InfoBulletin
July 2008
Issue 101
SharePoint server, Great expectations (of recovery), Relief for storage headaches, Script of the month, SQL licences
coopsys.net
InfoBulletin
July 2008
Issue 101
SharePoint server, Great expectations (of recovery), Relief for storage headaches, Script of the month, SQL licences
coopsys.net
January 2007 Choosing Windows Vista, Phone-to-Calendar synchronisation, Blu-ray v. HD DVD, How full is your inbox?, How safe is that web site?
August 2006 Dell 9G PowerEdge server overview, Shop online? You'd have to be certified!, ADSL to the power of 8, Control your server 100ft away, Computing and telephony converge, Where are my Outlook pictures?
April 2006 Faster broadband, memory upgrades, What does your PC say about you?, Player security updates, Clock screensaver
*** NewsBytes ***
Firefox 3: killed in the rush
Delivering even 13 gigabits of data per second from its servers, Mozilla found that it still couldn't keep pace with the 14,000 people every minute who were downloading its much vaunted Firefox browser version 3. After a couple hours of outage, download servers were back up serving close to 9,000 downloads a minute. The interface will appear familiar to users of v2 but underneath is a revamped one-click bookmark manager, automatic checking of site security SSL certificates (eg for online shopping), fast full-page zooming, and an 'Awesome bar' (or smart location bar) that simplifies smart tagging of bookmarks and provides search-alikes from within your tags, eg any site containing the word "grant". Best of all, existing Firefox fans will notice that 3 uses less memory than 2, while the page rendering and layout engine loads web pages 2 to 3 times faster. www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox
I'm on the Sat-Nav
Mobile manufacturer Nokia will be pushing GPS navigation in half of its phones sold in the next 4 years. The market leader plans to offset decreasing handset prices move by generating new revenue streams in the majority of its business and multimedia handsets by 2012, shipping 35 million GPS units this year. The company's existing Nokia Maps software gives access to to downloadable maps for more than 200 countries. In a parallel move, Microsoft has announced its Windows Embedded NavReady 2009 for satellite navigation devices, essentially a cut-down of Windows CE 5 as used by several GPS manufacturers.
Holographic storage shines through
Holographic storage is finally making it to market and is aiming squarely at the tape storage sector. Developer InPhase Technologies is producing its Tapestry hologram storage, a 5.25" diameter, clear plastic disc in a cartridge, with data stored on the disc surface at 20MB/second by a blue laser. Although up to 4 times slower than LTO3 tape, Tapestry has a 50-year life, and at 300GB per disc is 6-12 times the capacity of Blu-ray, with later generations increasing capacity to 1.6TB and 120MB/sec. However at $18,000 per drive and $180 per disc in volume, such high capacity investment needs careful justification.
20,000 orders milestone
Recently we supplied our 20,000th order! Some valuable Facilities Management work for one of our regular clients.
Slow boot gets the boot
Forty years of research by HP engineers has come to fruition and may spell the end of endless boot up times for computer owners simply waiting for their machines to be ready for use. The discovery of a fourth basic type of electrical circuit (in addition to the existing resistors, capacitors and inductors) was made by a team at Hewlett-Packard led by Stanley Williams and published in the journal Nature. The so-called 'memristor' could result in memory that doesn't forget its data when switched off, since it remembers both the direction and the amount of charge that flows through the circuit.
Lower charges for calls on BT lines
Save up to 40% on calls via bulk purchasing. Our telecom partner Worksmart is offering significantly reduced costs on BT lines. It's like changing your gas provider, you keep the same numbers, lines and BT service commitment, but the cost is much less. We've switched ourselves to this service. If you'd like to know more please contact us below.
RealSnailMail [RSM] installation
Art imitating life? Part of the Slow Art exhibition at the SIGGRAPH 2008 conference in August, the Real Snail Mail project employs land snails "Cecil", "Austin" and "Muriel" (Helix Aspersa) fitted with RFID chips as messengers delivering emails at around 0.03mph through their tank. Messages are picked up and received by RFID reader hotspots in the tank. RealSnailMail was presented by research fellows Vicky Isley and Paul Smith at Bournemouth University on 17th June - "a physical and biological interruption to the flow of communication ... allowing us to explore notions of time". http://www.realsnailmail.net/
Work better, sleep more
Got the mark of the "qwerty" keyboard on your cheek yet? Then you are clearly already ahead of the times, taking naps to boost your post-lunch productivity. Organisations were encouraged this month to let their staff have a nap in their lunch break as part of National Siesta Day and make the Spanish tradition acceptable in UK culture. The non-profit making organisation Siesta Awareness cites a 10-20 minute break such as this increasing productivity by over 30%. Sweet (short) dreams.
Survey results: charity Internet use
The full results of consultants nfpSynergy's annual Virtual Promise 2007 survey of charities' use of the Internet is now available, and tackles such questions as budgets, board involvement with strategy, use of open source software, systems integration and marketing.
*** More NewsBytes ***
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1.
Share and SharePoint alike
A one-size collaboration tool that fits all? IB finds out.
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Help at hand. |
Whatever else you think of Microsoft and its software, you have to hand it to them for marketing genius and labelling. They certainly have a way with simplified, understandable names for their products, and none more so than with Microsoft SharePoint. 
Collaboration made easyThis is server software that does what it says - it's a point for sharing your Office documents and information seamlessly and securely with colleagues, wherever they are located. No more wrestling with single Word documents - the old familiar cry that rings out across the office "Can you close that Word report so I can edit it?!!" (and what do you do when the person hampering your efforts is accessing your document remotely from home?). An end to Excel users grappling for control of a single spreadsheet. New possibilities of preparing presentations in tandem or teams, thereby bringing in better design experience, instead of funnelling everything through the seminar presenter who is hopeless at layout and therefore comes up with generic PowerPoints that look like all the rest. Sadly the Microsoft marketing 'beyond the label' plunges headlong into business speak ... "a suite of server capabilities that help your organization by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight". Potential SharePointers involved in social rather than business enterprises might remain none the wiser. So let's break down a typical Sharepoint demo and translate it into not-for-profit language. A collaborative chameleon providing an alternative to remote users connecting into their office network via the VPN
What is SharePoint?
Expiration policies handled on auto-pilotSuppose organisational policy states that documents must generally be saved for 5 years. All of the above documents thus have predefined expiration policies and the new proposal sent to the repository will automatically be deleted in 5 years with warnings displayed beforehand at a predetermined interval. Personal data can be set to expire in a similar at sooner intervals to comply with data protection issues. None of these so-called 'business processes' are rocket science to implement and can be managed by any number of applications currently out there, many of them free and open source, but the effort and expertise required to install, configure and run such a disparate set of tools can be considerable. SharePoint effectively takes the known set of Microsoft Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so on) and integrates them into a server suite to make the data seamlessly sharable. Empowering global teams with collaborative workspacesWhat can SharePoint do? Sharepoint can help you create:
Although we have put together a particular example here focused on charity needs, a SharePoint site fulfils many other roles too, such as building event calendars, contacts, web links, discussions, issue lists, and announcements. You can also create custom lists in your team site that meet your team's specific information-sharing needs, for instance an Intranet database specific to your department. 
This collaborative chameleon can also provide alternative to remote users connecting into their office network via the VPN (virtual private network) or even in place of using third party software to allow file storage in Outlook Web Access (OWA). You also have the added advantage with the current SharePoint version that you can access your portal (and all its content) from any mobile device (even basic WAP phones) simply by adding a /m to the end of your web link (eg http://myexampleportal.net/test/m) Backups: Gathering no MOSSAs with any integrated system, it's important to have regular scheduled backups, especially since a SharePoint install takes over port 80 and therefore replaces the default web site in Internet Information Services (IIS). Services to OWA remote email may also need some port reconfiguration. A common misconception is that backups are only possible with the full portal server (now Microsoft Office SharePoint Server or MOSS). The latter has a nice friendly interface for backups and restores, as well as running scheduled backups. However backups and restores are also possible with SharePoint Services (the free SharePoint system, part of Windows Server 2003); to schedule this it's just a matter of setting up a Windows Scheduled Task that runs a command line backup. Make it happenOur experience taps into more than 4 years of running SharePoint portals so do contact us to find out more or to get yourself up and running with SharePoint. Contacts
-IB- Acknowledgements: Arik Fletcher |
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2.
Great expectations (of recovery)
When it comes to time spent on the computer, home and small office users are putting all their effort in wrong place.
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Help at hand. |
It's Monday, a very black Monday. Intensely black in fact. Because this is the colour, indeed the only colour, staring out at you from the screen. Is the computer is dead? Suddenly life feels very lonely as you are presented with your own unique scenario of helplessness, instead of merely reading about other people's disaster stories in the press. I and other colleagues receive distress calls from unknown people out of the blue on an almost weekly basis. The catastrophes are often initiated by drive boot failures and system corruptions, but what is more tragic is the human process of self-denial leading up to such failures. Symptoms are punctuated by such phrases as "The computer started to misbehave a couple of times last month", or "I forgot to write down any of the error messages" or "No, I've never done any backups". Is your computer failing you or is it actually the other way round?Of course, computers and their software should perfectly reliably all of the time, but to rely on such an assumption is to fly in the face of a myriad End-User Licence Agreements (EULA) which require the owner to accept the product 'as is', and thousands of reports of daily computer disasters. "It won't happen to me" isn't a basis for business continuity. Consider this: an operating system, be it Windows or Linux or any other flavour, is really, really complex. It will typically have been slaved upon over years or decades by hundreds of developers and testers, will comprise more than 60 million lines of software code, and be able to run on almost any given piece of computer hardware made by thousands of manufacturers. That's quite a feat of engineering. Your little Pet Calculator has run pretty well for perhaps the last 3 years and you may have invested hundreds of hours of your time installing and fine-tuning the desktop environment and applications like spell-checking, mail folders and the document structure. And yet invested nothing in protecting your precious documents and data. Today the machine won't start and you want some geek from round the corner to put it all right again in half an hour, and preferably for less than cost of lunch. What does this say about your attitude to investment and risk. An Independent Financial Advisor would say it's irrational at best, perhaps even schizoid. Technician, heal thyselfWeigh up (and wake up to) the cost of what you are doing, because mid to large organisations already have. Granted it is far more efficient to support 50 machines per head than one, when they are all of a uniform design with well-established software, but the main difference between the one and the many is that larger groups have grasped the nettle of ensuring their data doesn't go down with a sinking ship. A volunteer producing a monthly WI-style newsletter may not be under the same pressure as say, a supporter's club secretary running a membership database. So while the volunteer could perhaps survive a machine meltdown and the subsequent time to rebuild, the club secretary has considerably more responsibility to shoulder and needs as least some kind of fallback. People with even a mention of the word "continuity" listed in their job description should worry if any of what they are reading here comes as news. But the issue at hand for any of the three potential unfortunates sketched out above is the same: they should all have chalked up a mental note (at the bare minimum) of what to do when Black Monday strikes and, better still, take the next logical step - avoiding action. Yet given the number of desperate calls for help, 'PC disaster denial' is still rife. Since one of the things computers do best is simply copying data somewhere else, even a simple backup to a £5 memory stick is now within everyone's grasp, and very cheaply at that. At this level of protection, the once helpless user can even abandon his/her broken steed and beg, borrow (but preferably not steal) another computer on which to continue surviving until their Black Monday Beast is fixed. Learn more about disaster recovery. -IB- Paul Craig |
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3.
Seeking relief for data storage headaches
How much of your central storage is consumed with staff spare time activities rather than work and is it time to get tough on electronic banter?
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Help at hand. |
Everyday office banter has been replaced by 'electronic banter' – nothing new for sure – but the days of simple text email interchange have now been superseded by attachments bearing pictures, music or video clips, creating new data storage headaches for the organisation's, according to business and technology specialist Detica. A quick scan round personal data repositories on a central server will often reveal one iTunes installation for at least half the employees and then all the music library that goes with it. Add a few YouTube clips and several albums of kids and holiday photos and each head of staff is racking up a few Gig of storage that is suddenly taken out of the loop for storing work projects. Cases of the odd Christmas party video have been discovered, consuming half a GigaByte for the one clip. Chris Saunders, Detica's head of data stewardship puts it thus: "In the Web 2.0 culture, we've stopped talking to one another directly - the norm is to communicate electronically, even to people just a few metres away from us in the office". However, staff do not shoulder the entire blame for new storage headaches. New compliance rules, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, are forcing companies such as finance institutions to store more information and keep it on record for longer; the idea is to invoke a more formal life cycle methodology for data to assess risk and exposure for given business circumstances, but such regulations take the average IT department far beyond what have been considered normal IT practices. Saunders believes that companies are missing the (rather obvious) trick of getting employees on board with data management, even just with basics like regularly deleting old emails, especially those with large attachments. This is important not only the grounds of maintaining free space but also to ensure that employees are checking the shelf-life of the information they store. Another approach taken up by some is to enforce data quotas on the server, though this can have a backlash where an increase in IT support calls is generated because of obscure effects when applications that detect a user has run out of space. To some extent, the human quest for 'digital play time' can be managed by allowing a certain storage allocation of personal data, though this has to be reckoned against general IT policies for the organisation. Saunders concludes: "The good news is that, once you get your employees to understand the challenge and take responsibility for managing their own information hoards, not only will the performance of your servers be streamlined, but you'll get a more organised and up-to-date archive of data which can be used more effectively for business intelligence." ContactsLearn how to archive emails automatically. -IB- Acknowledgements: staff team |
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4.
Script of the month
An occasional series that lays out scripts which run when your computer or server starts up.
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Help at hand. |
The idea is to automate many tasks that occur once-off on start-up or when the a user logs in instead of having to type and run them manually. To kick off, here are 2 useful ones - for starters as it were. LogonScriptThis is the basic script that maps drives, installs printers, and can clean up a PC at user logon. The script can usually be modified to include many other common tasks that your server must carry out on start-up. RandomPassword ScriptThis script sets a random password for the administrator account and then emails the password to a specified address. Good for resetting the server password if you forgot it, though you need to remember to change that emailed password again asap. One example of the RandomPassword Script is to run it as a scheduled task so that the admin password is reset at scheduled periods. For increased security, some sites run it every 24 hours on the Domain Controller with passwords emailed to the mobile phones of two key personnel. Have you read the script?Co-Operative Systems is increasingly using automated scripts to improve IT services in a number of different ways, so do contact us to find out how we can help you save time and increase reliability. -IB- |
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5.
Microsoft SQL Server licences
Tips on watching and working out those CALs.
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Help at hand. |
When buying licences for Microsoft's SQL Server (usually pronounced "sequel server") it's worth absorbing a few tips to make your expenditure stretch as far as possible. The downside being that it means grasping the difference between your server software and your server hardware, as well as sorting out your cores from your processors. For simplicity's sake, this article only refers to the word "server" to mean an application server (a piece of software), rather than that black metal box of drives, chips, fans and LEDs whirring away in the cabinet of your server/comms room. SQL Server licences are allocated either: 
CALs are Client Access Licences, meaning the right to access the services of the server software in question, for example Terminal Server™, Small Business Server™, Exchange Server™, etc, or in this case, SQL Server™. Per-server/per-seat-plus-the-number-of-CALs is best when you have a finite number of users, for instance a fundraising department where only internal staff and maybe one or two commissioned fundraisers access the database running on SQL Server software. 
This licensing scenario in fact has two models, where the Per server model has a specified number of CALs are associated with a particular server, unlike Per seat where 'seats' or users can effectively move around between devices that offer up application servers. Thus, with Exchange Server, it may be wise to choose that latter model where users move around between branch offices accessing their email from physically different but interconnected mail servers. 
Per-processor is a better bet when there might be an unknown numbers of users accessing an SQL application, say via the web, such as a climate change database with worldwide researchers gathering and inputting data. Note that per-processor refers to a physical processor chip rather than the number of cores in the processor. As an aside, the number of cores is important in determining how many applications the processor will run from a performance angle. For instance four applications on dual quad cores is a good combination allowing one core per application per processor. Not all server software can be licensed on a per-processor basis, so happily Microsoft have compiled a table showing the ins and outs for their score or so of server software products. ContactsLearn more about Microsoft licences. -IB- Acknowledgements: Zorina Baksh |
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6.
Q&A: How to send large email attachments?
Question 
Hi Mark,
I want to email a 10MB file attachment, but my friend says his mailbox isn't that big or is often overloaded. | ||
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Help at hand. |
The short answer is "Don't", but we won't leave you stranded there! It is still common for free email accounts to capacity limits as low as 10MB or even lower - some only provide 2MB of space in all. Given that the provider has to buy all those hard drives and then do the work of sharing them out amongst users reliably, one could hardly complain without attracting accusations of being just slightly picky. And to be fair, email was never built for sending attachments even 100th of this size, despite the fact that MegaByte-sized files fly all over the place now. But all is not lost. Far from it. A good starter is to pick up a free Gmail (now Google Mail) account, noted for its famous, ever-expanding 'lots-of-space' storage, currently clocked at around 6.8GB (6,800MB or so) for a newcomer. Also http://mail.rediff.com/ claims to offer unlimited storage space and up to 20MB attachments, while www.gawab.com is completely free (ad-sponsored) and has been offering 1GB of storage and support for 10MB attachments. However email inherently encourages bad habits in that senders tend to circulate multiple copies of the same thing, a major cause of Internet bandwidth clog. Furthermore, expect email addicts who own 6GB mailboxes to have them nearly permanently filled, so even your relatively measly 10MB attachment will tip them over their limit and you'll find a rejection message coming back to you. And ultimately an angry reply saying "You blew up my mail box!" So rather than sending files out, make people come to you .... Essentially this means signing up to a storage provider, which can also be free. We reviewed several online storage providers in November and among the largest of these - humyo.com - now serves up a massive 30GB of free space per account. The only disadvantage to any central store of this ilk is that you must persuade the person 'at the other end' to sign up to the same provider, but once that happens you can divide-and-rule, offering up massive attachments from just one account and determining who gets to download with access rules under your control. And no more inboxes filling up.
-IB-
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Clicks of the Trade - spreadsheet keyboard shortcuts
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! ---
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Help at hand. |
Most spreadsheet users are aware of the common keyboard shortcuts such as Ctrl+Z to Undo previous commands (the Oops button) and Ctrl+A to Select all cells with contents, but how about some of the slightly more esoteric shortcuts that are nevertheless essential for making spreadsheets a pleasure to use instead of a pain? Check these out spreadsheet keyboard shortcuts:
** try it now **-IB-
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E&OE
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