Access to information is a hot topic these days, especially as companies–big and small, public and private–struggle to optimize their electronically stored information (ESI) so it can be readily available. If you followed the advice in my last post and cleaned out your storage junk drawer, you’ve probably eased access to your critical data somewhat by getting rid of unwanted information while moving less important data onto less expensive storage.
Now that your house is in order in terms of what data is vital and where it should reside, let’s add up all the times you save copies of that data and for what purpose. I’m sure you back up your data faithfully and even replicate the most important information, making real-time copies for elevated protection. You also probably create copies so you can archive it in accordance with corporate policies and/or regulatory compliance requirements. And, you might even have additional copies for eDiscovery. The total of all those copies most likely will surprise you.
I hear from IT managers all the time who are trying to cope with 50-percent annual increases in primary storage. Then when they factor in storing multiple copies of the same data for things like disaster recovery or litigation support, the amount is compounded 10 or 20 times. They’re equally distressed that significant increases in administrative overhead can be traced to excessive time managing disparate products that don’t talk to each other.
We should follow Apple’s lead and ditch the point products in favor of a single platform with multi-purpose functionality. This way, a single copy of data can be managed from a single view and repurposed many times. In doing so, you create one highly optimized, highly efficient copy of data for multi-purpose use. The efficiency gains translate to direct savings in terms of dollars, storage space and administrative time.
Who wouldn’t want to trade four or more different products for a common platform where you can leverage data copies for a multitude of purposes, including data protection, replication, disaster recovery, long-term archive and compliance? Common sense alone should prevail in the decision to choose a unified approach to optimizing your critical information. Add in all the savings and comparisons to Apple-like innovation and it becomes a no-brainer.
According to a new report from Gartner, Inc., Xerox Corporation ranked as the worldwide market share leader in Managed Print Services (MPS) based on revenue. Xerox believes this data further validates its approach to provide services and solutions that deliver business value.
Xerox/Fuji Xerox captured 53 percent of MPS revenues worldwide in 2007; and in North America alone, Xerox accounts for 56 percent of the MPS market.
“This is another positive evaluation Xerox has received from Gartner, the first being our placement in the “Magic Quadrant for Managed Print Services Worldwide and most recently our position in the Leaders Quadrant in the “Magic Quadrant for MFPs and Printers,” said Stephen Cronin, president, Xerox Global Services. “We believe the Gartner reports, along with the significant cost savings and productivity gains we’re achieving for our customers, speak to our leadership position on both the product side and in the MPS space.”
Ownership for document output is usually fragmented across organizations and departments. With Xerox Office Services’ comprehensive Lean Six Sigma-based approach, customers are able to determine the actual costs associated with printing, copying and faxing across all offices. The assessment also tracks how often and when multi-vendor copiers, printers and other hardware devices are being used. Armed with this information, Xerox designs an output strategy that not only meets workplace requirements, but also increases efficiency while reducing waste.
In addition to maintaining its own equipment, Xerox currently manages more than a million competitive devices in customers’ offices worldwide; which includes help desk, break-fix, supplies, service level agreements and procurement.
More information about Gartner, and access to the report, is available at http://www.gartner.com. A cost may be associated with accessing the full report.
Google the terms “placefulness” and “Drupal” together, and the top results all point to … Plone! As we move more deeply into our web site design, we are gaining a better understand of our site needs.
Placefulness: the Plone community makes frequent use of this term to describe how the system automatically retains the “location” of each new document one creates in the site. In end-user terms, the user clearly knows where he/she is within the site at all times. This makes Plone well-suited for sites with a clean content hierarchy. Contrast this with Drupal, in which new nodes have no location by default. The system only automatically assigns them a node ID number. Drupal developers use content types, menus, tags, views, and modules to create the illusion of place and hierarchical structure.
Many of our users, responsible for a particular school program, need to manage the hierarchy of article in their content area. If this process is difficult to use, it will challenge a lot of people and become an obstacle to content creation. We must also consider permissions and menus. Plone cascades editing privileges in a way that Drupal does not — if you can edit the parent, then you can also edit its children by default. Users may expect menu items to appear automatically in a hierarchical content structure.
Recognizing the need, the Drupal community has generated a number of modules that help automatically link new nodes to their location within a hierarchical content structure. Most obvious is the book module, distributed with core. Users may create child pages, and the Book Navigation feature automatically generates a book menu on the fly.
I learned that it is best to automatically display Book Navigation on whenever one is in a book. If one restricts the block’s visibility based on the URL path, then one has to specify custom URLs for all of the pages in the book or use PathAuto to automatically generate them. This quickly becomes a hassle again.
At first glance, it does not appear straightforward to mix book and non-book menu items in these menus, which could be a problem. We could create separate menus for structured content navigation and links to interactive pages (a.k.a., transactions). While that would work better within Drupal, would it make the site more or less usable to our visitors?
To further complicate matters, we want the landing page of each top-level section to show the news items for that category instead of a book page. Now we need to make the book navigation appear before we are actually in the book. This code snippet makes book navigation appear on all pages — we would have to modify it to display a navigation block to match the book one is about to enter. Another possible direction is to insert PHP code into the book landing page to manually query the database for news items related to that book. That may be more straightforward.
Good news: I just tried two new tricks (for me). I inserted PHP code into a book page to mix dynamic with static content. Drupal provided me the SQL query in the Drupal 6 View interface.
$sql = "SELECT node.nid AS nid FROM node node LEFT JOIN term_node term_node ON node.vid = term_node.vid INNER JOIN term_data term_data ON term_node.tid = term_data.tid WHERE (node.type in ('news')) AND (term_data.name = 'admission')";
(I know, I’m showing my novice Drupal learning curve. It’s my blog.)
We could throw in the towel and manually manage the menus. We really want the ability to post a single article to multiple places in the hierarchy, which seems to run counter to any automatic menu generation feature. However, if a user responsible for a small portion of the site needs to scroll through the entire site menu hierarchy to place their item, they will be stopped in their tracks.
Node Hierarchy appears to address our concern directly, allowing a user to specify the child relationship of a new node to an existing one. It’s unclear whether development on this module is sufficiently active to use on our primary, public web site. The Drupal 6 version is currently in alpha. I also question whether it uses a popup menu to select the parent node, which would be very awkward on a large site. Node Hierarchy is incompatible with book, which would mean that we were placing our trust in a module with less community support than Book.
I have yet to investigate breadcrumb navigation, which would also help strengthen the sense of placefulness of each node. I hope it will play well with the other hoops I am jumping through to make this work.
For classroom pages, it may make more sense to use Organic Groups. That should allow teachers to post articles, manually maintain a simple menu, and create items for other content types as we support them (image galleries, calendar, blog posts, etc.). This will also allow individuals to maintain both public and private content, which should help us both maintain visibility of classroom programs and protect the privacy of our students, teachers, and parents.
Amherst College developed their own solution, MonsterMenus, to provide this functionality to their site. However, development was so extensive that they were not able to publish a module for this, despite recognizing the high levels of interest and expressing their willingness to share.
If we need to choose between Drupal and Plone, we may need to determine the core nature of our site. Is this a traditional content repository with some interactive features, or is it an interactive site with some hierarchical content? Will the interactivity be mostly one-way (collecting information from school community members), or will we really reply and produce lots of original, dynamic content ourselves? In other words, will we really have the kind of community site that Drupal was invented to provide? We don’t want to constantly swim upstream against Drupal’s core tendencies.
The ace up our sleeve is that we can set up a test site to experiment with different potential solutions before we commit to a development platform.
ProStor InfiniVault-DICOM is an intelligent long-term storage solution that addresses the need for expanded storage capacity in organizations that are creating an increasing number of images and retaining them for longer periods of time. The system is also ideal for replacing obsolete deep archive technologies including tape and optical storage. In addition to DICOM images, ProStor InfiniVault-DICOM stores and properly retains electronic medical records and business files. The scalable and affordable system manages DICOM objects over the network for modalities, RIS, HIS and PACS systems. Patients, doctors, technicians and healthcare administrators alike benefit from this cost-effective system that easily drops into existing environments with DICOM 3.0 conformance and HIPAA compliance.
Unlike other disk-based storage systems, ProStor InfiniVault-DICOM integrates industry leading RDX(R) removable disk cartridges to provide the performance of online storage with the economics of offline storage. The system simplifies the management of data by enabling secure local and remote access to images, automatically making multiple copies of data for offsite archival and disaster recovery. ProStor InfiniVault-DICOM also automates data retention with HIPAA compliance, including the disposition of images and data.
The ProStor InfiniVault-DICOM Model 100 System is capable of managing more than 1 billion studies in DICOM format. Each 500 GB removable disk cartridge employed by ProStor InfiniVault can store 500 multi-slice CT scans, 2,500 MRIs or 10,000 X-rays at a time. With up to 100 RDX cartridges online and an infinite number offline, ProStor InfiniVault-DICOM can manage all DICOM image and file needs of an organization.
“We’re pleased to partner with ProStor to provide to the healthcare community the best archive storage for CT scans, MRIs, digitized X-rays and EMR files,” said Joe Rorke, vice president of marketing and business development of Rorke Data. “We chose ProStor InfiniVault-DICOM because it is a scalable, secure and affordable solution for PACS DICOM image archiving and can also be used for the storage of HIS, RIS, patient records and business data.”
Buzz Walker, vice president of marketing for ProStor Systems, agreed, “Imaging labs, regional clinics and hospitals looking for a DICOM-compliant system to address their growing capacity needs will find that ProStor InfiniVault-DICOM is a superior cost-effective alternative to traditional disk, tape or optical archive solutions and provides protection from technology obsolescence and migration.”
The world has gone digital in just about everything we do. Almost every iota of information we access these days is stored in some kind of digital form and accessed electronically — text, charts, images, video, music, you name it. The key questions are: Will your data be there when you need it? And who’s going to preserve it?
In the December 2008 edition of Communications of the ACM, the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, Dr. Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, provides a guide for surviving what has become known as the “data deluge.”
Managing this deluge and preserving what’s important is what Berman refers to as one of the “grand challenges” of the Information Age. The amount of digital data is immense: A 2008 report by the International Data Corporation (IDC), a global provider of information technology intelligence based in Framingham, Mass., predicts that by 2011, our “digital universe” will be 10 times the size it was in 2006 - and almost half of this universe will not have a permanent home as the amount of digital information outstrips storage space.
“As a society, we have only begun to address this challenge at a scale concomitant with the deluge of data available to us and its importance in the modern world,” writes Berman, a longtime pioneer in cyberinfrastructure – an open but organized aggregate of information technologies including computers, data archives, networks, software, digital instruments, and other scientific endeavors that support 21st century life and work.
Berman is a strong advocate of cyberinfrastructure that supports the management and preservation of digital data in the Information Age – data cyberinfrastructure: “Just like the physical infrastructures all around us — roads, bridges, water and electricity – we need a data cyberinfrastructure that is stable, predictable, and cost-effective.”
In her article, Berman explores key trends and issues associated with preserving digital data, and what’s required to keep it manageable, accessible, available, and secure. However, she warns that there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution for data stewardship and preservation.
“The ‘free rider’ solution of ‘Let someone else do it’– whether that someone else is the government, a library, a museum, an archive, Google, Microsoft, the data creator, or the data user — is unrealistic and pushes responsibility to a single company, institution, or sector. What is needed are cross-sector economic partnerships,” says Berman. She adds that the solution is to “take a comprehensive and coordinated approach to data cyberinfrastructure and treat the problem holistically, creating strategies that make sense from a technical, policy, regulatory, economic, security, and community perspective.”
Berman’s ACM article closes with a set of “Top 10” guidelines for data stewardship:
1. Make a plan. Create an explicit strategy for stewardship and preservation for your data, from its inception to the end of its lifetime; explicitly consider what that lifetime may be.
2. Be aware of data costs and include them in your overall IT budget. Ensure that all costs are factored in, including hardware, software, expert support, and time. Determine whether it is more cost-effective to regenerate some of your information rather than preserve it over a long period.
3. Associate metadata with your data. Metadata is needed to be able to find and use your data immediately and for years to come. Identify relevant standards for data/metadata content and format, following them to ensure the data can be used by others.
4. Make multiple copies of valuable data. Store some of them off-site and in different systems.
5. Plan for the transition of digital data to new storage media ahead of time. Include budgetary planning for new storage and software technologies, file format migrations, and time. Migration must be an ongoing process. Migrate data to new technologies before your storage media becomes obsolete.
6. Plan for transitions in data stewardship. If the data will eventually be turned over to a formal repository, institution, or other custodial environment, ensure it meets the requirements of the new environment and that the new steward indeed agrees to take it on.
7. Determine the level of “trust” required when choosing how to archive data. Are the resources of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration necessary or will Google do?
8. Tailor plans for preservation and access to the expected use. Gene-sequence data used daily by hundreds of thousands of researchers worldwide may need a different preservation and access infrastructure from, for example, digital photos viewed occasionally by family members.
9. Pay attention to security. Be aware of what you must do to maintain the integrity of your data.
10. Know the regulations. Know whether copyright, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the U.S. National Institutes of Health publishing expectations, or other policies and/or regulations are relevant to your data, ensuring your approach to stewardship and publication is compliant.
Berman is a national leader in this area and also co-chairs of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access with OCLC economist Brian Lavoie. The task force was formed late last year to explore and ultimately present a range of economic models, components, and actionable recommendations for sustainable preservation and access of digital data in the public interest. Commissioned for two years, the task force will publish an interim report outlining economic issues and systemic challenges associated with digital preservation later this month on its website.
The first thing you’ll notice about 2.7 is its new interface. From the top down, we’ve listened to your feedback and thought deeply about the design and the result is a WordPress that’s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a previous version. (Download it now, or read on for more.)
Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.
Digging in further you might notice that every screen is customizable. Let’s say you never care about author on your post listings — just click “Screen Options” and uncheck it and it’s instantly gone from the page. The same for any module on the dashboard or write screen. If your screen is narrow and the menu is taking up too much horizontal room, click the arrow to minimize it to be icon-only, and then go to the write page and drag and drop everything from the right column into the main one, so your posting area is full-screen. (For example I like hiding everything except categories, tags, and publish. I put categories and tags on the right, and publish under the post box.)
For a visual introduction to what 2.7 is, check out this video (available in HD, and full screen):
It’s all about you. It’s the next generation of WordPress, which is why we’ve bestowed it with the honor of being named for John Coltrane. And you can download it today.
Last, but certainly not least, this may be the last time you ever have to manually upgrade WordPress again. We heard how tired you were of doing upgrades for yourself and your friends, so now WordPress includes a built-in upgrade that will automatically notify you of new releases, and when you’re ready it will download them, install them, and upgrade your blog with a single click.
(As with any interface change it may take a little bit of time to acclimate yourself but soon you’ll find yourself whizzing through the screens. Even people who have hated it at first tell us after a few days they wonder how they got by before.)
The Story Behind 2.7
The real reason Coltrane is such a huge leap forward is because the community was so involved with every step of the process. Over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, our highest ever, with many tens of thousands more participating in the polls, surveys, tests, mailing lists, and other feedback mechanisms the WordPress dev team used in putting this release together.
For some of the back story in the development of 2.7, check out these blog posts (thanks to WeblogToolsCollection for the list):
This was interesting to us, a blogging software release we actually blogged about, but the process was hugely informative. Prior to its release today Crazyhorse and 2.7 had been tested by tens of thousands of people on their blogs, hundreds of thousands of you count .com. The volume of feedback was so high that we decided to push back the release date a month to take time to incorporate it all and do more revisions based on what you guys said.
For those of you wondering why we didn’t call this release 3.0, it’s because we abhor version number inflation. 3.0 will just be the next release after 2.9. The major features in new point releases approach also works well for products like OS X, with huge changes between a 10.3 and 10.4.
The Future
Those of you following along at home might have noticed this was our second major redesign of WordPress this year. Whoa nelly! While that wasn’t ideal, and I especially sympathize with those of you creating books or tutorials around WordPress, there’s good news. The changes to WordPress in 2.5 and 2.7 were necessary for us to break free of much of the legacy cruft and interface bloat that had built up over the years (gradually) and more importantly provide us with a UI framework and interface language we can use at the foundation to build tomorrow’s WordPress on, to express ideas we haven’t been able to before. So at the end of 2009 I expect, interface-wise, WordPress to look largely the same as it does now.
That said, we couldn’t be more excited about the future with regards to features. Now that we’ve cleared out more basic things, we are looking forward in the coming year to really tackling media handling including audio and video, better tools for plugin and theme developers, widgets, theme updates, more integrated and contextual help, and easier integration with projects like BuddyPress and bbPress.
The Abba Technologies Green Tech Open House takes place on Tuesday, December 16 from 10:30 AM - 2:30 PM in Albuquerque. The event aims to share strategies to save money and make IT environments more efficient.
Technical presentations will feature streamlining of the data center & infrastructure, automation of power management tactics, and virtualization.
Guest speakers include Susie Marbury, Energy Efficiency & Green Building Administrator NM Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department; John Soladay Director of Environmental Health, City of Albuquerque; Nick Babic Project Developer, Affordable Solar; Bruce Wells Project Manager, Abba Managed Services.
When I told a colleague that I was enjoying interviewing for a database specialist, she thought I was being facetious. However, it’s absolutely true. I really enjoy listening carefully to statements into which our candidates have put so much thought and preparation, presentations that attempt to reflect their very best qualities.
Our colleagues are so responsive to invitations to join the selection committee. A group of peers from around the school, some technical and some not so much, prepare thoughtful questions and show considerable investment in the selection of a future colleague. I just listen to their questions and the candidate responses.
This week, I scheduled a lot of individual time with each candidate. We walked around campus chatting about issues technical and not. I just wanted to get a gut feel for what it might be like to work with this person. This is an overt attempt to get away from my usual practice of being very analytical and strategic. I need some “soft” input into my decision making as well.
I attempt to imagine each candidate’s potential. What exciting contributions may that person make to the school in the future? Build new systems? Bring people together toward a common purpose? What connections can I make between their experiences and apparent qualities and the challenges that we face?
It will only get more exciting when our choice agrees to join us, and we start to turn possibilities into reality. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, a new public-private partnership announced plans to promote electric car development in California. The partnership includes Better Place, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company that builds electric car battery exchange stations, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums as well as business groups and universities.
“The systemic issues facing our country today–climate change, economic downturn and the ongoing geopolitical struggle between energy-rich and energy-poor nations–all tie back to our addiction to oil,” Shai Agassi, founder of Better Place and a former top executive at software giant SAP, said at a press conference in San Francisco. “We have to get off our addiction to oil.”
OKI Printing Solutions (brand name for OKI Data Corporation) today announced it has established Oki Data Americas Inc. Argentina Branch - effective November 3, 2008. The Argentinean office will be the third operation in Latin America, following the opening of Brazilian and Mexican sales offices. The move capitalizes on business growth in emerging markets.
Argentina’s business printer and MFP market is the third largest in Latin America and therefore a key focus for expansion for OKI Printing Solutions.
The market for 2007 stood at 220,000 units shipped, up 255% on the corresponding figure for 2004. In value terms, the market was worth USD 80.94 million in 2007, up 177% over the same three-year period.(*)
Monochrome page printers account for 76% of the total page printer market and this sector is expected to grow even more - by 27% over the period 2007-2010. The Business Printer and MFP market is expected to grow by 36% over the same period.(*)
OKI Printing Solutions has been conducting business in Argentina since 1995 and its products are well-known in the financial and governmental sector for their durability and reliability. The Argentinian office will focus on delivering high-quality customer service and after-sales care for its customers, developing stronger business relationships and expanding its distribution channel. OKI Printing Solutions intends to double its sales revenue from Argentina by FY2010.
Harushige Sugimoto, President and Chief Executive Officer of OKI Printing Solutions says: “OKI Printing Solutions is focused on building strong customer relationships. In the past, we have worked through dealers. While we will continue to do this, we will now have the additional help of a branch office to ensure that the service and support our customers receive is enhanced even further.”
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