What makes an effective IT Management Team?

IT Managers and Decision Makers, this was written for you.

IT Departments come in all different shapes and sizes. There are however some key elements I would recommend for effective IT management. It’s important to certainly have strategy.

Here is my list:

Asset Management and Risk Assessment

Time and time again you will need to know what your on hand IT Assets are and associated Risks to those assets. This is important and empowering knowledge to have to make recommendations or make decisions that can help add money back into budget. Its always good to know how much time is left on your IT assets and when to retire them as well as getting the most you can in return for the sale of used equipment. Understanding Risk is important so as to ensure your assets will be best protected and your interests are best met. So there are different formulas for determining this, what’s important is that you have established due diligence toward this area to protect your business from significant liabilities.

Change Control

With technology advancing every moment, it is very important to limit risk when implementing changes to your infrastructure and technology. It’s always good to have management on the same page when you are driving change. Also communication to employees is key to increasing change awareness. There are many aspects of change control, what is most important with regards to change is planning and communication. If you fail to plan you are planning to fail. And failure to communicate is a structural breakdown which will only drive distraction, confusion, and inefficiency.

Active measures to reduce costs by going Green

Being Green is a buzz phrase we have been hearing a lot about. What does it really mean to be Green? In my view it means just being more efficient. Does that mean working your employees to the bone with multi-tasking? No, absolutely not. You have the potential with building a Green working environment to motivate your employees without the pay raises per-se, ie. a dollar saved is a dollar earned. With technology today this is very much possible from the front line all the way back up to the top. There are a lot of ways to be Green and we certainly can help you do that, with the problems in today’s economy it is essential to save money in order to stay in business while maintaining your competitive edge.

Release Readiness

Release Readiness is very important in the Change Control and Project Management aspects. With there being a lot of change in technology its important to be ready to effectively implement those changes. They can be hardware or software. Its important to be proactive and provide due diligence in technology management, as the very efficiency you seek through it will simply go backward with immature or incorrect technology implementations.

IT Security

As more and more companies go virtual, and data is their value. It is important then that assets, availability, reliability, and performance all be examines and protected. Threats can come from many different directions. It is important to understand the threats and risks and take action to protect against them. So there are many different types of measures to be taken when building a Security Baseline. I listed this step later on because obtaining a full understanding of your IT Assets is key along with doing a Risk Assessment. These two elements will help management understand what security measures need to be taken. You are only as strong as your weakest link, also keep in mind your business is as valuable to you as your desire to stay in business. There is a great deal of cyberfraud and startups that literally steal from their competitors. If you value staying in business you simply cannot ignore IT Security and pure and proper implementation practices. Saving money in a foolish manner can put you more at risk. But doing things smarter will save you money. As long as there are cyber criminals there will always be a need for cyber security.

Effective Communications

Each of these are important as they develop well rounded focus as we tackle the most complicated and diverse IT issues. It’s important to run a tight ship that collectively bears a scalable setup, and adaptable setup. In my personal view innovative managers and decision makers can utilize effectively their abilities to keep their employees motivated while adding to bottom dollar.

Let me know how you do, with giving your focus to these principles.

Multiple Desktops in Windows

( Linux / *nix ) feel in Windows

Making Windows feel like an open source environment

There’s a cool app that helps you multi-task in an organized and efficient way in windows.  If you have used Freebsd, Suse, Slackware, DSL, Fedora, RHEL, etc.  They all have a few things different that Windows does not have, that is that they allow you to have multiple desktops.  Now that is a good idea that allows efficient work to be done in each desktop.  It helps to be able to track what you are triaging or working on.  Here is a program that gives windows that functionality as well:
https://www.hpdit.com/sysinternals/Desktops.exe
Pretty cool…

Removing Artio . cz and / or Kanga Internet . com meta tags / link from your Joomla pages

The Issue:  A spammer places their Website links in all your page’s metadata
The problem with Joomsef is that although it is great it has a down side SEO. The standard Joomsef component has advertising used in it and this is produced in the form of the Meta Generator tag in the pages displayed. This can affect website ranking in search engines. It also bloats the meta tag information with no relational ad content. There can also be output at the bottom of the pages that have a link to the Joomsef website, in my case Kanga Internet.
The Joomsef 1.5.1 version still has a file called signature.b64 included with it. This file is checked in every call or click on the website links. The signature file is a base 64 encoded string that, when decoded, contains the a HTML link to Artio. Simply removing the base 64 file will not work and removing the mention of the base 64 file from within the calling PHP code will not work so I have modified the code to not even look for the file and removed all checking for it. The code is quicker as it doesnt do a all the processing, decoding, placement, checking and the display of the advert that would normally happen on every click.

After locating the file signature.b64 open it for edit.  You will want to copy the entire text string then commence decoding of Base 64.  It should look something like this:

PGJyIC8+PHNwYW4+PGEgaHJlZj1cImh0dHA6Ly93d3cua

2FuZ2FpbnRlcm5ldC5jb21cIiB0aXRsZT1$

There are many Base 64 decoders online as well as downloadable programs+source code.  Use one of them to decode the string and you will see it reveals clearly what these spammers seek to spam your pages with:

Now like some of you I am sure you went and installed KangaInternet’s solution under misleading pretences from KangaInternet.bomb (hopefully) that they were providing us a wonderful service by riding the software of Artio.cz’s spam, well not only did they do that, but well like Gollum’s love for the ring they also could not put down the spamming and well in my case they opted to put their own website link, which really upset a lot of web masters developers including myself.  I don’t know about you, but no one likes to be mislead into thinking someone is giving the community back a solution only to find out that they have been tricked into having a very similar spam problem from in this case kangainternet.  Plus, Kanga internet didn’t write the code, Artio did, also what relational content does Kanga Internet provide to my website, so yes having these foolish tags in your pages will simple hurt your ranking in Google and boost some dumb chap’s shoddy company, I would call these acts grayhat SEO, some might say blackhat.  Anyways what a relief it is to not have that junk in my pages.

Performance tuning the Windows System Drive

From time to time the old issue of alert or log spamming will come up.  With it the usual performance degradation and CPU throttling issues as well.  During these times, it is best to find the large temp or log files and remove them from your Windows System Drive, for return to performance stability (RTPS).  This can be done through Windows Search.
 
Press Windows Key then press S
 
If you have downloaded Windows Search you will need to on the left side select Search Companion.
 
Click all files and folders
 
From there then:
Click What size is it? Double arrows to expand
 
Then you can put in the size of the files.  You can search for different file types as well such as (*.tmp, *.tpm, *.chk, *.log)
 
Select all (ctrl+a) then shift+del.
 
Also you can modify system paging to use one file rather than many when creating the paging file.  This will help improve drive performance as well as minimize on orphaned files.  That can be done in System Properties – Advanced – Under performance click settings – than advanced tab – click change – set the minimum and maximum to 1.5 times the physical memory – click set – reboot for changes.
 
This should help you remove unnecessary files while optimizing system performance.

Great Tool for Windows Server Active Directory Exploration

CES 2009 Show Recap and Vegas

The Technology presented at CES 2009 was pretty cool, but also had a lot of fun in Las Vegas:

So let me tell you about my experience.  I had gone out on business to CES 2009 and was sponsored by a rather large firmware corp there I won’t mention.  Needless, it was interesting.  I had made a lot of networking contacts including those of Microsoft and plan on going back my own next year. I had stayed at Circus Circus hotel which was in all honesty the dumpiest hotel I had seen, but got to stay there for free.

So CES was rather interesting:

I was looking at green technologies and there were many of them, longer lasting batteries, batteries with quick charge up times and long shelf-life along with the capabilities to power up laptops, cell phones, etc.  Also saw bio-friendly batteries.  There was pretty cool portable technologies running lightweight software and power.  Microsoft seemed to strive to show their cloud services off (population data compiling).

Fun in Vegas:

Here is what I did:

1. Saw Circus Circus presentation, which was a rope balancing trick, very impressive by a Brazilian performer
2. We saw a partial view of the Bellagio Fountains
3. Went on a Venetian gondola ride while being sung songs in Italian by a swiss Italian man.
4. Took a late night walk in the Caesar’s Palace Forum shops which was relaxing and soothing with hearing the water fountains run
5. Went to some shows we got for free:  Bite (passed on it), the V – show, tried to see the pirate ship battle but was too windy.
6. Drove around in a convertible got some air with the rag-top down one day when it was sunny and warm
7. Went to a lengthy and boring time share presentation, glad we didn’t buy
8. Saw a little of Paris and New York New York from the outside
9. Thought on business and prospective business goals
10. Relaxed and ate at nice restaurants
11. Went to the Wax Museum which was cool and fun
12. Ran into a few adult stars, a-hem moving on.