World IPv6 Day

I wrote about the 'new' IPv6 protocol a few months back - Time for IPv6 - saying that with IPv4 addresses rapidly running out, network admins needed to get themselves ready for IPv6. Well it looks like some of the big boys are getting themselves ready, and giving you and me the chance to test our own systems too on World IPv6 Day on June 8th.

Some of the big web players such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo! will be configuring their sites and services to operate over IPv6, so you can test your own readiness. Google also have a simple test available here. This test will tell you if your systems are ready for IPv6 but sadly doesn't give you any information on what to do if they are not. Watch this space ....

Working Together > Competing?

IT may be one of the few industries where competing companies can work together to become more than the sum of their parts. We work with several local and national companies in order to spread our coverage and widen the skill set available to our customers. We participate in several industry groups where we share ideas with our 'competition' rather than hiding behind our own IP and shooing away anyone who dare ask about how we do things. The power of sharing and working together certainly does seem stronger than the need to compete sometimes. We find that we rarely end up competing for a prospect with the guys we site beside in these groups, which means there are customers our there for all of us. We just need to make sure we find the ones that are the best fit for our specific areas of expertise.

I enjoy reading Arlin Sorensen's blog Peer Power. He recently wrote about the Lessons from Peers (part 1 and part 2). Have a read!

The Merits of Jailbreaking

A while ago I wrote about jailbreaking your iDevice. Now one of the biggest proponents of jailbreaking, and the king of Cydia, Saurik gives you reasons why you should jailbreak your iPhone. Well worth a read!

Service Level Agreements

How do you define an acceptable service level agreement (SLA) when negotiating service contracts with customers? There may be many factors that you want to manage and measure (remember: if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it), including things like maximum response and resolution time and a number of fixed metrics, such as priority levels.

There is a school of thought that as a service provider, you shouldn’t give anything away in an SLA unless it is specifically asked for. Though in a competitive market you will certainly want to offer something different to ‘the other guys’. Whether that is guarantees of quicker response times or a lower percentage of missed SLA targets before penalties apply is up to you. A missed SLA target for example may be where you have a target response time of <1hr for a priority one incident and it takes your 70 minutes to respond. Most SLAs will allow for a small percentage of targets to be missed, so long as some defined average measurement remains within targeted limits.

When defining SLAs, one thing that is often overlooked is how your supplier agreements and even internal (inter-departmental) agreements compare with the SLA your offer customers. Think about it. If you guarantee to replace a server hard disk within 24hrs but your supplier has a 2-day lead time for delivery, how can you meet the SLA? Or maybe your supplier is not a problem but your Accounts team has a policy to only pay invoices when they reach their terms? That hard drive you ordered may not be delivered until after the bill is paid, which could be 30 days down the track.

Other factors may come into play. Maybe you have a standard SLA response time for priority 1 that says you will have an engineer on site within 1 hour. If you have the same terms across multiple customers, then you are going to have to make sure that you always have engineers on standby, or at least in the office doing work they can drop if the need arises. How you schedule your engineers is key in this scenario. Keep an eye on the number of short-response SLAs you put out there and make sure that you actually have the staff to cover them, otherwise you might end up paying the penalty. Literally.

I’ve mentioned priorities a couple of times, so we really have to make sure that we have defined how we come to decide on the priority of a job. Otherwise you know what happens: The customer sets the priority of the job and it is always priority 1! How you define your priorities will be different depending on the services you are offering but just make sure that you do define them clearly. You will most likely define priorities based on the number of users or services affected in an incident, the business impact of an incident or some other arbitrary measurement. Like if the CEO’s PA calls, it is priority 1 every time!!

Lastly, make sure you define the scope of your SLA. Maybe you cover servers and routers but don’t cover printers - make sure that is clear.

SLAs tend to be full of legal jargon. Unfortunately they have to be but the key points I’ve mentioned have to be spelled out unambiguously in plain English for all to understand. For me, that is the key to executing an SLA that keeps all parties happy.

FT won't give up subscriber relationship to Apple | Reuters

I wrote about Apple's new subscription policy a little while back (Apple's Publication Subscription Strategy - good business or magazine-killer?) saying that publishers would be motivated to provide a better solution. Well it seems that the Financial Times is the first to take a stand with Apple. Apparently the media giant is 'in talks' with Apple to avoid paying them the 30% they demand for all electronic subscriptions.

Watch this space, it could get interesting .....

Peer Power: 10 Key Area's of Attention For Your Business

Arlin Sorensen's blog - making running a business look easy!

Peer Power: 10 Key Area's of Attention For Your Business

Skills complimentary to your IT knowledge?

I remember doing work experience at a chemical plant and a steel mill in the late eighties (yup, showing my age here). The guy I was shadowing made a point of saying that IT skills alone were not enough to succeed and that I would need to have some complimentary skills and knowledge, such as chemistry or physics. Granted, most of the systems I 'worked' on during this time were process control systems rather than office admin type functions, so his comments were probably true.

I later took a full-time position at that chemical plant (along with a large percentage of the people I went to school with in all honesty) and though I didn't need any specific chemical knowledge, I did have to know a bit about accounting when dealing with the finance people, a bit about warehousing and transport when working with the logistics guys and so on. We spend so much time and effort (and money) on IT training, it is easy to forget that to properly support people running IT hardware and software, you really do need to know a about what they do and how they do it. Otherwise, you are just offering generic advice that may not suit the specific situation.

The same applies at all levels of IT. As a salesman, if you don't understand the requirements of the customers you are selling to, you are going to give them the wrong solution which then has pretty serious ramifications for the relationship going forward. In the almost 20 years I've been in and out of IT, I've learned about finance and accounting, factory production lines, steel fabrication, food processing, legal documentation, airline ticketing, construction and property management ..... I could go on!

So I was thinking the other day about the guy telling me I needed to go and learn about chemistry and thinking he was pretty much spot on - not specifically on chemistry but on needing to know a lot more than IT to be successful in IT. Here endeth the lesson.

Jailbreaking your iDevice

Jailbreaking - the process of removing your device from the restrictions imposed upon it by the manufacturer. Opening the operating system up to allow new addons and installations.

I'm on my third iDevice now and I've always had them jailbroken. There are so many great apps out there that Apple wouldn't allow in the App Store - often because they replicate features that exist in the stock firmware and quite often because they do it better!

There are lots of contentious issues around jailbreaking your device. Apple have tried to say it invalidates the warranty but most jurisdictions have ruled otherwise. Apple will tell you that allowing 'unsupported' third-party apps on your iDevice poses security risks. And while this may be true to an extent, time and again we have seen the 'hackers' fix security holes that Apple has taken months to attend to.

From a personal point of view, jailbreaking allows me the freedom to do whatever I like with the device I have spent my hard-earned dollars on. Why should Apple dictate how I use my own device? I bought it, I don't rent it from them. Can you imagine buying a 50" high-def plasma and the manufacturer saying "well yes, you can only watch it in black and white". Not bloody likely!

Anyway, what prompted me to write this short piece was an interesting article on jailbreaking on Gizmodo.com.au. Have a read and tell me what you think.

How do you manage smartphones?

They are everywhere these days. And not just smartphones but tablets and other mobile devices. Whatever flavour they are, they all have the ability to access and store all manner of information. Email and calendar sure but in some cases they will have access to your CRM, your terminal server and even files from your network. So how do you manage this? Or do you manage this?

From a business point of view, if a member of staff comes in on Monday with a new iPhone and wants to read their email on it, it is probably seen as a positive thing. So you give them the details they need and they start syncing.

From that point on, you need to at least have a policy telling your staff what they can and can’t do - what information should they have on the device, force secure passwords, force entry of a PIN or password when the device is unattended, etc. You should also have procedures in place to remote wipe a device to protect your IP. Blackberry has had remote wipe functionality for a long time through BES and the iPhone has had this since version 3. This at least gives you the ability to remove data from a lost or ‘rogue’ device. BES also gives you a certain amount of control over what a user can do with the device, as can third-party tools such as Good Mobile.

You are very protective of the data you store on your computer systems, so shouldn’t this protection extend to your mobile devices? These devices are so powerful these days that they really are just another part of your network and should be treated as such.

Backing up your cloud services

So you've moved into the cloud and you use Google Apps, Picasa, Flickr, etc, etc. Great. But can you trust these sites - particularly the free ones - to look after your data with the care and attention that you would like? Maybe not - even Google lost a heap of mail recently.

I came across a web site service that offers to back up your Gmail, Google Apps, Flickr albums and even your Facebook and Linkedin feeds - Backupify. I've signed up for the freebie account for starters and first impressions are good - the very simple interface is a bonus.

I'll let you know how it goes when it has done a few backups for me but I just wanted to share what looks like a little gem with you.

Apple's Publication Subscription Strategy - good business or magazine-killer?

This one is slightly off-topic but one that is close to my heart - Apple's policy on subscribing to newspapers and periodicals through iTunes. I have an iPad and one of the things I love is being able to read all manner of magazines on it - particularly overseas mags such as Wired that I can get on the iPad for $4.99, instead of paying $15-20 for an imported print copy. If I lived in the US, I could get a print subscription for very little but the international subscriptions are fairly pricey. So I've been looking forward to being able to subscribe on the iPad and get the benefits & discounts over the per-issue cost.

Apple finally released their strategy for magazine subscriptions through iTunes this week. And it's a little bit controversial. On the surface it looks great and in the usual Apple way, they are making it as easy as possible to make a purchase. You will be able to download the publication's app through iTunes / App Store, then hit a button and subscribe to the publication using your Apple ID and iTunes account. All good so far. The controversial part is that they will take 30% of the revenue and pass on 70% to the publisher.

On a per-issue basis, 30% is probably not unreasonable for the store front and distribution - be it iTunes or your local paper shop. But subscriptions work differently. Normally if you purchase a magazine subscription - particularly from the bigger publishers - you engage the company directly. Subscriptions are usually an economical way of getting every issue at a fair discount below the cost price. Part of this 'discount' is due to the fact that there are less middlemen involved in the transaction. In the modern age of free information on the internet, that is the preferred way for the publishers to go in order to thrive and survive. Subscriptions and sales of newspapers and magazines are down considerably on a few years ago - google for magazine circulation figures and you can find plenty of examples.

Apple's 30% cut will mean that either subscription prices go up or the publishers profits go down. Either way it isn't great for an industry starting to struggle. But this is only part of the problem. Publishers will give you cheaper subscriptions because they will capture your personal data, which they will use to advertise other products and services to you, or sometimes sell to third parties. This data is pretty valuable these days. When a company has free access to this information and knows your habits and preferences, they can target advertisements and special offers to you, making marketing and selling that bit cheaper (in theory at least). With Apple's subscription model, they will have this data and not the publishers. Another example of why they will either need to increase prices or reduce profits.

Well why don't the publishers go direct, you say? Because Apple won't let them. OK, not strictly true. While the publishers can market and sell directly to you, part of their agreement says they must still pay 30% to Apple. Wow! I understand Apple should still be able to take some cut for handling the distribution but if they are not having to do any marketing, financial transactions, etc then 30% becomes very greedy indeed.

So what's the answer? I think that what we will see is publishers creating web readers, so they can sell you these subscriptions directly and you can view the magazine on any web browser. That way they can manage the costs. There could well be an issue with security / piracy with this model but I can imagine that development is already in hand to address these. Normally what Apple wants, Apple gets and this will be the case at least initially. Ultimately this will cause a lot of pain to publishers but let's hope they use this pain to motivate them to provide some better, where consumers can pay a little less and they can make a little more, cutting out the middleman.

Business and IT Objectives - Service Management / ITIL Focus

It sometimes seems that IT is just another expensive function of the business. Even in these modern times when we rely on IT for everything from checking out the latest news to processing payroll and way more, there is still some kind of disconnect.

ITIL good practice says that we should align our business objectives with our IT objectives. They both have to support each other so that's obvious isn't it? But does it happen in your organisation?

Bob Anderson's Blog shows some common business goals and their corresponding IT goals. Straightforward thinking it may be, it certainly does get overlooked.

Think about it. You set your goals and targets and budgets every year but many companies don't even consider how their IT processes and systems are even going to be able to support and promote these goals. Some people expect their IT to 'just work' but if there is no strategy around it and no investment in it, it will soon turn into a sick puppy and quite possibly bring your business with it.

Time for IPv6

IPv6 has been around now for a long, long time. I have a book on my shelf from 2002 on the subject (IPv6 Essentials - O'Reilly) - as yet unread I might add. 9 years in IT terms is a lifetime, and yet IPv6 is rarely seen or heard from. That will change very soon, when we run out of IPv4 IP addresses. This is predicted to happen before 2011 is out.
So what does this mean for the average Joe? Well quite a bit actually. If you have any level or responsibility over a computer network, you have some work to do. If you manage any kind of public network, then things are going to change for you in a big way. The crux of the problem is that the original IP addressing scheme - IPv4 - can only account for a little over 4 billion addresses. When the creators of the protocol devised the rules back in the late 70’s, the internet was still a closed system, open mostly to government agencies such as universities and the military. The idea of needing more than 4 billion addresses would have have seemed ridiculously large and never likely to be met or exceeded. But since then, the internet has taken over the world, with every man and his dog having a web site, large scale control operations, media publishing and all manner of other systems using it. Each and every device on the internet has an IP address, and the original 4 billion is almost gone.
And that brings us to IPv6. When it was first recognised that we would soon start running out of IP address, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) wrote up the spec for IPv6 and published it as RFC 2460 in 1998. IPv6 addressing will cater for 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses, a mind-bogglingly huge number. When the IPv4 addresses dry up, we’re all going to have to start talking in IPv6. At the very least this is going to take some learning and some strategic planning. Most likely it is going to mean a whole lot of spend on new networking hardware too.
Many routers and switches up the higher end of the scale will have the feature set to handle this change. You need to start looking at the impact of IPv6 in your network and work out which devices you will be able to keep and use and which ones you will have to either replace or re-purpose. It may be that parts of your network remain on IPv4 addressing and parts are migrated to IPv6. You need to start thinking about that soon and working out budgets, project plans, etc. Then you will also have to get your technical guys and girls up-skilled so they understand the new protocol so that they can re-program those routers and switches to maintain the status quo in your network.
You might want to sit on your hands and wait it out. Maybe something better will come along? Maybe somebody will find some more IPv4 addresses down the back of the sofa? If you do this, you will be in trouble. The exhaustion of IP addresses is akin to - and potentially far worse than - the Y2k problem. Remember the panic at the end of the last millennium and businesses spending large on protecting themselves from a problem that never eventuated? Well this problem is one that will eventuate but so far nobody is reacting (proacting?) and to ignore this issue is to create a digital disaster.
References:
IPv6 on Wikipedia
Is IPv6 part of your Risk Management Framework?

Dealing with email interruptions

Why You Shouldn’t Check Your Email First Thing In The Morning | Gizmodo Australia


Interesting article. One of the things we often get sucked into is the notion that emails need to be read, dealt with and filed as soon as they arrive We feel rude if we have unread emails in our inboxes. I know I do anyway.

What it means in reality is an interruption to whatever we were doing in the first place. I have tried to only read emails once per hour but it's a tough discipline in the modern world, not to mention a world where people expect things to just happen instantly.

How do you manage your email?

Telecommuting

Telecommuting, teleworking, remote working, distributed workforce; Call it what you will, the bottom line is that you have a group of workers who are not all located centrally in your office. It sounds like an old term and in fact telecommuting and teleworking were first coined decades ago. Actually doing this in a modern environment is becoming easier and easier, and indeed is being encouraged by governments and green advocates.

With the terrible floods in Brisbane and surrounds this week, our remote working policy has been fully tested. The office has been closed for the last 4 days so we’ve all been working from home (or in some cases, other people’s homes!). As pretty much all of our infrastructure is in the cloud, we have been able to continue working with barely any deviation from business as usual really. We have been talking about increasing our remote working time and when we review the week, it will be interesting to see how it changes our views and what is possible and reasonable.

But what does it mean to you and your company?

The biggest single factor restricting the growth of telecommuting is trust. Do you trust your staff to actually do what you are paying them for, when they are not sat in the next cubicle? Or do you expect them to be playing Farmville or Call of Duty? In the past, this would have been difficult but technology should be making this less of an issue. And I’m not talking about spy cameras!

So what do you need?

• Firstly I would say good staff but it’s not quite as simple as that. You need to foster a culture where your team are motivated to work for the company and understand its goals. How you do that is a topic for another day - though feel free to leave comments with your ideas and opinions. Communication is key. speak to the team, make sure they have the tools and information they need and understand the tasks they have been given. Even the most motivated and dedicated worker can tie themselves in knots when working alone by trying to figure things out where they would normally just ask their co-workers. So you need to make sure they have what they need or are able to ask for it.
• Secondly, you need a steady stream of work - interesting work as much as you can - to keep their attention. Communication comes into play here too. You really have to make sure that the team understands the tasks allocated and what outcomes are expected.
• Thirdly - and depending on the line of work you are in - some system of logging and tracking time. This is straightforward for us, as a percentage of our engineers time is charged to customers on an hourly basis, so the team has been drilled and drilled on how important it is to track time. And we have a software platform designed exactly for that. They understand that this is not to play Big Brother but that it is a necessity for the company to get paid.
• Lastly you will need systems. Your team needs to be able to communicate with you, with their co-workers and with your customers. These days this may be via mobile phone but you may also have a Voice over IP (VoIP) phone system that allows them to log in and handle phone calls in the same way as if they are in the office. They will need access to email, CRM, documents, etc. You may have web based applications for this or maybe a Terminal Server so your staff can access a full desktop experience that looks and feels just like their office desktop.

For me personally, I feel that being out of a noisy office increases my productivity. I can just get on with things and end up completing far more jobs out of the office than when in it. Downsides are a bit of a lack of visibility of what’s going on in the company and the office, and knowing that there are certain things that do just have to be done while in the thick of it.

Telecommuting is a no-brainer for me, at least on a part-time basis. How does it work for you?

Dipping your toe in the cloud

So you’ve decided you want to go cloud. Or maybe you are a bit apprehensive and want to dip a toe in the water before you go the whole hog? This is fairly common. And understandable for that matter.

I’ve had a GMail account for years so I have been using ‘the cloud’ but have never really done anything with Google Docs. Until recently anyway. I had been using the beta of Office 2010 for a while but in the end didn’t feel the need to go out and buy it. So when the beta period ended and I could no longer use it, I got rid of it. That left a bit of a hole, which was mostly filled with Google Docs. I could simply upload my important documents with the built in batch uploader and away we go.

Having used Google Docs for several months now, I can say that it works well. As a way to dip your toe into cloud for free, you can’t really argue with the value. But here’s the rub. I have documents all over the place and just when I thought I had uploaded them all, I found another obscurely named folder with some files I needed to view to see if I should keep them or not. I didn’t want to upload and convert each one manually so I went looking for another solution.

You would think it would be simple and that a quick Google search would have you floundering in a sea of applications that would let you view these orphaned Word and Excel documents easily. But no, that really isn’t the case. I had almost given up on it when I came across GDocsOpen. They offer a free trial so I thought it had to be worth a go. A 744kb download and trial registration later, I’m ready to go.

Installation is just a next, next, next, finish kind of affair - pretty straightforward. Once registered, you are faced with the options page which asks what kind of documents you want to associate with the program, and of course your Google credentials. Then you are ready to go.

Finding an Excel file to test it with, I double-clicked and waited for the magic to happen. You get a spinning wheel which sits for a few seconds but then your Microsoft Office file opens up in Google Docs, inside GDocsOpen. By this point it has already uploaded and converted the file for you. If you are an impatient person like me, the process can seem a little slow but compare it to uploading manually and there is definitely an efficiency there.

If GDocsOpen finds that you have the file in your Docs repository already it will prompt you for which copy you want to open, or if you want to discard the local copy and just open the Docs copy. If you choose to just open the remote copy, when you come to save and close, you have the option to sync your changes to both copies, which is a nice touch for toe-dippers. It also means you can essentially use it to backup your Google Docs locally.

So the application doesn’t do a great deal but it does remove a few clicks and a bit of manual effort. Overall it is a pretty nice little app that fills a hole that nobody else seems to be trying to fill. There is a free 7-day trial available ($9.99 to purchase the full version), so if you are wanting to dip your toe in the cloud, it has got to be worth a go. Click here to view the website.

How much information should you give away?

As an IT service provider, we are there to support, maintain and where possible improve our customer’s IT systems. During the course of these works, a whole lot of information is collected from log files and error messages, research and testing and more. Well-run IT service providers - and certainly those who stick to IT Service Management frameworks such as ITIL - will have some form of knowledge management system implemented. In basic terms, this will be a knowledge base of documented issues, problems and their resolutions. It is likely that this repository of information will consist of specific articles documenting resolutions, as well as job notes from resolved issues. The whole point is that information is shared within the company, and future issues can be assessed against known issues for quicker resolution.

So far, so good. To run an efficient IT operation, it is vital to have and to share this information amongst your technical staff. It just makes the whole business of servicing your customers that bit easier. But speaking of the customer, how much of this information do you share with them? There are several things to consider here and it is worth looking at it from both the customer and provider standpoints.

The customer wants to see that you have done plenty for them to justify the fat bill that just landed in their inbox. They want to see that you fixed problems quickly and by being proactive, you saved them lots of dollars by avoiding potential lost downtime. Having said that, in my experience they are not interested in the technical details. They probably have no idea what HKLM_User is and don’t care what tweaking a Reg_DWORD value does.

From the service provider point of view, you want to keep your customers happy and as much as possible, give them what they want. But you don’t want to give away the farm to your ad-hoc customers. Give them enough information that tells them you are working for them and looking out for their business interests without necessarily giving away your intellectual property (IP). Having said all that, if you have customers on fixed-fee contracts, it could be in your interests to give customers access to that IP, so that in future they can fix problems themselves without having to call you. This is win-win really.

So what to do? Firstly make sure that all your work is documented and a mostly non-technical summary of work goes out with the bills each month. Implement some kind of knowledge management system (KMS) or knowledge base (KB) and give access to this to your fixed-fee customers. Encourage them to search this system before calling you. At the same time, you should probably not give access to this info to your ad-hoc customers. You can have the best of both worlds but the absolute key is getting your engineers to write-up useful notes in the first place. But that discussion is for another day …...

5 Predictions for Small Business in 2011

5 Predictions for Small Business in 2011

Interesting set of predictions for 2011.