While working on our Sox projects I was emailing spreadsheets around. To help track progress I "traffic lighted" certain cells: Green for no problem, yellow when I was waiting for someone, and red when I had to do something myself. I was using Excel 2007, but those receiving my spreadsheets were using Excel 2003. Every time I saved the file, Excel 2007 would wand me about a minor loss of fidelity but I paid little attention. That was until one user complained that there were no green cells on the spreadsheet – only yellow.
Now I must admit to being color deficient (or partially color blind). So when I chose green for the cells, it was a bit of a yellowish green. And when Excell saved my spreadsheet in 2003 format, it changed these green cells to bright yellow! My guess is that the 2007 version of the program uses 24 bit color (like a photo), whereas the 2003 version uses only 8 bit color (like a gif file). And when the 24 bit color was downgraded to 8 bit, the yellow green was changed to bright yellow – totally altering the meaning!
So beware when using Office 2007 and 2003 products in a mixed environment. Things can bite you if you are not careful.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Caveat emptor – Let the buyer beware.
In a recent Network World article IT Managers are warned against buying consumer class laptops. The logic implied is that higher prices mean better quality systems. Unfortunately my experience shows that paying more money by no means guarantees that you will get better systems.
In October 2007 I purchased four HP Compaq 8510p systems for evaluation for evaluation purposes, and supplied them to several end users, one of who was our corporate lawyer. Right from the beginning these systems had problems, with the ATI graphics card resetting and with the wireless cards taking over 15 minutes to connect.
Then things went downhill . Our corporate lawyer, who uses only MS Office, had blue screens every day with "infinite loop" error messages from the graphics card driver. (A little web research show that some ATI cards have suffered from Infinite loop errors for over 3 years). A driver update did nothing. HP sent a replacement for the corporate lawyers system. Within a few days the replacement system started blue screening. At the same time my laptop's graphics card started resetting occasionally. So HP sent two more replacement machines. When the first machine would not even boot, saying that the BIOS was not ACPI compliant things didn't look good. Sure enough, our corporate lawyer's machine started blue screening again, with increasing frequency. Eventually she gave it back to me, saying that it was useless. Another user has SAS on their machine. This one green screened – a first for me! (It looked like it went into character mode, showing rows of little green boxes).
With our Sox project taking up much of my time I just haven't been able to get these problems resolved. But apart from that, you really don't expect new laptops that cost about $2200 each to suffer from these problems. Out of 4 machines supplied every single one has a graphics card problem, and at least two of them have wireless problems. Including the replacement machines, the failure rate is over 100%! I am still struggling to get HP to resolve these problems.
Needless to say, we won't be buying any more HP laptops, which is a pity because I really liked them. While this experience can't be typical (if it was, I would expect HP to be out of the laptop business) it does show that paying more for laptops by no means guarantees that you will have fewer problems. If anything, considering the volumes sold, maybe it would pay IT manager to buy consumer class laptops.
Caveat emptor – Let the buyer beware.
In October 2007 I purchased four HP Compaq 8510p systems for evaluation for evaluation purposes, and supplied them to several end users, one of who was our corporate lawyer. Right from the beginning these systems had problems, with the ATI graphics card resetting and with the wireless cards taking over 15 minutes to connect.
Then things went downhill . Our corporate lawyer, who uses only MS Office, had blue screens every day with "infinite loop" error messages from the graphics card driver. (A little web research show that some ATI cards have suffered from Infinite loop errors for over 3 years). A driver update did nothing. HP sent a replacement for the corporate lawyers system. Within a few days the replacement system started blue screening. At the same time my laptop's graphics card started resetting occasionally. So HP sent two more replacement machines. When the first machine would not even boot, saying that the BIOS was not ACPI compliant things didn't look good. Sure enough, our corporate lawyer's machine started blue screening again, with increasing frequency. Eventually she gave it back to me, saying that it was useless. Another user has SAS on their machine. This one green screened – a first for me! (It looked like it went into character mode, showing rows of little green boxes).
With our Sox project taking up much of my time I just haven't been able to get these problems resolved. But apart from that, you really don't expect new laptops that cost about $2200 each to suffer from these problems. Out of 4 machines supplied every single one has a graphics card problem, and at least two of them have wireless problems. Including the replacement machines, the failure rate is over 100%! I am still struggling to get HP to resolve these problems.
Needless to say, we won't be buying any more HP laptops, which is a pity because I really liked them. While this experience can't be typical (if it was, I would expect HP to be out of the laptop business) it does show that paying more for laptops by no means guarantees that you will have fewer problems. If anything, considering the volumes sold, maybe it would pay IT manager to buy consumer class laptops.
Caveat emptor – Let the buyer beware.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Sox (Sarbanes Oxley)
Today marks the end of a Sarbanes Oxley (Sox) project which has been consuming much of my time for months. My responsibility was getting the IT part of the company Sox compliant, and I'm pleased to say that after tying up a few loose ends the auditors gave us 100%. Considering that six months ago there was nothing in place, this leaves me feeling satisfied.
If there ever was something that cries out for tools like Lotus Notes or even SharePoint it is Sox. However, because of previous history and the consultants we were using, we ended up using the classic word doc, spreadsheet and email approach with a lot of cutting and pasting. This approach is very popular in many companies, but in reality is a very manual method. You often find it used for project management as well.
Spreadsheets track progress and summarize document content, and a significant part of the work consists of keeping them up to date. The core of Sox is developing policies and procedures (summarized in those spreadsheets), and then providing evidence that you are following you procedures. Fortunately most of these policies and procedures are well understood, but customizing them for a company involves emailing copies back and forth. Some of the documentation references other parts, and manually keeping this in sync is difficult to say the least. As I have said before it is impossible to keep any non trivial collection of documents in sync manually. And Sox certainly qualifies as a non trivial document collection. Is it any wonder that mail stores grow so fast with this approach? What really puzzles me is why some companies use such manual and inefficient methods to manage a particular process.
Now consider doing this using a workflow enabled tool like Notes or SharePoint. All the emailing of documents back and forth is no longer required. Audit trails show changes to documentation. And different views of those documents provided automatically updated summaries that replace the spreadsheets. Once you have such a system or tool in place my gut feel is that you will cut the work load by about 50%.
Which leaves the question – why is the "cut & paste" method so popular amongst IT professionals? We talk so much about collaboration, but we don’t practice it. Maybe we need read a book like Flawed Advice and the Management Trap and then take a good hard look in the mirror.
If there ever was something that cries out for tools like Lotus Notes or even SharePoint it is Sox. However, because of previous history and the consultants we were using, we ended up using the classic word doc, spreadsheet and email approach with a lot of cutting and pasting. This approach is very popular in many companies, but in reality is a very manual method. You often find it used for project management as well.
Spreadsheets track progress and summarize document content, and a significant part of the work consists of keeping them up to date. The core of Sox is developing policies and procedures (summarized in those spreadsheets), and then providing evidence that you are following you procedures. Fortunately most of these policies and procedures are well understood, but customizing them for a company involves emailing copies back and forth. Some of the documentation references other parts, and manually keeping this in sync is difficult to say the least. As I have said before it is impossible to keep any non trivial collection of documents in sync manually. And Sox certainly qualifies as a non trivial document collection. Is it any wonder that mail stores grow so fast with this approach? What really puzzles me is why some companies use such manual and inefficient methods to manage a particular process.
Now consider doing this using a workflow enabled tool like Notes or SharePoint. All the emailing of documents back and forth is no longer required. Audit trails show changes to documentation. And different views of those documents provided automatically updated summaries that replace the spreadsheets. Once you have such a system or tool in place my gut feel is that you will cut the work load by about 50%.
Which leaves the question – why is the "cut & paste" method so popular amongst IT professionals? We talk so much about collaboration, but we don’t practice it. Maybe we need read a book like Flawed Advice and the Management Trap and then take a good hard look in the mirror.
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