The Portable Consultant

The Portable Consultant now finds himself the owner of no less than five Microsoft Windows systems, including two laptops. Even taking into account the eventual conversion of some of the older systems to Linux, there will likely remain three or so.

To make a long story short, I’ve been interested in Windows Home Server since Todd Cochrane of the Geek News Central podcast covered it at a tech conference some time ago.

Being frugal, I wouldn’t consider getting a complete turnkey solution such as the HP MediaSmart Server. I’d rather recycle an old, suitable PC -initially, at least. WHS is said to live happily on a Pentium III, 1 Ghz box and the fact that it can be headless (no monitor, keyboard, or mouse required) is a bonus since my townhouse is short of horizontal surfaces for that sort of thing.

Of course, being frugal, I will be comparing WHS with any open source options but I recalled that the Microsoft product had some efficiencies that might justify the cost and one of these is Single Instance Store which promises to reduce the storage required for the OS since only one instance of any given Windows system file would be stored.

To verify this, I checked with the Microsoft product pages.

You likely know where this is going… I couldn’t find any reference to SIS after ten minutes of browsing and following product page links. I’m sure it’s there, but I couldn’t find it among all the Let’s-not-confuse-the-Simple-Home-User text.

So I tried the Wikipedia entry for WHS… Complete Success!

Wikipedia has a complete, clear (even for the-Simple-Home-User), and concise description of the product complete with links to entries for terms such as SIS itself.

Now, it is likely that Microsoft had a hand in writing and/or editing this entry. No matter. The simple straightforward style got me past all their marketing department’s product jargon to answer the questions I had about the product.

Moral of the story: No online product research is complete without a visit to Wikipedia.

Cheers,
-pmh

The Portable Consultant has noticed that the few posts he once did about the Lexar Lightning and its portable USB applications are the most popular hits on his blog site, almost all of which come via Google.

So it is with great shame that I must confess to being remiss in not informing both my regular readers (Hi, Mom!) of the recent increase in my ‘PQ’, my portability quotient.

Over the past few months I have acquired:

1. a new Lenovo X61 ThinkPad… smaller, more powerful, and with far better battery life than my old refurbished T30 (!) ThinkPad.

2. a new Nokia N800 Internet Tablet… pocket sized, blazingly fast at connecting to WiFi networks and bluetooth devices, a fine podcatcher and Internet Radio - with a linux terminal interface where I can enter most of the same shell commands I once used to manage big UNIX boxes.

3. a new unlocked Nokia 6300 GSM cell phone… a phone not only capable of going “native” in most countries of the world with local SIM cards, but also the miniature camera I’ve always needed to get those unexpected photos at unexpected times in unexpected places.

The whole, however, is greater than the sum of the parts. Together these devices enhance the capabilities of each other in ways I’m only beginning to appreciate.

I’ll be writing more about how these devices play together in the near future.

Cheers,
-pmh

Booth bunny
Once in a while every articulate consultant gets to play booth bunny at some technical show. So, having donned a jacket and tie, rather than the fur-trimmed swimsuit, The Portable Consultant was happy to take his turn describing his client’s services to their customers. During a break in the huge lines of people hungry to hear about infrastructure solutions design (”Servers R Us”, basically -all manner of hosting), I took the time to visit our booth neighbours who were presenting their Record and Document Management Systems pilot project.

Now the organization in question is large. Several divisions have the size and technical expertise to justify large initiatives within their own jurisdiction. That being said, I have always been something of a centralist with regard to IT, believing that enterprise-wide strategic solutions are preferable to tactical point solutions in several areas - document and records management being two of them, email being yet another.

So I was interested to learn that this particular ECM pilot project was apparently taking place with some involvement, or at least monitoring, from a central central strategic IT initiatives group. As I learned more, however, it was somewhat distressing to hear that the project would provide its own email archiving component and so the new system would, in fact, result in a de facto change in the enterprise’s existing email archiving abilities.

The quick answer
When I asked whether email would be treated as “business records” I was told they would. When I asked whether the new system would archive email for the business division in question I was told it would. When I asked whether the existing enterprise mail archive would continue to retain copies of mail archived information the proposed system the response was “Yes, if someone were to configure it that way.”

So it appears we have a business unit of this large enterprise making decisions that appear to lie outside their purview, namely the realm of the enterprise’s email archiving policy. It would take considerable knowledge and effort for one of the users to make the configurations necessary to restore the original functionality of the enterprise email archiving function once the division’s new record and document management system had been installed. In short, this one initiative has removed the word “Enterprise” from a portion of ECM policy.

Local versus central or indisputable mandate?
Some may see this as the old battle between the central IT folks and those in the business units. My view is that the ‘E’ in ECM stands for ‘enterprise’ and that a service like email archiving that is clearly within the enterprise mandate should not be altered at the departmental level except to enhance or expand. If this division’s email is no longer archived by the central service then the essential meaning of ‘enterprise’ email will have been lost.

Cheers,
-pmh