Alex Scoble's IT Notes - An Information Technology Blog

Document Management Systems

Working on our DMS today. We use WORLDOX, which is a DMS tailored to the legal profession.

Whoever originally set up our DMS did a horrible job and so I'm doing cleanup in preparation for moving the DMS and all of our other server based apps and files from the current Novell 5.1 servers to the new Dell PE 2650 Win 2003 server.

I'm still trying to figure out the best way to set up the directories and metadata fields to make it easier for everyone to find the documents they need and to also make it easier to keep field entry standardized.

Right now, we have too many generic doc types and practice areas in those two search fields so some people tag a standard document as a document and others as misc. Part of it's a training issue which we are also working on, but my boss, the "tech" partner and I think that the field structure should be much simpler. Limited to Client number, matter number, author and typist.

Would be helpful if there was at least one good book on administering WORLDOX, but I haven't been able to find one.

Anyone else out there have any DMS suggestions, books to read on the subject or informative websites?

Show Me the Money

So I'm in the middle of ordering a whole new network's worth of stuff from Dell. Problem is, they use Citibank, currently, for their Net 30 financing. Citibank is totally being the money nazis. They won't increase our line of credit without 2 years of audited financials. I'm IT Manager for a law firm. We are privately held. Would be a waste of resources for a privately held company to have an auditing firm come in to look at our financials. We have a kick ass controller and our books were recently looked at by our bank for a new line of credit.

Citibank won't even accept a guarantee of credit from our bank. They say it's against company policy. Guess keeping Dell as customers is against company policy too. Dell can't afford to lose business because of bad blood between company CFOs/controllers and Dell's financial institution.

I can try to implement Dell all day (yes, I like Dell), but I only make the recommendation. At the end of the day, it's the accountants and upper management that pay the bills and if they have to go through a song and dance for the priveledge of spending money, they might do it once, but doubtful if ever again after that.

It is possible for large corporations like CitiBank and Dell to lose it all based on one weak link in their business model. It's happened before and it will happen again.

Caterpillers destroy crops one small bite at a time.

Testing 1 2 3

So out of all the projects that I have queued up to completely revamp the network, the first one up is to move all of our files and served applications (other than financial) from our current Novell 5.1 servers (ick) to a new Dell PE 2650 box (heavily built out - Dell had a buy 2 get 1 free deal, so I spec'd in a 3.0Ghz 1mb cache Xeon, 5 73GB SCSI drives in RAID 5 {should have done RAID 10, but oh well} and 2GB of memory).

The server is running Win 2003 and is ready to go. So am I. The main thing holding me back is that my boss wants me to test it out thorougly before switching everyone over. Rightly so. My problem is that I'm a get up and do it kind of administrator. I've never been particularly big on testing...Actually one of my weak points, that and security. Anyhow, going in tomorrow to restore data from tonight's backup tape onto the new server and see what happens.

At this point if I did make the switch quickly without a lot of testing, I would get flack for it because they want it tested, yet I also know that I could move everything tomorrow with only minor difficulties.

Most IT admins are way too conservative. I'm the opposite and need to work on moving over a little. Then again, at some point you have to say Go and just fix whatever issues arise.

Link Love

Thanks to all of those that have left comments so far. Getting feedback from others in the community is exactly what is so cool about blogs. Now I have to do my part and keep up a regular schedule of blogging. If I do one post a night I figure that I'm golden.

Thanks also to the following people for linking to me on their sites:

Mike McBride - Blogs Life of a One-Man IT Department (hey that's me too :D )

Sean Brady has added me to his Legal IT blogroll - After only two days of posts, I'm not sure that I deserve it, but I will do my best to earn that position

Enoch Choi - Who I met at my brother's last Bay Area "Geek Fest" at the Palo Alto Cheese Cake Factory

Robert Scoble - OK, might as well give him some love back since his initial post did give me hundreds of views, even if he is my older brother living it up in Seattle

New Technologies in the Enterprise

One of the things I just purchased for my firm is a new Dell PowerVault 132T LTO2 tape library. LTO2 tapes are the next generation of linear tape cartridges similar to older DLT. They have a built in table of contents chip (similar to AIT tapes) so that drives can detect what is on the tape without having to read from the tape at all.

They hold 200gigabytes native or up to 400GB compressed and write at 36megabytes/sec native. So it's a tape that stores a ton of info and is about as fast as a modern IDE hard drive. The 132T holds 21 tapes for 4.2 terabytes of total storage.

Don't know how good it will be but I can't wait to find out. I've been waiting to get my hands on an LTO tape system since they were introduced about 2 years ago.

Anyhow, that's my example of a new (relatively - LTO2 has been out for about 8 months) technology available to IT Managers to help them run an enterprise. Let me know if you have any examples of new and fascinating products/technologies that are now available.

How To Beat Viruses (and Spam)

Well, with the latest virus (Midoom or whatever else it's called) floating around, I figure that now is as good a time as any to give my thoughts on some good ways to defeat viruses (virii? - sounds too uppity to me).

At this day and age, the favorite infection vector that virus writers like to use is still email. So your first layer of antivirus security will be at your mail servers/gateways.

I have written a bit about Postini on my brother's website (http://scoble.weblogs.com as if you didn't already know), but I'm going to post about it again here and talk about it in a little more detail.

Postini is a 100% outsourced hosted email gateway. It performs several functions for incoming and outgoing email. First and foremost it is a spam filter. A damn good one at that. It captures and quarantines about 95% of all spam before it ever gets to your network. The system is totally configurable so that you can exclude certain domains from being scanned or even mails regarding your business sectors. Users can also raise or lower the threshholds for spam based on 5 separate categories (porn, get rich quick schemes etc.).

Secondly, it also scans every mail for viruses. You can also quarantine emails that have attachments of a certain type. Basically it does what every other 3rd party gateway on the market does, but it does it before the mail ever has a chance to enter into your network. Which is totally cool in and of itself. Also, because it's managed autonomously by the folks at Postini, you don't have to worry about keeping virus dat files up to date and all that. Postini was catching mails with the latest virus as soon as they were out in the wild.

About the only complaint that I currently have with Postini is that there's no way to view SMTP transaction logs to check on status of delivery for individual messages.

2nd line of defense is antivirus running on your mail servers - in my case Exchange 5.5. I use Symantec AV for Email Servers. Good product, although I prefer TrendMicro ScanMail just because it's such a rocksolid product. Both applications automatically update themselves and are fairly easy to install and administer.

3rd line is AV software on the PCs. This is the hardest of the 3 lines of defense to manage, but also the most important as it is your last line (other than user awareness, but I'll get to that). It's hard to manage because you have to keep all of your desktops, laptops and remote systems protected and up to date. Luckily there are products like Symantec AV Corp to help out with that. I've used this product since 7.5 and I just have to say that I have loved it since day one.

I used to use the McAfee enterprise AV suite and it was just a mess. When I started using these systems way back in 98 McAfee did not update the clients automatically (something that I don't believe they added until 2001 or so at which point they had lost me as a point of market penetration for about 2 years) and the client was unstable and didn't catch as many viruses as NAV (now Symantec AV) Corp did.

Symantec Corp is a server managed system that automatically keeps ALL of your systems up to date. Schedules AV scans across all systems and allows you to easily control the configuration of the AV clients on ALL systems. Not to mention that if your PCs are running Win 2k or Win XP, you never even have to visit the systems to install the AV Client. It's just such a slick product that it's a no brainer to deploy.

I'm sure that TrendMicro's enterprise product is pretty good, but I just haven't messed with it at all. I'm pretty much of the mind that if you find something that works and works well, stick with it until you come across a better solution in the field.

Another method of defense against viruses that you can use is user awareness. This basically means that you periodically send out reminders to users of what and what not to do with email attachments, internet downloads, etc.

Then lastly and least important is patching of systems. Since all of your systems should be behind firewalls, mail gateways and protected by AV systems, keeping the systems up to date isn't as important as it otherwise might be. Having said that though, ANY system that is exposed to the internet at large should be patched early and often. There are some tools available now that allow you to centrally manage updates to all of your systems in which case you don't have much excuse to not keep your systems patched. Plus patching does generally make your client's systems run better.

I'm sure if you run a larger organization there are some other methods you can use to keep protected, but those are pretty much the basics.

Something else that I should mention. It's a good idea to check regularly on Symantec's Security Response website or another similar site and to force your enterprise systems to update whenever you see that there's a new virus in the wild and a corresponding update.

WordPerfect To Office Conversion

I figure that this is a good topic to start talking about since in many ways it's the most complex project that I've undertaken.

The goal is to move all 40 people in our law firm from WordPerfect Suite to using Office 2003 as the standard. We are currently using WordPerfect Office 2000 and Microsoft Office 97 as well as WORLDOX 2000 for our document management system.

This is a huge task for good reason. Quite a few of the firm's personnel have years invested in using WordPerfect. The application works. They know how to use it and it gets the job done for them quite nicely.

The problem with getting them to use Word is that Word will NEVER be exactly like WordPerfect. So if you know one, the other seems much less than intuitive. I have some experience with working in Word and I oftentimes have problems doing the simplest things in WordPerfect simply because it's a different paradigm of doing things.

So the first issue is training. Getting everyone up to speed on how to properly use Word.

Second issue is features. We currently have macros and templates in WordPerfect, but none in Word. We also could gain a lot of benefit from purchasing a metadata scrubber, which is a whole other topic for another day. Some sort of app that converts cleanly from WordPerfect to Word would also be beneficial. So there are a few tools that we need to have in place before we can get people to standardize.

Third issue is getting everyone to build their documents to a set standard as much as possible. This goes hand in hand with training, but the standards have to be built before they can be taught.

Even if we do all of that, there will still be a modicum of resistance from the users who are comfortable with WordPerfect. Having said that though, I think that we are all willing to come to the table, discuss what we need to do and attempt to resolve the issues. If we can manage that, the project should go smoothly.

I will be talking more about this as it progresses.

Welcome

Hello and welcome to my new blog.

My name is Alex Scoble. I'm an IT Manager for a small law firm in Palo Alto.

I'm going to be writing here about software, hardware, technologies and best practices as I work with them in the field.

I hope to create an archive of my knowledge for personal use and also to give other people out there in the IT community perhaps some ideas on how to do things or tips and opinions on new products.