Dear Sandra Gittlen of IT World

Sandra,


I received the soure inquiry for your article Will cloud computing kick the IT door in for women?  And responded with the email below.


I am extremely disappointed to read your article.  Especially since your cited source is an employee of VMWare, a company with a very vested interest in pushing the cloud agenda.


Below is the contents of my original email that is an answer to your question:  Will cloud computing kick the IT door in for women?


MY EMAIL TO SANDRA:
My name is Erin Kelley and I am the owner of a small IT services company in Chicago, IL.  I am a technologist by career and business owner as of 2009… and I am female.
 
My answer to your inquiry is no… and what!?!
 
Cloud computing is just a pseudonym for hosted infrastructure.  That infrastructure still has to be maintained rigorously by a team of skill IT professionals.  I can’t see how that affords any different opportunity to women in IT than currently offered.

Unless the implication is that women in a company’s IT department can now shift off the responsibility of rigorously maintaining their infrastructure to another company (a.k.a. outsourcing / cloud hosting) which means they become managers of vendors as opposed to IT engineers.

My response to that is simple… how terrible!  What a terrible implication that women can only thrive or be successful at the human side of IT (managing and HR) versus the technical and engineering side.  And that shifting responsibility for the technical side of IT makes the career more accessible to women.

 

To be a woman in IT you need to know your field and be good at it.  Even if you are managing outside vendors you need to be able to direct and advise them, work with internal and vendor support teams, and advocate effectively for the direction of the vendor technology.  And when a system goes down, you still will get that first call because even if you outsource/cloud source you are the clients’/users’ first point of contact and if you’re executive responsible for the services of others, you are the single throat to choke as well.

Hosted versus onsite is a pendulum that has been swinging back and forth as computer technology has evolved:  from dummy terminals that connected to mainframes then the personal computer then the client server architecture then software as a service then ?whatever is next, maybe personal compute farms and hyper-local networks, who knows?  But they all need skilled IT professionals to manage the technology.

In order to attract more women to IT we need to show girls at a very early age that taking apart things and reassembling them, building structures with legos, and looking in microscopes is not only SUPER COOL but something they can be good at.  This is really the only way to foster a love of and develop the base skills for a foundation skillset required for a science/technology career.

I have found that all of the women in IT that I have worked with have been excellent technologists and engineers.  Plus they provided added soft skills that the men don’t often have.  But they all started with the technology or curiosity with math/science/engineering from an early age.  You can’t expect someone that spent a lifetime developing ONLY softer skills to now see the market demand and try to shoehorn their abilities to fit a position that they never developed the love for or base skills for.

Best Regards,
Erin Kelley, Owner
Simply Smart Technology

What are the best simple, open source CMSs for small, content-oriented sites?

I heart Quora.  I'm an avid Quora question asker and answerer.


This question came up the other day about simple open-source content management systems (CMSs).
"What are the best simple, open source CMSs for small, content-oriented sites?

Something relatively simple and easy to modify, and with a good facility for editing articles (not just blogging). Textpattern might be one example. What others?"

Questions about CMSs usually come up in the early stages of a web project, web development clients often ask questions about managing their own content.  Here are some helpful guidelines about picking the content management systems that meet your specific needs and some helpful resources for additional information.

When you say content oriented, do you mean outward content like (1) blog articles or (2) more rich types of media content or (3) content in the form of documents?

(1) Blog articles and other outward facing text content for a small, low traffic site: I would think about WordPress, Concrete5 / same content larger, higher traffic site: Drupal, Umbraco, DotNetNuke, or Joomla

(2) Media, photos, social content: probably LifeRay

(3) Document management: Alfresco

Here is a really great article that details the pros and cons of the major CMS platforms. I especially like the distinguished clients list. This gives good live examples of functionality and load:
http://www.cubrid.org/blog/dev-platform/comprehensive-overview-of-top-14-content-management-systems/

This is a nifty tool that lets you compare a number of CMS platforms on their core technology and availability of add in features:
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

Here's a short blog about some indie CMS platforms. Concrete5 looks great for non-technical companies.
http://sixrevisions.com/web-applications/10-promising-content-management-systems/

Email Client - Add Safe Sender

Outlook 2003 / Outlook 2007

1.       Navigate to the Tools menu

2.       Click Options.

3.       Choose the Preferences tab

4.       Under E-mail, click Junk E-mail

5.       Click the Safe Senders or Safe Recipients tab

6.       Click Add

7.       In the Enter an e-mail address or Internet domain name to be added to the list box, enter the name or address you want added

8.       Click OK

Outlook 2010

1.       Navigate to the Home tab

2.       Find the Delete group

3.       Click Junk and Junk E-mail Options

4.       On the Safe Senders tab, click Add

5.       Enter an e-mail address or domain name

6.       Click OK

Entourage

1.       Navigate to Tools->Junk Email Protection

2.       Click on the Safe Domains tab

3.       Click in the window to type in a domain

4.       Click OK

Mac Mail

1.       Click on your Address Book icon in the dock

2.       Click on File > New Card

3.       Add the persons, contact information to the new card

4.       Click the Edit button to save the entry





Simply Smart Technology is a Chicago based IT Support provider offering help desk and proactive IT support services

Troubleshooting SPAM for the System Administrator or Technician

Here’s an example of a process that you could use to evaluate where a piece of SPAM mail is coming from and decide how to stop it.  There's some check points along the way designed to help you stop and think through your options and next steps.

Troubleshooting Steps

1. Get the original emails with headers intact (see steps below)

2. Read headers by opening the attached email, navigating to File, then Properties, look for the textbox at the bottom labeled Internet headers (see example below)

3. Use the header to figure out who is sending the email. You need to figure out where the email is originating from in order to prescribe a fix. Most email servers have a SPAM filter and have the ability to put SPAMers on a global BLACKLIST. This is only appropriate when we can isolate the SPAMers down to 1-3 IPs or one domain and confirm no legitimate email will be blocked as a consequence.

In the example below we can see this email originated from 178.124.110.246 Use ARIN.net to do a whois lookup on the IP address of the sender. The result is here http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-178-0-0-0-1/pft The owner of this IP block is in Amsterdamn.

4. Check the SPAM flag score in the header. The SPAM filtering can be adjusted based on score, but as this impacts all users you should have a very compelling reason and for this change. We also would provide notification to end-users before making this change.

In this example we see the SPAM flag score is WHITELISTED. This is clearly the reason these emails are getting past.

5. Investigate the email server WHITELIST and BLACKLIST.

In this example we see that any email address @EXAMPLE_DOMAIN is on a global WHITELIST.

6. Be aware that changing servers settings could impact users ability to receive email and things are generally setup the way they are for a particular reason. If you aren’t sure why something is setup a certain way ASK before you make any changes.

In this example  @EXAMPLE_DOMAIN is on a global WHITELIST because emails sent from the company's websites are SPOOFED addresses. These are legit emails that we want EXAMPLE_DOMAIN to receive. This is not exactly ideal, but the website cannot be modified with a fix.

7. Weigh the options, talk to everyone you need to talk to, gather as much information you need to in order to make a decision then come up with a plan of action.

In this example we can remove @EXAMPLE_DOMAIN from the global WHITELIST and add in the individual email accounts used by the websites specifically.

8. Once you have a plan of action make sure you understand the consequences / impact of the changes you are about to make. If you are unsure… STOP and ASK.

In this example the change may result in some legit internal emails being flagged as SPAM.

9. Determine who you need to notify about the changes. Is it the end user, the all users, your boss? How much notification should you provide? 2 min, 1 hour, 2 days? If you still aren’t sure… STOP and ASK.

If there is even a remote chance that someone’s internal legit email is going to be flagged as SPAM we recommend notifying the users about what to expect and how you plan to mitigate this issue when it comes back up.

In this example, there might be a better approach were like BLACKLIST this specific IP address.

Get SPAM Emails with Headers Intact

Have the user follow these steps:

- Create a new email message addressed to YOUR_EMAIL

- Choose Attach Item then Outlook Item

- A window to browse your Outlook mailbox will popup

- Navigate through your emails until you find one of the SPAM messages

- Left-click to select the message

- Click the OK button

- Repeat this process for as many SPAM emails as you like

Email Header Example

Header from EXAMPLE_EMAIL_ADDRESS Rolex Today -38%

X-Antivirus: AVG for E-mail

Received: from EXAMPLE_EMAIL_SERVER (EXAMPLE_EMAIL_SERVER_IP) by

EXAMPLE_EMAIL_SERVER (EXAMPLE_EMAIL_SERVER_IP) with Microsoft SMTP Server

(TLS) id 14.1.355.2; Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:15:24 -0800

Received: from localhost (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by

EXAMPLE_EMAIL_SERVER (Postfix) with ESMTP id 18FAADE for

<EXAMPLE_EMAIL_ADDRESS>; Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:15:25 -0800 (PST)

X-Relayed-From: 178.124.110.246

X-Relayed-From-Added: Yes

X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new at EXAMPLE_EMAIL_SERVER

X-Spam-Flag: NO

X-Spam-Score: 0

X-Spam-Level:

X-Spam-Status: No, score=x tagged_above=-999 required=4 WHITELISTED tests=[]

Received: from EXAMPLE_EMAIL_SERVER ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost

(EXAMPLE_EMAIL_SERVER [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP

id 33nftJEdODDU for <EXAMPLE_EMAIL_ADDRESS >; Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:15:25 -0800

(PST)

Received: from microsof-b96170 (unknown [178.124.110.246]) by

EXAMPLE_EMAIL_SERVER (Postfix) with SMTP id 389EF64 for

<EXAMPLE_EMAIL_ADDRESS >; Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:15:23 -0800 (PST)

Message-ID: <EXAMPLE_MESSAGE_ID>

To: <EXAMPLE_EMAIL_ADDRESS >

Subject: EXAMPLE_EMAIL_ADDRESS  Rolex Today -38%

From: <EXAMPLE_EMAIL_ADDRESS >

MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: text/html; charset="ISO-8859-1"

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:15:23 -0800

Return-Path: EXAMPLE_EMAIL_ADDRESS

X-MS-Exchange-Organization-AuthSource: EXAMPLE_EMAIL_SERVER

X-MS-Exchange-Organization-AuthAs: Anonymous

Simply Smart Technology is a Chicago based IT Support provider offering cloud based Microsoft Exchange services and email system adminstration services.

crowdSPRING, are you getting what you pay for?

UPDATE: CrowdSpring sent this issue up to their developer team who fixed the meta tags on our project.

Summary

We used crowdSPRING for our logo design project. There were a couple bumps along the road, but we ended up with a fantastic logo.

The biggest bump in the road came post-project when we found that we paid a $29 fee to keep our project out of the search engines but no technical controls were put in place to make this happen.

My hope is that by sharing our experience others can avoid some of the challenges we encountered as well as learn how to check their project to see if they were charged a fee for a service they didn’t receive.

The Debate

There is an ongoing about the quality and ethics of using spec sites like crowdSPRING and 99Designs. I have a range conflicting opinions on this topic. I am both a small business owner who sees value in spec work and business owner of a web design company that doesn’t want to see design work under-valued.

I’ve made peace with this inner-conflict because I absolutely believe there are two separate markets:
- small businesses that don’t have the budget to hire a design company
- businesses that have the budget to hire a design company

The first category of potential clients have the same needs for a logo, business cards, and other marketing materials but they may not have the resources to hire a design firm. Resources like budget and lack of contacts with freelancers is a major limitation when small business owners look to hire a graphic designer or design firm.

I truly believe that crowd sourcing websites such as crowdSPRING and 99 Designs meet a need that exists for small businesses with a small marketing budget where design firms and independent designers never did.

The second category of clients, businesses that have the budget to hire a design company, might give crowd sourcing a try but the crowd sourcing experience will never match in quality and customer service to that of a design firm. Other than this, I have very little to say about this side of the debate as my experience is limited here.

Regardless, I’ve recommended crowdSPRING to several web design clients for help developing a logo and the results have always been positive.

Our Experience

Simply Smart Technology is a fast growing IT support company so in December we decided to refresh our logo to one that matches our company philosophy and status. We turned to crowdSPRING to help find a designer for our logo project.

The project setup process was fairly straight forward. crowdSPRING presented a form with a bunch of questions to help you setup your project.

One of those questions was titled “Search Engine Privacy”. There is an option to “Keep my project out of the search engines”. To keep the cost of our logo from being returned whenever someone searched our company seemed well worth the $29 fee.

The other key fields were the project duration, privacy of the gallery, and project details. We left our gallery open for viewing and gave vague information about ourselves in the project details.

We hit submit and we were off and running!

The project duration was set to 9 days, starting over the holidays. crowdSPRING suggested that we reach out to designers whose work we liked and invite them to our project. So I diligently went to work scanning other galleries, checking portfolios, and inviting designers to the project. This yielded wonderful results and we saw entries from many of the designers we contacted.

After the first couple of days it was obvious that we were getting the same design concept done in a variety of ways. Specifically, we were seeing a sphere with a single S sitting on top of text with our name. I quickly posted an update to the project that we would not be selecting this type of design and that all of the initials in our company name should be included if initials are used at all.

As time went on and my frustration with seeing the same designs over and over grew I posted more strongly worded updates on our project brief. AKA: we will not consider any logos that contain… yada yada yada.

As the project evolved we started putting more specific instructions in our project brief about what a logo should be. It should represent our company in every way: simple, easy to understand, and technology related. We submitted specific ideas for icons like a cursor, thought bubble, a spark as a conceptual representation of an idea, etc.

Some designers were attentive to the requests, but the majority of them were not. We ended up finding a few really quality designs and designers but having to sort through a large quantity of what we’ll label “other”. It was like the TJMaxx of logo designs; if you wade through enough quantity of “other” you’ll eventually find one or two gems that make it pretty much worth it.

Even with the project updates we continued to see this same design submitted and same usage of a single S until the end of the project.

I concluded that the designers were viewing the other entries and not reading the project brief. For this reason, if I were to do another project on crowdSPRING I would keep the gallery closed.

The project finished up and picked 10 logos to share for “voting”. We invited friends, family, and other business owners to look through the designs and give their feedback. Then we selected our logo. The wrap up process was easy and we could ask for minor modifications to the design.

All-in-all we love our new logo!!

Privacy Please

After the project closed I pulled up our project site to see what was viewable from the outside. I was surprised to see that the cost of our logo, picture of our logo, and user profile were all publicly viewable.

The most shocking surprise of all came when I looked at the webpage source for the publicly viewable project page and it was set to allow search engines to both crawl and index the information. Specifically there is a meta tag named “robots” that tells the search engine what to do. This tag on our project is set to “index,follow” which means, “please index the contents of this page to be included in search results and follow the links on the page to possibly include them in your search results”.

I wanted to confirm what I was seeing so did a quick search on Google using the term “site:crowdspring.com” then the title of our project, the project popped right up as the first result.

I contacted crowdSPRING customer support and gave them several chances to resolve the issue. They offered to change my username and credit me back the $29 fee. Finally after much urging they have escalated this to their development team.

My concern is that they have been bilking clients out of fees for a service that they aren’t providing… and for how long? It seems to me that crowdSPRING owes a bunch of clients a return of their $29 fee. Perhaps we are the only ones that this issue impacted. That would be a wonderful finding, but I believe crowdSPRING needs to look into the scope of this issue and provide some reassurance to their customer base that we are getting what we pay for.

Irony

My initial gripe was with the lack of privacy with the crowdSPRING project and now I’m making a very public statement about our use of their service. So I do see the irony here.

But I founded my company on the idea that “we are here to help” and if this could be helpful to other users of crowdSPRING then that outweighs my initial concern.

My hope is that we will raise awareness of this issue so that other users of crowdSPRING can look at their project to see if they were charged a fee for a service they didn’t receive.

iPhone vs Android - Beyond the Specs - Part 1

There is battle going between Apple's iPhone running iOS and the variety of handset makers running Google's Android operating system. If you're like us, before picking a side in this holy war you'll want to be as informed as possible about the options available.

There is a mass of ink and pixels dedicated to comparing the iPhone and Android based on technical specifications. The differences in technical specifications between phone models is important, but only to the extent that it impacts the users' experience. To put it another way, do you care if a phone boasts the fastest processor on the market if navigating through the screens causes error messages and hangs?

Our reading has turned up another set of articles on phone usability, but most of these articles detail how initially intuitive it is to start using the smartphone or provide in-depth analysis of the "bells-and-whistles" features that set the two platforms apart. Intuitive setup and advanced features are also interesting comparison points, but what our clients ask all the time is which platform is better for my business use.

Before we investigate how the two platforms stack up for business use, we need to define what the core functionality of a smartphone really is. For business users smartphones have two core functions:

1) Phone calls

2) Emails

This maybe a simplistic view of the smartphone, but consider your day-to-day phone usage for business. If your phone doesn't reliably make and receive phone calls, do you really care if the background is animated?

So phone calls and emails ride on top of the phone's operating system and the phone connects to the carrier, the operating system should run smoothly and the carrier connections should be reliable and perform well.

So let's start with carrier quality…

Simply Smart Technology is based in Chicago and so are our clients, so all of this research is geared toward the Chicago / Midwest region. Our research revealed data that matches our anecdotal experiences and the feedback we hear from our clients: US Cellular and Verizon are on top for quality, performance, and reliability.

Verizon provides both iPhone and Android phones as well as business services, for those reasons we rank Verizon #1 for the Chicago / Midwest region. US Cellar lacks business services and diversity in phone platforms but for stellar quality, performance, and reliability we slot them at the #2 position. Anecdotally we have found Verizon to be on the pricier side, so for a cheap but fairly reliable alternative T-Mobile is boss. Sprint provides okay quality, but is on the pricier side which lands them in the second to last spot. And, to quote a CNET reviewer, AT&T is "epically terrible"(*).

Because call quality and network reliability is important, carrier selection is crucial. But the important thing to note is that both the iPhone and Android platforms have good carrier options so this is a neutral point for each platform.

Next up we'll look at the operating system... stay tuned for Part 2 of iPhone vs Android - Beyond the Specs.

Android	iPhone	Call Quality North Central U.S. (Chicago / Midwest) **	Network Quality North Central U.S. (Chicago / Midwest) ***	SMB Business Wireless Performance and Reliability ****	Our Rank
AT&T	AT&T	2 out of 5	2 out of 5	2 out of 5	#5
Verizon	Verizon	4 out of 5	4 out of 5	5 out of 5	#1
Sprint Nextel		3 out of 5	2 out of 5	3 out of 5	#4
T-Mobile		2 out of 5	3 out of 5	3 out of 5	#3
US Cellular		5 out of 5	5 out of 5	N/A	#2

* CNET, 2010 Quick Guide to Top Cell Phone Carriers, http://reviews.cnet.com/best-cell-phone-carriers/

** JD Power and Associates, 2011 Wireless Call Quality Performance Study, http://www.jdpower.com/telecom/ratings/wireless-call-quality-ratings-(volume-1)/north-central/

*** JD Power and Associates, 2011 Wireless Network Quality Ratings, http://www.jdpower.com/telecom/ratings/wireless-network-quality-ratings-(volume-2)/north-central/

**** JD Power and Associates, 2011 Business Wireless Satisfaction Study, http://www.jdpower.com/business/ratings/business-wireless-ratings/smb-(small-and-midsize-business)/

Other Sources:

PC Magazine, 2010 Cellular Service Providers: Contract Providers, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2368156,00.asp#fbid=DA7wPgRCIBC

Google's Glory Days Gone?

InfoWorld's Neil McAllister new article Are Google's Best Days Behind It is on point.

The article cites growing bureaucracy, lack of privacy measures, legal issues, and slowing product development.

I agree with a lot of the points made in this article but I would say... maybe this isn't such a bad thing.

Google's core search engine product is what made Google great. The only-what-you-need and nothing else design combined with magically accurate search results is what launched Google. Some of the new offshoot projects are redundant (Google+) or barely interesting (Google Wave).

Additionally, Google has been unable to develop its long standing consumer products into full-featured enterprise solutions.

I know many of you read this and say, "hey there! I love my Goolge INSERT FAVORITE GOOGLEY THING HERE". I understand. But in order to illustrate my point let's talk through two examples, Gmail for business and Google Voice.

Business email should do the following things:

- access to sent emails, received emails, and email folders regardless of the access method (desktop client, smart phone, website, etc.)

- keep your contacts synced on all devices

- calendar sync on all devices and ability to delegate access

This bare minimum set of features isn't quite available in Gmail. Gmail is an POP/IMAP only solution whose tagging method of order doesn't work well with productivity email clients that use folder based organization.

Google Voice is another solution that is not quite enterprise class, but great for home consumers. The lack of phone trees, ring groups, and call schedules make it an exclusively consumer application. And when you are ready to move to another solution, well, investigate porting your # out of Google Voice. Google the topic and you may eventually find the one obscure (non-Google) blog that details the multi-part process you'll need to follow.

Slowing development, especially if it means more innovation on their core products and a getting back to the minimalist yet functional M.O. that made them great, sounds anything but the end of the Glory Days. Maybe it's what happens when you enter the wonderful world of adulthood... less experimentation, more appreciation and focus on the things that make you great.

- Erin Kelley

Simply Smart Technology

Chicago IT Support, IT Services for Chicago