IT outsourcing contracts, as noted in a recent blog post, should be treated as living documents -- continuously evaluated, refined, and optimized over time. Not only do business conditions continually change, but it’s also important for outsourcing customers to...
Infrastructure
4 Reasons to Use Static Analysis on Your Codebase
All of us who work in software development want the products that we release to be high quality, and also low cost to maintain in the field. This is no big revelation; it’s common knowledge, and it’s common sense. It’s not clear that there is any silver bullet in...
DIACAP and Gold Disk: What about Windows 7?
This post is in response to David’s excellent post about Gold Disk. I recently performed some DIACAP Compliance testing using Gold Disk on one of our products, which was built on Windows XP Embedded. That process is fairly straightforward, even though Gold Disk is...
Test Management 101 – Why Developers Are Not Sufficient to Fully Test Your Project
Your developers have been working on your latest software project. The hours have been long, the going a little rough, and they're just about finished in more ways than one. Now it's time to verify that the application works. Are you thinking of asking your developers...
In Celebration of IPv6
On June 8th of last year, an event known as World IPv6 Day was celebrated. Well, “celebrated” might carry a little too much emphasis – perhaps instead, World IPv6 Day was observed. And what did you do to celebrate this observance of the future? Well, if you are like...
Outsource Your System Administration to Set Your Engineers Free
The inquisitive nature of engineers, which makes them so good at designing, developing and building products, can also lead them to become distracted by other “interesting things” like managing the very systems and tools that allow them to do their engineering....
How to lock down users on your PTC Integrity Server
Recently I was doing some work for a customer, experimenting with allowing limited access to non-Administrator class users using the PTC Integrity Administration client. I discovered that once a standard user gained access to the PTC Integrity Administration client,...
How to rename column headers in your PTC Integrity Custom Reports
In the Metrics, Metrics, Metrics series of articles I wrote about PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager, I talked about how you can use metrics information gathered from fields on your report to build custom reports, charts and dashboards. Now that the main series is...
Creating “Custom” Facts in Puppet
The servers that I’m managing can be divided into two groups, colo and local servers. While most of the configuration has been similar between these two, there have been a growing number of things which I’ve had to configure differently through Puppet. The latest...
Electric Flow 8.0 New Feature: Manual and Automated Retry on Error
Electric Cloud recently released version 8.0 of their build and deployment orchestration tool, Electric Flow. This latest release includes many new features, but the focus of this article will be the ability to retry tasks and stages from a failed pipeline and why...
SPK Earns Place on MSP 501 List of Top Managed Services Providers in the World
SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif., Aug. 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- SPK and Associates, LLC (SPK) is excited to announce our recent award as one of 2019's 501 most elite Information Technology managed service providers in the United States. The Channel Futures /...
Declutter your multi-computer desktop with ‘Mouse without Borders’
For the everyday user with a laptop or desktop, this article may not apply. And for those of you who have no need to have more than one PC on your desk -- kudos! But from time to time, its necessary to have several PC's on your desk at the same time -- especially...