In the world of IT, solutions become problems with alarming regularity. The new software of today is the upgrade nightmare of tomorrow. The policies that solved problems create new ones years later. The corporate IT departments that we look to for solutions are...
Infrastructure
How to Monitor Your APC UPS Units – Part 1
Picture your ideal company technological infrastructure. Servers to handle day to day tasks, servers to do engineering simulations, network equipment to handle communication, network-attached storage for your company critical data, and last but not least,...
Taking IT Out of Corporate IT … A Response
There were quite a lot of comments on this site and other sites on the original post -- all by IT professionals, and almost all negative. The comments were interesting, but quite one-sided. Many people thought the article was suggesting dropping a figurative bomb on...
Top 5 Hottest IT Outsourcing Trends
As the global economy remains turbulent, corporate decisions-makers continue to remain laser-focused on cost containment and finding new ways of generating additional productivity and value to their organizations. As a result, these macro factors are shaping many of...
In the Trenches: How IT Outsourcing Makes Life Easier on IT Managers
In September we introduced a blog post series on how IT outsourcing can deliver multiple benefits to organizations. These gains can range from lower costs to support for an activity or function to process improvements delivered by an organization that has extensive...
Top 5 Reasons to Conduct an IT Outsourcing Re-Evaluation
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...
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,...