The Portable Consultant

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

The Internet isn’t our modern version of the Library of Alexandria, Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive is closer in spirit to that ancient centre of knowledge.

link rot
Over time, especially Internet time, web links break. It’s a part of the natural changing order of things. But the Portable Consultant is particularly sorry to see knowledge, freely offered by a company as part of its marketing, removed completely from the web after a merger or acquisition.

The Oracle Corporation is good at this - or bad, depending on your point of view.

It happened when Oracle acquired Stellent, a well-known ECM company.

The Stellent site remained for a time, but links to free resources like white papers broke quickly and those to training programs followed soon after. It was reasonable, perhaps, in the case of training as that function came under the control of Oracle University. It was sad in the case of the other online ECM resources and white papers that disappeared. Some of these still exist but have been buried without the Stellent name, no doubt because the branding was inconsistent. If the Google search that lists any of these has a broken link you might try looking on Oracle.com under Fusion Middleware (say, What?).

re-branding trumps Search Engine Optimization
Such re-branding seems foolish in one important sense: a Google search on “Stellent training” does not offer any canonical links to Oracle training services on the first page of hits, but if you search the Oracle site you may find it buried in Oracle University under the incomprehensible name of Fusion Middleware. Right, as if all those who read about Stellent in (pre-acquisition) articles and reviews will recognize that Stellent is today “Fusion Middleware”.

No doubt this made sense to someone Oracle management.

Hyperion articles lost
It happened again when Oracle acquired Hyperion.

This time it was more personal. The Portable Consultant had written here about an article on the (former) Hyperion site, Unstructured Text and Structured Data. It took its theme from the George Lakoff book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (what categories reveal about the mind). The Hyperion article links categorization with data mining and Enterprise Content Management, describing several data mining approaches from various companies active in the space.

Sadly, that article is nowhere to be found on the Net. If it does still exist it is buried so deeply within the Oracle site that none of the unique keywords can retrieve it.

However, with some patience, I was able to retrieve a copy through The WayBack Machine at the Internet Archive.

What a shame that such articles should be lost for no apparent reason or for the sake of branding or a change in marketing approach. Thank goodness someone recognized the fragility of our Internet and is attempting to build our new Library of Alexandria.

The Open Text Index and the Internet Archive
I first heard of Brewster Kahle in connection with the intriguing WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers) distributed data search/retrieval system. WAIS indexed databases on Internet sites (not web sites, for this was before Berners-Lee created the world-wide web). As I recall, a central index led searchers to indexes, often at universities and research establishments – foreshadowing today’s Internet search engines.

Later, when Open Text Corporation’s Tim Bray had established the Open Text Index search engine, it became for a short time the back-end search engine for Yahoo! (circa 1995). As technical administrator of the OTI I regularly created a small pile of backup tapes for Open Text’s CEO, Tom Jenkins, to hold up at presentations as: “all the information on the world wide web”. For a time this was probably a fair approximation. Later, these tapes were passed on to Brewster Kahle to incorporate into the Internet Archive.

Today the WayBack Machine provides one of the few links (pun intended) to our Internet past. Whole sites are harvested at regular intervals to provide access, if sometimes spotty, to past web site versions and the information they held. I was able to find my missing article in a collection of pages from the old Hyperion site of 2006.

That I can retrieve Unstructured Text and Structured Data from the Internet Archive is a testament to the foresight of Internet pioneers like Kahle. That I cannot find it through an Internet search engine or retrieve it from an Oracle archive is an example of (understandable) short term commercial interests that do not practice knowledge management… including those companies that would be happy to tell you all about their KM software offerings!

Cheers,
-pmh