Author: Jeff Potts

McAfee Security Center is a whipping

My new Dell XPS 400 came with McAfee Security Center. My old home machine runs Norton Internet Security. To be honest, I figured the two would be pretty similar in features so I considered the free Dell McAfee bundle to be a good deal, particularly in light of the generous length of the subscription.

Boy was I wrong. McAfee has been one whipping after another and has, by far, been the biggest “change management” issue for my customers (ie, my wife and kids) with the new machine.

The biggest problem is that there does not seem to be a way to connect a Privacy Service account with a Windows account. On our home machine each of us log in with our own account. That lets me limit the kids’ ability to foul up the system. With Norton Internet Security I was able to tie a Windows account to a maturity level. Norton then made a decent attempt at blocking inappropriate content. With McAfee it isn’t as seamless–anyone wanting to use the net has to log in to McAfee Privacy Service even though they’ve already logged in to their Windows account. The Privacy Service accounts are managed separately from the Windows accounts. That’s shoddy and cumbersome. I’m supposed to ask my four year-old to remember two passwords?

The next annoyance was when McAfee alerted us to a “missing component” and suggested reinstalling. I don’t know why but I let that one slip. The thing that bugged me was the re-install. The product is actually a bundle of four products. When you install them they each need their own re-boot. If you must require a Windows restart, how about giving me the “restart later” option? Four re-starts? Good thing my system boots quickly!

And now for the hat trick. When you ask the McAfee to check for updates it fires up the browser. Unfortunately it doesn’t know how to work with anything other than MSIE. I bought a security product, McAfee! Why would I be running MSIE if I were concerned about security?

McAfee, your ultimate goal in life should be transparency. When your product becomes a pain it will get disabled and ultimately uninstalled. Paricularly when it comes to virus and firewall software, that’s definitely not good for anyone.

Hitachi Consulting acquires Navigator Systems, Inc.

It is hard to believe but the deal is finally done. Today Hitachi Consulting acquired my company, Navigator Systems, Inc.. I believe the press release will go out tomorrow.

We’ve got a lot of details to work through, as you can imagine–Hitachi is nearly 10 times the size of our 100-person firm. But I’m excited about the new possibilities it opens up for my small (but growing!) ECM practice on both the supply-side (access to new resources I can train up on ECM technologies) as well as the demand-side (new markets, geographies, accounts, etc.).

Obviously, I’m focused on adding capability to Hitachi’s existing ECM competency. But the main driver behind the acquisition was that Hitachi was looking to add serious muscle to their existing Business Intelligence(BI)/Corporate Performance Management (CPM) business. Navigator is a leader in that space and we’ve been growing, but now we’ll be able to move forward much more aggressively.

Since I joined Navigator in 1997 we came close to doing a deal a few times and it was always a little nerve-racking. The anticipation builds, major change looms on the horizon, and then nothing. Now we’re here and it is a little surreal. The coming months should be exciting!

Robertson’s call to arms: Let’s get practical

I’ve been thinking about James Robertson’s post. In it, James says that instead of undertaking enterprise-wide, strategic Knowledge Management initiatives (my grouping for his list of example “enterprise projects) organizations should be focused on smaller, more tactical point solutions that deliver real improvements to productivity.

He’s not advocating that every business unit just “do their own thing”.

This is not to say that the bigger picture is forgotten, quite the opposite. While individual activities are always focused on immediate needs, consideration is given to longer-term objectives. This influences the selection of the projects, the technology used, and the points of integration into other systems.

While I agree with James’ overall sentiment, I’m not quite clear on what he thinks is the best way for the business units to leverage economies of scale around best practices and infrastructure.

For example, several of our clients use a “shared services” or “center-of-excellence” approach. In this model, a centralized supporting infrastructure is put in place (includes physical infrastructure as well as human resources) that business units can leverage.

The trick is making sure that:

– The IT organization is not a bottleneck. The whole goal is to empower others to use the infrastructure.

– The process of selecting and implementing the infrastructure doesn’t turn into a multi-year project that delivers no value until the very end. By that time, the business units will have already done their own thing, often without regard to the shared economies of scale or “the big picture”.

It seems that this model lends itself to empowering business units without too much overhead yet still provides enough direction and coordination to avoid a big mess down the road.

Optaros summarizes 15 open source content management projects

Seth Gottlieb has published an excellent whitepaper summarizing 15 different open source projects. He also includes a summary of how to go about evaluating open source offerings.

Seth offers a short list of offerings for each of the following usage scenarios:

    Brochure Site
    Online Periodical
    Collaborative Workspace
    Wiki as Collaborative Workspace
    Online Community

The format is similar to the presentation he gave at KM World but the format obviously lets him go into much greater detail.

Migration tools are marketing, not technical, tools

CMSWatch says that although Trends: Microsoft has released free migration tools for Notes/Domino, it is the custom Notes/Domino code that makes it hard to switch.

I’ve architected Notes/Domino applications as well as solutions on other document management and collaboration platforms and I’ve ported applications from one platform to another. Platform migration tools are usually good at moving apps with little or no customization. The “problem” is, Notes/Domino is often used to develop complex, highly-customized applications. For those, there’s probably no getting around a complete re-development effort if they are to be moved at all.

If you accept that you are essentially starting over for all but the simplest applications, your next problem could be with end-user expectations. A lot of the functionality vendors are just now getting around to incorporating into their offerings has been present in Notes/Domino for some time. If the goal is to port the highly-customized application with a 0% loss in end-user functionality, prepare yourself for a substantial development effort and, potentially, the acquisition and integration of best-of-breed components to keep the app as functional as it was before.

This is probably true for any platform migration project. Although you’d like to think that the end-user requirements are de-coupled from the underlying technology choice, platform-specific features or strengths always seem to find their way from the platform feature spec sheet to the list of features end-users can’t live without. Sometimes, that’s because the platform might have been originally selected because of those strengths (i.e., platform X has strong collaborative features or platform Y has great Office integration, for example). Other times, it is because developers are inherently lazy–features that rely on functionality that comes “for free” or is built-in to the platform are often at the top of the priority list.

I think platform migration utilities are most efficiently used as a marketing tool rather than a technical tool–they give the sales folks an answer to the “what about our existing applications on platform X?” objection. Use them to migrate your simple stuff, then start the real work of planning the migration of your customized apps.