exchange I might be reconsidering right now.
2. Spotlight - Although it doesn't have the "Advanced Search" I would like to have, it is still better than any of the other Desktop Searches out there because it's quick, easy to use and tremendously effective.  However, I wish they would add a few lines of text from the results which would make it far better than the competition.
3. Path Finder - For those not familiar with Finder, it's much like Windows Explorer, but better.  A company created a replacement for Finder called Path Finder which is even better than Finder.  Mac enthusiasts will quickly note that Windows Explorer in Vista was a lousy attempt to emulate the Mac (a lot of features in Vista are a lousy attempt to emulate the Mac).  This leads to the next point
4. Apple keeps things clean and simple, Windows keeps things busy and cluttered.  The new Windows Explorer windows is a great example of this as is the new Control Panel.  For more detail on this see the Microsoft video referenced in this article:  ttp://www.ipodobserver.com/story/25957
5. iTunes in apple is better than iTunes in Windows.  Fortunately I'll still have my Mac Mini at home to run iTunes and sync my iPod to.
6. iMovie is far better than any of the $100 video editing products for Windows and iPhoto is still a good bit better than any of the Windows image library utils (although Picasa is not far behind).
7. The templates in iWork are so much cleaner and crisper than the templates in MS Office.

Well, enough blogging for one day.  I may come back to this later on and add some more thoughts, this is very much off the top of my head.  Next entry will be why I purchased a Dell.  I never saw that one coming ...

Will I ever get my new i760?

One day soon, Verizon is going to be releasing the i760.  There first real Windows Mobile 6 phone.  I am very excited.  So excited that I've become addicted to the PDAPhonehome.com rumor mill.  Supposedly I was going to have it Mid-August, then late August.  Now I'm hearing next week, or the week after or the first of October.  Who am I to believe?  Why can't Verizon just be cool like AT&T and have an announced launch date for their new phones?  I guess because Samsung isn't cool like Apple.  Oh well.  I digress.

Why do I care?  Because my i730 is done.  I reboot it at least once a day.  Typically 2-3 times.  The battery does not even last half a day anymore, and I never know when I have messages (okay, this is partly my fault for not installing a utility that would show if I have voicemails).  Anyhow, I like the size of the i760 and I like the features.  Also, I can't wait to have a camera on my phone.  I can count how many times that would have been useful.

For you curious ones out there, you can find the specs here:  http://pdadb.net/index.php?m=specs&id=696

Parallels to VMWare Fusion

The Background

One bucket.  That's what I want.  One bucket for all my action items.  Unfortunately, when you regularly work work from 5 different computers that may or may not be conneted to the same network, this becomes a bit difficult.  Especially when those systems aren't connected to the domain your co-workers are connected to.

Fortunately, I have a Virtual Machie running in Parallels on my notebook which is conneted to that domain.  I'm a huge VMWare fan, but I'm every bit the Parallel's fan is well.  Coherence rocks.  However,  I do most of my strategic work from my home office which has a Mac mini and a Dell XPS system running Vista.  So, the notebook is not the right location for that VM, it should be on one of those home systems.

All of that rambling to say, I've decided to move the VM that lives on the domain where my tasks ought to be organized from Parallels on my notebook to VMWare Fusion running on my Mac Mini at home.  My hope was that VMware Fusion would natively recognize the Parallels file.  Unfortunately, that's just not the case.  Below is the brief synopsis of what needed to happen to get it working.

The Technical Details

I first installed the VMware Converter (http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/) onto my Virtual Machine.  VMWare Converter has to be run as an administrator which my default account is not.  A simple Run As command took care of this.  Once I had VMware Converter running I simply clicked the "Import Virtual Machine" button, selected "Standalone virtual machine ..." as the Source, "This Local Machine" at the Source Login screen and then finished out the Wizard without much more thought. 

Once the Converter finished its job and it gave me a folder with all the needed Vmdk files, I enabled file sharing on the Mac Mini and moved the files from my notebook to the Mini.  I then opened Fusion (which I downloaded from http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/fusion/) and selected "File -> New".  This brought up a mostly self-explanatory Wizard.  The only slightly confusing part is that the Wizard asks for a Destination Location on the screen where you name your system.  I soon found this does not matter because on the next screen (Virtual Hard Disk) gave me an "Advanced Disk Options" which allowed me to select "Use an Existing Virtual Disk" which then allowed me to select the location of the VMDK files I just moved to the system.

Once this was complete, I upgraged the hardware of the VM (under the Virtual Machine folder) and was mostly good to go.  Microsoft wanted me to reactivate everything due to the change in hardware (both Windows and Office).  That was definitely annoying and added one more notch to the "man I wish I could find a more viable alternative to Microsoft Windows for my client that isn't so dependent on Microsoft" meter.  That meter is certainly not over the edget yet, but it's definitely climbing.

Now that Microsoft is activated, it seems that all is well with the newly relocated VM.  We'll have to see how Fusion works out for me.  I think I'm going to miss Coherence, but I'm too cheap to buy a parallels license and very interested to see Fusion in action.  I'll run with it for a bit and let you know how it goes.  Already I like the "Take Snapshot" feature, I look forward to checking out 3D graphics (although I doubt I'll care, I'm such a boring computer user), and I'm glad they let me hid the toolbar.

Well, if you've read to the end leave a comment.  I want to know who both of you are :)  Of course I'm not sure if I'll find your diligence in reading such a boring post impressive or concerning ...

Backups and continuity

I had a much needed, but not at all desired, chance to think through backup, disaster recovery and business continuity (Archival wasn't really a subject of much thought at the time).

I provide Tier 2+ technical support to an engineering firm of about 40 peole.  The Boot Sector on a drive which hosts all of their Autocad files was corrupted today.  They backup to their Charlotte office, and so a restore would have taken a full day.  For reasons I'll go into in a technical article I'll post later today, we determined a backup of the data on the drive needed to be made before attempting a restore (disk utilities are cool, they can back-up drives you can't even see).  The backup took most of the day to complete and so the majority of their engineers were unable to work. 

As I think about this I am sickened.  I architected their network with new servers, daily backups, multiple domain controllers, etc just so this sort of thing wouldn't happen.  It did, and they lost a significant amount of money.  How could I have let this happen?

Well, I put lots of thought into disaster recovery, and lots of thought into backups, but not enough thought into business continuity.  How do they keep working in the event of a crisis of this sort?  Well, for $500 I could have purchard a couple external drive, and utilized sync toy to do a nightly one-way sync to it of all their critical data.  They could even rotate the drives so one is always off-site.  In a situation like this we could have immediately redirected the engineers to that drive and they would have been up and running in under an hour rather than having to be off-line for a full day.  It's not an elegant solution, but it's an example of one of many solutions that would have prevented this disaster (DFS/FRS is another with a slightly higher price tag).

The off-site backup to Charlotte is great for Backup and great for disaster recovery and even takes care of the archival needs as well.  It even addresses one aspect of the business continuity concern.  Should the building burn, should the office be leveled by a tornado, they could temporarily relocate their office staff to charlotte office and be back to work within a day or two.  However, this was not an issue I thought through.  What happens if a drive is corrupted, or a server crashes or ???  How quick can we recover from the minor crisis?   

Many of you have already thought through your Backup, Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity and Archival.  But have you?  Have you dug deep?  Have you considered the minor and the major disasters?  Are their opporunities to spend a little bit of money to add additional layers of responsiveness and robustness to your plan?  I'll close with a few random backup tips that may be of interest:

1. Never make a domain controller your backup server.
2. Never make your exchange server your backup server.
3. If your backing up large amounts of data off-site, consider if there are means of quickly getting data back on-line when needed. 
4. As long as I've got the space and time for it, I'd take a Differential over an incremental any day. 
5. Brick level back-ups of Exchange are wonderfully helpful.  If your Exchange backup require you to dismount the Exchange store to perform a restore, you may want to consider adding a brick level backup to your routine.

That's all I've got.  I'd love to hear any additional thoughts or ideas you may have on this subject as it's an extremely complex question with no clean solutions. 

One last note, if you're looking for a hosted solution, Fairway Consulting is considering a hosted solution for the church market (http://www.Fairwayconsulting.com) that is very exciting and ACS Technologies already has one (http://www.acstechnologies.com/).

IBM Support Heading downhill?

A couple years ago, I encouraged Perimeter to switch to IBM systems largely due to Dan Barber's reccomendations.  The story was better products, better support and happier users.  Well, this has mostly been the case.  Although lately I have been less impressed.

Today Richard (who works with me at Viant) called IBM Tech Support because the Device Manager on a server he was setting up showed that it did not have drivers for the Biometric Coprocessor.  I didn't realize IBM was putting security chips in servers, but I figured it'd be worth a call to Tech Support all the same.  Below is an outline of the call (told by me from Richard's perspective):

1. First stop, hardware support.  I didn't think that was what I'd chosen, but that's where
   they sent me...  The individual felt it was a software issue and so they transferred me to software support
2. Software support.  Couldn't find serial # of computer so they explained that they would need to transfer me to customer service so that I could decide on a support plan to cover the support call.  I tried to explain that the computer was brand new and that I didn't need a support plan.  She wasn't concerned.  She told me the protocol she had to follow required her to transfer me to Customer Service and that I needed to work out a support plan with them (At this point I bit my tongue rather than mention again that the system is brand new, purchased with a three year warranty and doesn't need a support plan!)
3. Customer service:  Placed me on hold 3 times, but still couldn't find SN.  How can they not find the Serial Number of a brand new system?  Even Dell can do that!!!  Finally he decides to transfer me back to software support.
4. Software support: A miracle, he finds the serial number and so I can now be helped!  (I think I hear angels singing...)  I explain the issue at which point he pulls out a shotgun and shoots the singing angels.  He has never heard of the biometric coprocessor, but is sure it's a hardware issue and so I need to be transferred again - to Hardware support, the place I first began 45 minutes ago.
5. HW support: She recommends installing the Intel chipset upgrade (when all else fails, upgrade the chipset I suppose, because I soon find out she's never heard of the biometric coprocessor). After 1 restarting & 4 additional waits on hold, I'm informed that the very nice lady with the 2-pack-a-day voice has spoken with supervisors 2 levels up the line & none of them have ever heard of a biometric coprocessor. I politely explain that, while I'm not sure of it's function on the server, on laptops & desktops the biometric coprocessor is responsible for the fingerprint scanner and interfaces with the built-in security chip.  John, who has been listening to the entire conversation, overhears me mentioning this as he's walking by the server.  We have a Eureka moment as we look at each other, and then look at the keyboard. It's an IBM keyboard with built-in fingerprint reader.  We unplug the keyboard and immediately the exclamation point goes away in the device manager.  I'm still on hold and at this point, but I've come to the realization that even if I did explain what the issue was to the person on the other end they probably a)  Wouldn't care and b)  Fail to communicate it with anyone else.  *Click*  I hang-up.  The problem is resolved.  My problem that is.  IBM still doesn't realize that their IBM labled keyboards with built in biometric coprocessors don't tend to work to well with their IBM labled servers.  And I'm afraid that problem is just the tip of the iceberg.

On the onehand this story is comical.  On the other it is very concerning.  I remember having the same feeling about Dell as their customer support began slacking.  For a little while there I thing there quality and service really fell off the wagon.  I hope IBM does not have to go through the same growing pains.  I was just getting comfortable here.  Who knows, maybe the grass is greener in HP gardens.  Bill Lloyd keeps telling me that's the place to be...

Favorite Podcasts

It's odd that I have a blog, considering I really don't spend much time reading blogs.  I spend a good bit of time in the car and so I've taken more to podcasting.  I've been listening to podcasts for a while and I've come down to a few that I keep going back to:

• Security Now with Steve Gibson (of GRC fame) - The most worthwhile blog I listen to.
• CNET News.com:  Security bites - Helps keep me aware of what's going on in the world of security from a 10,000 foot view.
• eWeek News and Views or CNET News.com daily tech news podcast  - It's not nearly as depressing as the evening news, but same general idea.  Helps keeps you informed, but five minutes instaed of 15 would have been fine.
• Starbucks Experience - I think the main reason I like this podcast is that most of them are less than 5 minutes.  Brilliant!  This podcast is all about customer service and it's good to be thinking about these things.
• Let My People Think (Ravi Zacharias) - Ravi does a great job of blending apologetics with the matters of the heart.  This is a great podcast
• Lastly, I subscribe to, but rarely listen to the Chris Pirillo Show.  So, this one isn't really a reccomendation, but if you're into that sort of thing it's out there:)

How about you?  I'd love to here what Podcasts that you'd like to reccomend.