Technology can be a real driver of growth for small businesses — but putting IT to work can also throw up a whole new handful of problems. Tell us your war stories, share your problems and suggest solutions in this group blog, where you'll find others in the same situation.
Friday 6 November 2009, 7:25 AM
Link Building is Cool
Link building is cool. Yes, indeed it is. Developing links to help promote a business online is cool. Though, a lot of people may scoff at this, and look down disdainfully at this service. But that is ok, operational hazards the link builders would say.
When we started to develop this blog, we brainstormed about an appropriate name. Link building but was another option (besides several options). But we stuck to ‘Link Building is cool’ because it communicated our raison d’être, to tell this doubting joneses that link building requires skills, patience and insight.
We agree that there are firms out there which fib about the links that are delivered, and it is these instances we would write about. We will cover all significant updates (PR updates being an all time favorite) in this industry.
We will also write about the myths surrounding Link Building and various misrepresentations that a lot of Link Building companies do to win cases.
In this sense this blog could also be called, “link building school”.
Being situated in India (the undisputed hub of link building), gives us the advantage of being in the war zone. So all our reporting would be fresh and unadulterated.
We will attempt to bring you unbiased reports, reviews and opinion in the Link Building arena.
We would also invite our readers to let us know what you would want us to write about, and we would be happy to oblige.
We will encourage you to write and let us know what you would want us to write.
Happy Linking
Thursday 5 November 2009, 5:51 PM
Windows 7 pricing all over the shop..about as stable as Windows 7.
I really think Microsoft have made a mess of Windows 7 pricing. They got the product right, yet there initial pricing of at around £44.95 for the full version of Windows 7 Home Premium (which I feel is about right) has back fired on them.
It quickly came apparent that they could, as a so called monopoly, sell it for more, how much more, well as much as people would bear - someone got greedy.
The price has been all over the place up, down, anything but stable, compare this to the Mac Snow leopard upgrade that has stayed a consistent £25, maybe the unstable price is reflecting Windows 7 in more ways than one.
The so called 4 week window of opportunity at launch lasted less than a day at Amazon.co.uk, to order your copy at £44.97. Then in September Tesco, via Ingram Micro repeated the offer, well £49.97 (£44.97 with a £5 voucher) Tesco took the money upfront, it was the most popular item ever on hotukdeals.com.
Due to looming postal strikes, some suppliers such as Dixons were given permission to deliver on or after 19th October. Tesco followed suite and my copy was delivered early on 22nd October at 5.50pm, trouble was I was away for a week. No card appears to have been left. Re-deliver was attempted on the 29th at 11.50am.
On returning on the 29th that evening, there was a card from City-link stating that a delivery had been attempted that day.
On the 30th I checked to find City-link had strangely already sent the item back to Tesco, I couldn't pick it up.
No email had been received from Tesco to say the item was been delivered early, and their online webpage doesn't cross-reference the tracking info, so you can't check its progress from there.
I emailed Tesco to ask for the item to be resent, due to being sent early, and therefore returned early by Citylink, as to when it would have been expected, given the Worldwide launch and the delivery being 1-2 days after this normally.
I had no response via email from Tesco.
On phoning Tesco today they point-blank refused to re-send the item, instead offered a refund, with the option of re-purchasing at £95, instead of the £44.97 I'd paid.
I phoned Microsoft to discuss the matter as I felt it made Microsoft look bad, in light of poor customer service from Tesco/Ingram Micro. Initially Microsoft were helpful, as I pointed out that people legitimately purchasing software shouldn't have to put up with such practices, but once through to their customer response unit they gave way to the might of Tesco, and refused to get involved.
I feel Tesco made a mistake of not notifying Citi-link that the early delivery of Windows 7 should have meant slightly longer than 7 days before the item was returned, to take into account the early shipments.
But forcing customers who missed the item by a day ie. the 30th to have a refund and re-purchase at twice the price is just plain dishonest. Tesco you should be ashamed.
Thursday 5 November 2009, 11:17 AM
Email archiving - who needs it?
Is email archiving a big problem for SMEs? I spoke recently to Softek, a UK-based disti billing itself as 'highly technical value add distributor of IT security, email archiving and storage solutions'. Naturally enough, it has a view and a product to shift -- I wonder if you'll be totally convinced though.
So we talked about the company's new status as a distributor for PineApp email archiving appliances: boxes that suck in your Exchange (or GroupWise et al) email files after a given period, and delete them after the retention period required for legal compliance has passed. The company makes a series of them, ranging from one said to be suitable for 50 users, right up to 1,000 users.
Softek technical director Mike Bienvenu reckons that the main reason for the existence of appliances such as this, which are aimed at SMEs rather than big enterprises, users are looking for storage management rather than ways of staying legal with respect to email retention.
And that's why, he claims, the PineApp boxes are the only ones of their kind that provide stubbing - the ability to provide a stub for emails that have been archived off, which means the email program -- usually (sadly) Exchange -- sees the email as there. A call for a particular email results in it being pulled off the archive server. Apparently the boxes do deduping too.
I asked why an SME wouldn't just buy more storage rather than go for complex and expensive archiving system. It's not as if they're dealing with massive amounts of data flooding in from all over the globe. The argument for the technology is that compliance means that retaining data for a particular period of time -- up to seven year, for example -- makes this simpler to implement, and that technical issues involving Exchange's storage limitations and the retention of duplicate emails becomes expensive. Bienvenu also said that customers ask for archiving and want to ban PSTs off their network.
I'll confess the story sounded reasonable but not entirely convincing, unless the company's business process involves the generation of terabytes of email data.
Is specialised email archiving technology overkill for an SME?
Monday 2 November 2009, 8:30 AM
Adobe Reader in the Enterprise
This week I had the pleasure of working with some of the Microsoft Premier Field Engineers (PFE's) in an effort to further understand some of the application compatibility issues that might occur when sequencing for Microsoft App-V (formerly SoftGrid).
Quickly, the topic turned to compatibility issues surrounding Folder Redirection as this appeared to pose a serious compatibility problem for Adobe.
A quick scan of the web, raised a number of forum posting where numerous IT personnel could not get Acrobat or Reader 9 deployed to C# debugging and "file not found" issues.
For a few samples look here:
http://thinmaillist.blogspot.com/2008/08/thin-re-watch-out-with-adobe-acrobat_9472.html
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b5c03a
It looks like there were some pretty drastic solution paths explored here, especially for Citrix deployments. Yikes... I am really glad that I don't have to do this stuff anymore...
Before I dive too deep into the Adobe deployment problems, let's have a little introduction to Microsoft's Folder Redirection .
The idea of re-directing user local data folders onto the network was introduced with Windows XP and is defined as, "the automated re-routing of I/O (operations) from local standard folders to use a different, storage elsewhere on the network". Translated, this means that some standard user folders (i.e. My Pictures, My Documents) are redirected to store your files on a network server. This greatly increases the chances that your files (and Pictures) will get backed up in the laptop being nicked or knackered.
Windows Vista uses folder re-direction on the following directories; Contacts, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Favorites, Music, Videos, Pictures, Searches, AppData, Links, Saved Games.
If your browser has a spell checker AppData would appear with a red underline, which is appropriate as the AppData folder is one which caused us and to my great surprise, Adobe quite a lot of trouble.
Through our trouble-shooting exercise it became Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9 were attempting to write user specific data to the AppData folder. This is fine and according to the Microsoft logo application development specifications, this is OK.
So, in an enterprise environment, a user will logon to their desktop or laptop and if their IT department has done their job, the AppData folder will be redirected to something like; \\servername\region\department\username\AppData
And, here is the big issue. As folder re-direction takes place prior to logon- the user will not have any mapped drives. So, the fully qualified path to the final resting place on the target server for AppData will be a UNC path.
Hint: It will be a UNC path.
As you can probably guess where I am going here;
Adobe Acrobat 9 and Adobe Reader can not store their AppData files onto a UNC path. After a little debugging through their code, it appears that there is a failure to "read from left to right" and correctly parse the full path.
Hence, the file not found, app crashes and C# debugger errors that present themselves to users upon application start-up.
So, I did little more digging and loading Flash and version 6,7 and 8 of Adobe Reader. All of these packages use the redirected folder "AppData" in the same way - and I am sure that they will experience the same issue.
I will write more on the Adobe issues in forthcoming posts. And, there will be plenty to write about as it looks like there are over 400 application level conflicts between Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9.
References:
Folder Redirection has a brief mention here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folder_redirection
Friday 30 October 2009, 6:19 PM
Now is the time to invest in security skills training
The recent PwC survey into the Global State of Information Security (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39809565,00.htm) is a timely reminder of the skills adjustment facing our industry. Despite maturing in its short 20-year history, disparate roles are emerging in the security profession: the traditional technical IT security requirement is decreasing while jobs with a managerial focus are increasing. Even the rise in specialist university education has tended to be technically focussed. Security people get passed over for management training and the recruitment process continues to be highly weighted toward the measurable technical skills.
The PWC Survey highlighted a clear lack of security management expertise that led to lack of records on where sensitive data was stored and lack of the bigger picture on security incidents. So why is it that hiring managers struggle to find people with the right skills? 80% in one of our surveys indicated that they are challenged to fill their roles, despite the current economic downturn creating a larger available workforce.
Advancements in technology and the online world have always been ahead of the related considerations for security, because people, IT and business leaders have yet to develop the skills to think securely. Tomorrow’s business leaders need to be able to instinctively strategise for secure business development.
The challenge of ensuring secure e-skills will be about far more than the information security workforce though; security should become part of the core curriculum across the entire education system, from primary schools to a broad set of university courses It’s interesting that the majority of computing-related courses do not adequately address security issues, yet we know that strategic decisions taken by IT, from the procurement and/or development of software to the adoption of cloud services, is having a huge impact on vulnerability levels when the security requirements are not built in at the outset.
Security should also be a core element of business education. Employee induction should include security with the systems training; and security responsibilities should be part of the employment contract.
John Colley, CISSP, Managing Director (ISC)2 EMEA
Tuesday 27 October 2009, 5:48 PM
Google ABC’s… I Like
My company has been listed in Google’s auto-complete web services for a long time; if you type in “MyMobiS” you’ll see the auto-complete for my brand MyMobiSafe.com. For some of the most popular web searches however, they’ve penetrated the coveted Google ABC’s… which is when you type just one letter “A, B, C,…” their brand is the first to show in the auto-complete.
For fun, do a Google search and type in the letter A, what you’ll find to no surprise is “Amazon” as the first auto-complete suggestion.
What about the other brands that pop up? Here is a little list I made and some of the auto-complete brands might surprise you.
A=Amazon
B=Best Buy
C=Craigslist
D=Dictionary
E=Ebay
F=Facebook
G=Gmail
H=Hotmail
I=IMDB
J=Jet Blue
K=Kohls
L=Lowes
M=Mapquest
N=Netflix
O=Old Navy
P=Pandora
Q= Quotes
R=Realtor.com
S=Southwest Airlines
T=Target
U=USPS
V=Verizon Wireless
W=Walmart
X=XM Radio
Y=Youtube
Z=Zillow
While the Google auto-complete feature may make you question how some sites/searches take priority (as a fun example type “I like” into Google to see the funniest auto-complete priority around) the reality is that it means mega hits for the sites that make it into the priority. Interestingly enough, despite having spent tons of money in the beginning advertising with Google for MyMobiSafe.com, we didn’t seem to make it into the Google auto-complete directory until I had published a blog regarding an operational vulnerability within Google’s Android Mobile Operating System… go figure???
If you want to take a website global, the reality is that people need to be able to find it and that is exactly where Google fits into foreign market entry. Does your firm appear in Google’s auto-complete feature? Whether you’re a small business or a multinational, the reality is that if you don’t have an accessible website, you will struggle and likely suffocate as the business domain continues its digital expansion. Who will emerge as a titan of mobile search? Will Google struggle in this unique landscape of mobile search just as Microsoft has with their mobile operating system?
BTW…
I Like= i like to tape my thumbs to my hands to see what it would be like to be a dinosaur
Cheers,
Eric Everson - If technology is the wave of the future, then call Surfer Magazine because my board is waxed and I’m in the barrel!
Tuesday 20 October 2009, 3:37 PM
Citrix changes XenDesktop licences after feedback
Citrix has today announced modifications to the licence options for its recently announced XenDesktop 4 virtual desktop product. When the product was unveiled two weeks ago Citrix revamped its existing licensing schemes, including dropping a per-computer option in favour of a per-user scheme. A number of existing and potential Citrix users pointed out that this would cause them substantial cost increases.
The company has now posted a blog entry on new licensing options that it says addresses this and other concerns. In the blog, Sumit Dhawan, VP for Citrix XenDesktop, says:
" Your feedback has been invaluable in helping us make sure XenDesktop 4 enables the broadest set of virtual desktop scenarios possible. As a result, we've decided to make three important new enhancements to XenDesktop 4:m [a] device-based licensing option, [a] VDI Edition available in both user/device and CCU licensing, [and a] Campus-wide Licensing Program for customers in the education industry"
This change follows the company asking for feedback, information and opinions four days after the launch of the product, when Dhawan said it first became aware of the issue.
"We have received the customer feedback and we are actively investigating appropriate licensing programs for XenDesktop 4 to address these use cases. [...] We are in the process of collecting some more information and we plan to share our solution to address these requirements within 30 days."
Ewen Anderson, MD of UK consultancy Centralis, told ZDNet “It’s not clear whether the earlier furore over licensing models was a real issue or just a mis-interpreted release, but Citrix have moved swiftly to dispel the dark clouds and thrown in the added bonus of the campus agreement. From both a customer and a partner perspective that shows a willingness to listen which will be much appreciated.”
Monday 19 October 2009, 9:48 AM
Why "Real Time" Search misses the point of what makes social media powerful
As Google and Bing scrabble to lead the move towards Real Time Search, are they missing the point?
I admit I've always had issues with search engines and the SEO/SEM industry that rides its coat-tails. First off, if I am looking for something specific I rarely want 48,000,000 pages to sift through to find it. I'd rather have a handful and for them be highly relevant. If I asked a friend for some opinion or advice and they reeled off for several hours about a whole load of stuff that barely brushes on what I am talking about, Rain Man like, I'd probably never bother asking them again. And yet it seems totally acceptable for search engines to do the same.
An example. Search Google for "PR companies Huddersfield". It comes back with 146,000 responses. Now, there are only 11 PR companies in Huddersfield and the town only has a population of 146,000. Unless every single resident has PR expertise, or those 11 companies have managed to generate over 13,000 of content each, there is a whole heap or barely relevant tripe that Google is feeding back to me. Only 4 of the 11 companies actually get a mention on the first page of results and, as we know, not many people go beyond that first page when looking for answers. So at best Google has come back with worse than 40% accuracy on my request.
Good enough? Well, potentially not as good as asking people you know for a recommendation of a PR company in Huddersfield, which is what social media enables you to do. More and more people, especially those with Twitter desktop (and mobile) client TweetDeck open all day, are simply turning to Twitter to ask their followers for specific recommendations. They may not get a response -- and it may not be immediate -- but when they do they'll get something very, very relevant, usually with the value of a word of mouth recommendation attached to it. Google knows this is happening and is panicking enough to rush Real Time search results into the mix -- you can now filter Google results by those posted in the past hour, for example.
But whether it's real time or not -- and I don't believe "Past hour" IS real time -- it misses the point of why people are gravitating towards asking for business recommendations of contacts on Twitter and other social networks rather than turning to Google for responses which aren't in the slightest bit considered. In fact, the only level of qualification, if you can call it that, is that the ones you get first in your results have mastered search engine marketing and search engine optimisation, rather than than the PR, printing, telesales or skills you're actually looking for. The best at providing the specific service you need don't get listed first, as might actually be useful.
All this reminds me of a debate I got into with the managing director of an online business directory some time ago in a forum. We discussed his site, a pure directory of businesses, against mine at WeCanDo.BIZ where we have a directory (it's just a part of our site) but listed first are those with the highest number of endorsements from customers. He smugly pointed out to all reading the forum that he'd searched his site for an accountant and got 24,000 results; he'd searched our site and (at the time) got 6 results. I pointed out that no one wants 24,000 accountants, they typically want just one and for them to be good -- and being able to pick the most suitable from a short list was more useful than throwing a dart at a wall papered with Yellow Pages listing. He didn't argue against it.
So what could Google or Bing offer as a more credible alternative to pages or irrelevant twaddle, placed only through the "skill" of a search engine guru? Well, Twitter-like networks of their own that could be polled for a response might be a solution. But many have tried to emulate Twitter from scratch and failed. Perhaps being able to simultaneously tweet your search request to your own network of followers would help, so that as well as the 146,000 results from Google's servers you could have a proper real time update of responses from your Twitter followers on the same page? Twitter offers OAuth to enable us to be logged into Twitter while on other sites which can then use Twitter's features, so not hard to do if Google or Bing felt so inclined.
Or you could wait to see what Facebook does now it has web search on its site and Friendfeed waiting to be integrated into the site proper. It would be quite possible with the tech they've got to offer alongside traditional web search an ability to simultaneously broadcast your request to your Facebook users, as well as potentially any other network (including Twitter) you have connected to your FriendFeed. Could the social media sites themselves point to a new future for search?
Either way, "search" is changing with the power of crowd-sourcing attached and I, for one, cannot wait!
Your thoughts are always welcomed; just post a reply below.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
Monday 19 October 2009, 5:35 AM
Windows Operating Systems = Bloatware
There has been a lot going on. I've been trying out CTP 2011 “Quebec” from Microsoft, its basically Windows 7 Embedded. Now I know how various OEMs have been able to demo Windows 7 on all the netbooks that suddenly popped up. Consider the Windows 7 Embedded CTP to be like a "live-DVD" type of installation tool and you'll have the basic idea. If you take out pieces of Win7 that you don't need or want, you can lighten the OS load considerably. The smallest image with some networking I was able to make was about 500 MB. More on that later.
Win 7 Embedded is an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp. The OS is so freaking fat that it really doesn't make much if any sense to use it as an “embedded” operating system. As a touch screen enabled bistro table “information appliance” yeah, I'll buy that idea. Something to put inside a handheld or portable device? No and no way. Putting it in netbooks with Intel Atoms, or Via C7's maybe, they'd be slow. Windows XP though would be a better choice, and Win XP Embedded even better.
I suspect that a large amount of the fat in Win 7 comes from supporting old, really OLD applications. As an example I found edlin.exe in the system32 directory. That in itself was funny since the original edlin was a 16 bit LINE editor in MSDOS. It pre-dates edit.exe, another MSDOS editor, also in the system32 directory. Adding notepad.exe and write.exe makes 4 text editors in one folder. Is that really necessary?.
(Before you jump me, yes I know edlin.exe is still in XP Pro etc. When was the last time you HAD to use edlin? Did you really want to?)
There are runtime packages for C, C+, C++, VB5 and VB6, old MFC etc some of them pre-date Win95. ODBC database connectors for Access 95/97 databases, dBase3, and Paradox. Support for OS2, its limited but there.
Iexpress.exe, an application-installer-packager from the Windows 3.1 era also has an system32 “update”.
Most of the Win7 fat though is semi-hidden in plain-sight. Portions of the operating system have to be written in such a way to support either the old applications directly or through the application compatibility add-ons Microsoft has patched onto the various versions of Windows. Ntvdm and wow (Windows on Windows) are examples of application patching, hosting or shims embedded into Windows. I appreciate the fact that Microsoft wants to support everything they have ever released (except maybe MS Bob!) but come on, can't that stuff be supported in a download and only on the users' systems that need it?
Since Microsoft has stopped supporting MSDOS, Win 3.1 & 3.11, and WIn9X directly, why continue to support them in the new operating systems?
Hook Application Compatibility into Windows Update and use that to download the appropriate packages to support the old stuff the user has to continue using. There already is a side-by-side mechanism setup for the DLL hell of previous Windows NT versions. Something similar can be done for the old stuff, especially the 16 bit stuff.
How about MS making their Virtual PC software into something that does the legacy support? Its an extension of the idea of Virtual XP Pro stuff going to be done in WIn7.
Think of all the plug-ins that users have to download when they go web-surfing all over the Internet. Its not like the users don't already download most of the junk on their computers already.
Most of the people I have had to fix their home computers don't make back-ups and lose their installation disks so when they go out and buy the latest version of Windows Whatever, they end up buying new software anyway. This new software seldom needs MSDOS and 16bit Windows support. So why leave it in the OS as part of the piles of detritus that hardly ever gets executed?
If you want another argument to remove this un-needed dross, think of system security. All of this old compatibility software sitting on the system has a very large and exposed surface to malware writers. At present most of the compatibility software hasn't been used much to attack the host 32 bit system but its an attack vector waiting to happen. If the software wasn't there reliably on every Windows system that would be one less way to hack into or around system security. In other words, the 16 bit legacy software is not on the system UNLESS the user downloads a compatibility package, until then it wouldn't present itself as such a tempting target for future malware. If the malware guys can't count on it being there for use then its not a viable means of attack.
Friday 16 October 2009, 9:08 AM
Microsoft App-V: Helpful Tools
I wanted to mention a rather useful tool that have recently come from Microsoft.
As quoted by one of the TechNet blogs;
"The Microsoft Installer (MSI) Utility for Microsoft Application Virtualization, a utility for SoftGrid Application Virtualization solution that bridges the gap between traditional physical control of installed applications and the new paradigm of virtual applications."
This means that you can now load MSI packages into SoftGrid environments and not have to "Sequence" or convert them to SoftGrid (SFT) packages before deployment. This would allow an organization to utilize their existing SMS environment and "dilute" their application management efforts through supporting two different application management formats.
Have a read:
http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2007/09/11/microsoft-unveils-plans
-for-the-msi-utility-for-microsoft-virtualization-at-vmworld.aspx
And the official source:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2007/sep07/09-11virtualization.mspx
This makes sense as the SoftGrid SFT file format was riddled with Open Source/GPL software and the compression algorithm was written by a lovely French chap who detested Microsoft - hardly the recipe for a thriving format for M$. I am not too sure that this is going to work for more difficult/complex applications. However, it may help with some of the rapid proto-typing required to get a SoftGrid (aka MAV) environment off the ground and get some applications sequenced quickly, ready for testing (i.e. thrashing).
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