Can collaboration save our economy?

Web Informant TK February 2009: Can collaboration save our economy?

The economic news is depressing, and yet I want to see opportunity where others see looming disaster. And I think one way we can try to make things better is become more productive and do a better job collaborating with each other. Think of it as a no-cost stimulus package that even the Republicans can love.

Remember when the PC was first introduced, everyone thought it was such a great personal productivity tool? Sadly, the more powerful that PCs have become, the harder it is to use them to collaborate. This is because we get used to using them as our personal machines, and most of us don't like sharing our computers, let alone our work products from them.

The primary collaboration tool today is still what it was ten years ago: I send you an email attachment with a Word or Excel file. You make changes and then email the file back for me to look at. This is really serial collaboration, because we alternate working on the same file. While this model is okay for two people, when you have a whole group that is trying to add their thoughts it gets very messy, to say the least. Also, one person can hold up the entire process and then the rest of the group has to wait until that person has finished their revisions. And if we don't agree, we pretty much have to start the process from scratch. A friend of mine is ghost writing a book for two of his bosses. I can't imagine what his editing cycle is going to be like under this model.

It is time to realize that serial email-style collaboration is so last year. Consider these trends:

First, the Internet is now ubiquitous and most of us are comfortable using it to connect to our partners, supplies, customers, and colleagues. It has also made email more powerful, and most of us have become addicted to checking our email several times a day and even during off hours too. Some of us have to check email so frequently that we start to get a bit jittery when we are offline for a few hours, let alone when we want to take a week off on some deserted beach where there isn't any connectivity.

Contrast this with Lotus Notes, which has been around for about 20 years and supposed to be the be-all and end-all collaborative tool, or Microsoft's SharePoint, which is more recent. Both Notes and Sharepoint require everyone to run it, and develop to its own programming interfaces. That seems so quaint and outmoded now. And both are very quirky to install and deploy, which makes them less desirable too.

Second, email is a great notification system and a great way to organize your to-do list. You don't have to use it as the transportation system for sending documents around, though. As an example, you can set up a blog to automatically notify via email when someone posts a comment to a particular page, so people can participate in a discussion thread but don't have to continually return to that page to find out what has been posted.

Third, free or low-cost Internet applications have come of age, such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, Trackvia, Tripit, Timedriver, Hourtown and Setmeeting. All of these don't require any software to download, don't have a lot of upfront training or even any dough to use, which means that people can experiment with them and see if they will be suitable for their needs. All of these products can offload some of the tasks that we are used to doing on email and make us more productive in scheduling meetings, sharing work product, and arranging our time. Look for a story from me in the New York Times next month on this topic.

Fourth, instant messaging has become more useful for connecting remote work teams together and can be used as another notification system that is more immediate and more potent in terms of bringing people together. Some firms are beginning to use the built-in IM features of Facebook and Twitter for this purpose too. Again, this takes some load away from looking at your inbox for starting a particular task or trying to get a colleague's attention.

Finally, there are other tools for two-person collaboration that will work better in real time, such as LogMeIn or GoToMyPC, that allow two people to actually see each other's computer screen while they are talking on the phone. My podcasting partner Paul Gillin likes Yuuguu.com, which allows teams of 25 to share the same desktop, no matter if they are on Linux, Mac or Windows.

We still have a long way to go when it comes to collaborating effectively, and I since we are talking about sharing do share your own stories with my audience and post to this entry on strominator.com. I will have more to say on this topic for a keynote speech that I am giving in Philadelphia in April for the American Hardware Manufacturer's Association. If you want me to come talk to your organization, you can send me email, or better yet, just call me on the phone.

The shoemaker's children

This week I seem to be surrounded by dysfunctional electronics, and I
am not a happy camper. Or maybe they just are attracted to me, or I to
them.

My oven is on its third electronic control panel in as many months. It
has very fancy touch-pad controls, and when we first got it everything
on the panel worked with the sole exception of the on/off switch. And
the fact that it couldn't get beyond 290 degrees — it was a very
expensive crock pot. Cooking the turkey for Thanksgiving took the
better part of the day. But perhaps the third time will be the charm.

Then my stepson needed help with getting his Xbox connected on his
wireless network. I had done him no favors by setting up his wireless
router to use WPA2, which is the one security protocol that doesn't
work with the Xbox wireless adapter. That was luckily quick work to
downgrade him to just regular WPA. Why can't Microsoft support a
protocol that is several years old on its equipment is a mystery to
me.

How about my home laptop, which for some odd reason won't keep its
batteries charged? I guess it is a flaky motherboard power connection,
so the laptop needs to be plugged into the wall all the time. That is
annoying to say the least, but then it is a aging Dell that is due for
replacement, so maybe this a sign. Of course, finding something that
runs XP is an exercise in patience these days.

Speaking of Dell, I was looking for an inexpensive machine that I
could stuff with oodles of RAM to run in my lab. You would think with
all of the machines that they sell that it would be easy to find out
what the maximum amount of memory you could install in one of the
desktops would be. Not so easy to do on their Web site. So I took the
unusual step of calling them and that wasn't much better. I could
order a PC with a 64-bit Windows OS and that was the trick to boost
the RAM on the order, but a 64-bit OS is almost as much trouble as
Vista. I want a machine that will actually run my applications, thank
you very much. When I went into the Dell Outlet store to search for
used PCs, there was one yesterday that had 8GB for sale.

And I was excited to hear about the latest crop of devices that will
accept streaming video from Netflix, including a Samsung Blu-Ray video
player. A friend has been having a lot of fun using his Xbox and
streaming videos to it (you need to have both subscriptions to Netflix
and Xbox Live services though to do this). Trouble is, I bought the
cheaper model Samsung that doesn't do the streaming, even though it
has an Ethernet jack and runs Windows CE and can be upgraded across
the Internet. Another friend has the right model and was singing all
of its virtues and how wonderful his streaming videos were. Too bad
for me. Now I have one more computing device that can get infected,
require periodic care and feeding, and is already obsolete within a
few months of its purchase. I sure know how to pick 'em. At least I
haven't had to replace the front panel and the on/off switch is still
working. But it sure throws off a lot of heat, I guess from all the
graphics processing firepower inside.

At least my iPhone is running without any troubles, knock on formica.
I think I only have had to reboot it maybe 3 times in the past six
months. The fact that I used "only" in that sentence is a sad
testimonial to the state of my electronic life. They say the
shoemakers' children go barefoot. I would settle for a device that
would just operate as intended.

My network stimulus package

With all the talk of billions for this program or that in Washington, I thought I would put together my own stimulus package that can help your network run smoother. I don't know whether $10 billion to buy steel (domestic preferred) for new bridges or $9 billion to put up new rural DSL lines will really be effective (my initial reaction is dubious), but the idea of spending lots of money quickly by our Congress is a scary one. And despite serving on my local school board several years, I am not qualified to run any cabinet department or national office (I have dutifully and fully paid my income taxes and don't have any dark family embarrassments). But I think I can offer a few ideas for you. So here are a few suggestions that won't cost (much) dough and could save your own bacon if you are trying to impress the boss that your name doesn't belong on the cut list quite yet.

First off, do you actually know what kind of traffic is running on your network? Have you looked at your top applications? You would be surprised. At an event that I attended yesterday sponsored by Blue Coat, they talked about how when they did these assessments they always found ten times the number of applications that most IT admins thought they were supporting. That is a factor of ten. The best story was a company that found out that one of its most popular mission critical apps was a home-grown one running on a box under someone's desk. I am sure this isn't unique, or even rare. It doesn't matter what fancy tool you use to do this apps census, and there are many vendors besides Blue Coat who would gladly come in and do one for you (in the hopes that you will eventually buy their gear). But the more that you know, the more you fine tune your network and reduce the traffic from the apps that aren't business-related.

Second, have you looked at your latency lately? Has someone along the way added a few new router hops somewhere that you didn't know about? I am amazed that we are still talking about a concept that is decades old and should be better understood. Latency improvements are the best bang for your buck short of hiring a DC lobbyist to get some of that earmark money. And you don't have to wait for any Congressional action either.

Third, how many people still have admin rights to their own desktop PCs? This makes it impossible to manage these machines, and allows users to install their own apps. Granted, it may be politically difficult to change this policy now, but hey, change is in the air and you might as well start somewhere.

Next, have you looked at your user accounts lately and seen if anyone that you have laid off is still using your network? You would be surprised at how often this happens. At one hospital that I visited, the IT manager told me that an employee who was laid off went home and started using his girlfriend's login credentials at night. They caught it because the girlfriend was still logged in at the same time at work. And the number of people that I talk to that don't have regular password change policies, or have the same password for all of their critical servers, is amazingly high. Take the time to get this set up properly. Given the number of layoffs these days, this is probably the biggest thing that you can do to fix your security loopholes that doesn't even cost you a dime.

I will have lots of other suggestions, if you are interested; check out my article in next week's Information Security magazine. I will post a link to it on my Strominator.com blog when it goes live. In the meantime, you can post your own network stimulus ideas on my blog if you are feeling a need to share them.

Time for a tune up

What with Toyota posting its first quarterly loss last month and our new Community-Organizer-in-Chief looking to retool the auto industry, the only good news is that gas is not $4 a gallon anymore. But these items remind me that it is time for different kind of transportation tune up, mainly our data transportation networks.

Most of us have come to rely on email as the main artery of moving data into and out of our enterprises. After all, we are all connected via email. Many office workers bring up email as their first application in the morning and even login from home at nights and on weekends. And as more people have smartphones, sending emails when you aren't at your desk isn't such a big deal now – even our COIC does that too.

I was reminded how lousy email is at transportation when I tried to email a proposal to a prospective client of mine today. First, the email didn't get through. Then I sent him an Instant Message, to confirm receipt. The second email didn't attach the document properly, and finally the third time was the charm. All this to send a 50 kB Word file – imagine if I had something larger that would be automatically rejected.

This reminds me of another story that took place many years ago, at the dawn of the Internet era when we still used gateways to get email from other networks, such as Compuserve and MCIMail (may their memories be honored). Someone had tried to send me a big attachment (at the time, that might have been about 50 kB too!) that literally got stuck in our gateway. No email could be received for several days until we figured out that the "big" file was gumming up the works, and once we deleted it all was well again.

Email is just not the best transportation vehicle. And like our struggling auto industry, we need to look for alternative-fueled methods to move our bits around.

For those of us old enough to remember file transfer protocols, there is that (and the more secure SCP) to move data from point A to point B. But these aren't very elegant, and get trapped by firewalls and other security measures, as they should be.

Then there are the various file-sending services that go by such names as SendThisFile.com, YouSendIt.com and DropSend.com etc. There is even DilbertFiles.com, which I thought was a joke from the comic strip but is actually a legit service that I guess has some license from Scott Adams to use the hapless cubical dweller. These all operate pretty much the same way, taking the transportation over from the email network, and just using emails to notify your recipients that you have a file transfer pending. You authenticate yourself via a Web browser to both send and receive your file.

What is interesting lately is that email is also being replaced as the notification network too: either by IMs or by Twitter. I have mentioned this in my last essay, because of the generational divide and the fact that email is now too slow to notify people that live on Facebook, or just use their cell phones for Net data access, or because people get too much email and they just miss the memo in their inbox.

IMs have a lot going for them. They are easy to use, they are almost immediate, and they are now pretty much accepted in the fleets of corporate communications vehicles. But they aren't any better at transferring data than email is – and in some cases corporations block attachments, or users can't get them because they are running multiple client programs like Trillium or Adium that don't always play well with sending and receiving attachments (does this sound familiar)? And IM is ideal for one-to-one communications, but quickly breaks down when one-to-many conversations are required.

What about Twitter? This seems to have lots of promise as a notification system, although it is still somewhat creaky, sort of like when the first transcontinental railroads went in the 1800s. The network can easily get overloaded, there are all sorts of tricks like using hash tags and business people using Twitter to monitor dissatisfied customers (Bank of America and Dell are two notable examples). They can work really well for notifying a lot of people quickly about real-time events, as we have seen with recent news stories in the past several months.

The trouble is that making the transition from an all-email network to this mixed bag of technologies is proving to be just as painful as what Detroit is going through right now with its cars. Maybe upgrades to Twitter can be included in part deux of the bailout express package. After all, it comes under the heading of critical national infrastructure. (I am somewhat kidding here).

The generational media divide

I was at a meeting this week that drove home the big generational divide in online and offline media consumption. At the podium was a 20-something CEO of a new venture that is trying to work with new college grads. In the audience were people mostly twice his age of captains of industry. The young CEO was asked what he thought about using content that was similar to the way Consumer Reports rates and compares products. After a pause and a blank look, he said, "I don't know what you mean, I never heard of that publication." That got a big laugh from the audience, but his ignorance was genuine. The Q&A continued, and he mentioned a few moments later how he gets a lot of his information from the Web site HuffingtonPost.com. Now it was the moment of being perplexed for the gentlemen sitting next to me, who leaned over to ask me if I have ever heard of such a publication. His ignorance was also the real deal.

So where do you stand on the Consumer Reports/HuffingtonPost axis? And more importantly, where do your readers stand as well? How savvy are they with using online media to get their information?

There is a growing divide in how we consume media, and it is mostly age-related. But it isn't as simple as everyone older is using this technology and younger is using that technology – there are a lot more subtle sub-groups. For example, 20-somethings that have never been to college aren't using email – they went right to texting and if they don't need email for their jobs they don't use it in their personal communications, and probably will remain away from email for a long time to come. And 50-somethings don't have much experience with social media, unless their kids are on Facebook and they signed up for defensive parental reasons, or they heard about it from a younger work colleague, for example. Almost no one is really using RSS feeds to keep track of Web content, except a few nerds and PR people. Instant Messaging has all sorts of twisted demographics, depending not just on age but also on how distributed the work team is and whether it is blessed or cursed by the corporate IT department. And so forth.

What does this mean for professional communicators? Several things. First, you have to become a master of multiple media channels and methods. Writing, speaking, podcasting, blogging, creating social network groups, filming videos, and more. You have to become omnivorous in what you consume and what you create.

Second, bylines aren't enough. So while I do write for the New York Times several times a year, that isn't enough. I should also post comments on various newspaper blogs (if it is relevant), and participate in various discussion forums.

Third, it isn't just about you but whom you know and who forwards your emails and links to your content. Is it better for the CEO of a potential client to just get a single email from me about a particular subject? Or to have five of his direct reports send the same link to something that I have posted? Or to have the post appear somewhere else that results in three new clients hiring me? You get the idea. Everything has the potential to be viral these days.

Finally, don't be afraid to experiment. The rules aren't set in stone, and while there are differences in the generations in media consumption, no one really knows how this is all going to shake out. One of the great opportunities of the Web – the ability to measure everything – is also its biggest challenge, because you don't necessarily have the ability to link cause and effect. I realized this as I was posting a new screencast video of mine last month to 15 different Web sites. Some of the sites have no traffic, some videos are rising stars. It is the same video on each site. What makes one more viewed is impossible to explain. (And by the way, if you haven't checked out my videos yet, go over to WebInformant.tv and watch one or two and let me know what you think.)

Facebook, the new social disease

Accompanying the announcement that more than 150 million people are active on Facebook last week (and even more depressing, that half of them login daily) are a new series of security and legal issues surrounding its use. When exactly is your account compromised by a piece of software that may not be acting in your best interests? Or could it be something that is more sinister, or just human error?

Don't you pine for those simple days when the line between software and malware was pretty easy to delineate? Consider these news items:

Last week, Facebook sued the Brazilian site Power.com, claiming that its automated login process violated their terms of service. According to the LA Times, Power has agreed to use Facebook Connect, but the suit brings up all sorts of issues that aren't so clear cut: is Power providing a service for its users, by consolidating several social networking logins? Or is it doing something that it shouldn't, by storing these credentials? How is that different from any number of sites that allow me to cross-post messages to different video or blog sites?
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/01/lawsuit-shows-h.html

Last December, we saw the Koobface trojan that spreads through social network news feed messages, prompting users to download what they think is an update to the Adobe Flash player but is really malware:
http://www.avertlabs.com/research/blog/index.php/2008/12/03/koobface-remains-active-on-facebook/

This was similar to a Brazilain-based attack that plagued Twitter last summer:
http://www.viruslist.com/en/weblog?weblogid=208187551

Earlier last fall over in Russia, we saw email/SMS pitches for people to download a Java applet to their cell phones that was spread via the Russian social network Vkontakte. Once on their phones, the app would automatically text several premium numbers that would be charged back to the user:
http://www.viruslist.com/en/weblog?weblogid=208187582

The trouble is that as these attacks proliferate, it gets harder to differentiate them with legit situations where people are just making dumb mistakes. Consider the situation where a new social networking user doesn't understand the very optional step when he or she signs up and is asked whether or not to send email invitations to their entire address book. In just a few seconds, a simple task of joining the network has turned into an annoying one sending out hundreds of unwanted emails. Sometimes this step isn't explained well in the sign-up process, or sometimes people aren't paying attention. Either way, it isn't malevolent; it is just a stupid user error.

Or take instant messaging, which seems so quaint now that there are lots of other networks out there. Yes, there are malware programs that propagate through IM, and there are security products that protect IM networks too. But nothing can stop human stupidity in how these IM networks are used, particularly if you store your IM login credentials on a family computer that is shared by several people. One of my colleagues has been having IM conversations with the wrong people – some that have gone on for ten or 15 minutes, before he realized he was talking to the intended's spouse or kids. Why anyone leave his or her IM account wide open in this way is hard to understand. But it points out that just because someone is signed into IM, doesn't mean that they are there. Remember, on the Internet no one knows that your dog hasn't logged instead of you.

Then there are sites like omgxd.com that use your login information for IM networks, supposedly to make it easier to connect but in reality spam all of your contacts on your buddy list. Heyxd.com is another one. I have tried to find out whether these two sites are legit or have some sinister purpose. I can't really tell, but I would recommend steering clear of both of them.

So the next time you get an email or IM or text message asking you to download a greeting card, update your Flash player, or do something else, take a moment to stop and think whether this is a request that you should just hit the delete key and move on. You don't need to be the latest victim of a new social networking disease.

Starting the New Year with Windows NT 4

To start off the new year right, I decided to go back in time and see what I could learn from running an ancient (by computing standards, anyway) operating system and software combination. To appreciate how far we have come (or not), and to see whether I could actually get real work done. The idea came about from some conversations that Jason Perlow and I had. Jason is a fellow blogger and IT consultant who now works for IBM. He and I at one point in our lives (although not at the same time) lived in Port Washington, N.Y. and spent a lot of time with OS/2, but don't let that influence you.

I picked NT v4 as my starting place. This operating system is more than ten years old, and was probably the last OS that Microsoft created that had some real simplicity to it. To get an idea of the power of the OS, there are still many corporate servers running it, even though Microsoft has tried to stamp it out and turn off support and push people to upgrade to something more recent. To get around the driver issues and other challenges, I decided to set up a virtual machine running NT, and I am using VMware's Fusion on my Mac (just to make it interesting).

Jason and I have the hypothesis that the OS doesn't really matter anymore, and that if you can get beyond some of the issues with running older software and applications, you may find that an older OS is perfect for your needs. We also thought that running an ancient OS was a good way to see how far we have come with newer computers, and perhaps a way to extract some additional performance because the older OSs are smaller and theoretically could run faster on the newer PCs.

To get NT working properly, you need find versions of software either online or in someone's attic that are not so old as to be useless. First off, I had to install Service Pack 6, and I also needed to install the right version of the SP too for the encryption level of the OS. You then install the VMware tools software, which supplies the drivers to get the most out of your machine. Then you install Microsoft Office 2000 – which is the most recent version of Office that will run on NT. I messed up by installing the tools package after Office, and VMware didn't like that. Office 2000 has the unfortunate side effect of updating your NT version with an almost-working version of Internet Explorer v5. The reason I say almost-working is that you need another piece of software called the Windows Installer to get other software installed on this machine. I couldn't get past this point, however.

I also put on Firefox v2.0.0.20 browser on the machine, which is a fairly recent version of the browser, but apparently not recent enough as I had some problems with certain Web sites. I had to update my Adobe Flash plug-in too. Finally, I added AIM v5.9, which is an older version of Instant Messenger software. Skype doesn't have any version that will run on NT, which is too bad.

So what I found was that the VM version of NT was pretty snappy. It would boot from scratch in under 30 seconds, and faster still from the suspended VM state. I liked the old-fashioned Windows and the lack of glitz and raw simplicity of the controls. No Aero Glass junk for this OS! Another plus with using VMs is that you don't have to worry about personal firewalls and anti-virus as much – you can set up a protected environment and keep it isolated from your host machine, which is good because most of the AV programs have stopped supporting NT a long time ago.

All of my Office documents – some of which were created on Macs, some on Windows, came up just fine in Office 2000, which is because I am not using the 2007 version that introduced a new file format that isn't compatible with the older versions. Shame on you Microsoft – and I know from hearing from some of you how vexing that version could be.

The other thing I noticed is how important the browser is to today's computing world, and if you aren't willing to stay current with your browser, you quickly get into trouble with many Web sites. The coming of IE v7 is a good case in point, and I know there will be a lot of grief to be had on both ends – the people that adopt the new browser and find sites that don't work in it, and the sites that want to use its new features and piss off the people that aren't upgrading yet.

I will have more to report on this experiment as I spend more time back in NT land. And those of you that want to try this on your own, email me privately and I will give you more specific tips.