Management a love-hate relationship

I am in the midst of training for the GSA, Google Search Appliance.  While training is usually fast and furious, it is nice meeting other people from different companies and seeing how everyone is viewing the same product.  The different perspectives are nice to have, sometimes great for new ideas.

I was conversing with a fellow trainee and we were talking about why we were at the training.  He comes from a company of about 50 people and me from 90,000+.  Both of us got onto the topic of pros and cons about company size.  Small companies are quick and agile with lots of collaborating, and there is usually little overhead.  Larger companies have lots of resources and influence but usually have lots of bureaucracy, aka. overhead. 

Many try to argue one is better than the other, but it is really what is suited to your tastes.  I work for a company that has a lot of overhead, but it makes sense.  Everyone has worked on a project where management does not step up and people start running in different directions.  Doing things slowly right, is faster than doing things wrong really quickly and having to redo the mess up. 

Personally, I am not a fan of people that are pure management.  I know it is a necessary evil and I am not going to get rid of it.  My major qualm is those people creating large amounts of unnecessary bureaucracy.  Some people are so high up they cannot see the ground.  The only information they receive is from other management. 

Governance is extremely important and not fun to implement.  I understand this, but if bureaucracy needs to be created it should be the job of those in charge to make sure that it runs as efficiently as possible.  Governance is there to protect the business so things do not go wrong.  If it gets to the point that it starts harming the business then I think there is a problem.  People of my level have no way of influencing high level business policies, those in charge should be constantly trying to improve company inner workings the same way developers improve and refract code. Business process and computer code are in the end both algorithms.

Search me

I've spent the last two days in GSA, Google Search Application, training.  While many may snicker about the name I think that this is important learn.  While we do rely on Google.com for searching just about any and all content, Google.com can only search public data.  Things behind a firewall or on a company intranet are not going to show up.  I am sure many of us use the "company" search and find it more than lacking.

I work for a rather small company of around 90,000 employees.  We have solutions in place for our company that work well for large companies.  Unfortunately the company I work for breaks most solutions through just sheer volume.  We are not large, we are freaking huge. 

I am learning about the GSA to implement for customers.  It would be nice to use this internally.  The cobbler's children are the only ones with broken shoes, fits where I work. 

A company can buy a GSA and throw it behind their firewall and let it run.  The basic configuration is to set boundaries for the machine then let run to its heart is content.  There is a lot more to worry about, but that is what happens at a high level.  You get the same algorithm that is on the Google.com site and the GSA returns searches in under a second.  It is set to never take longer than 3 seconds, other wise it just ignores the data that is taking too long.

It is nice that it uses such a trusted algorithm, now you will not get any porn from your co-workers in your intranet search . . . damn.  The licensing is not cheap but for medium to large companies this is a very good solution.  Google excels in unstructured collaboration and the GSA helps makes sense of vast amounts unorganized information.

Needs more . . . resources?

A co-worker asked me a very simple question the other day.  "Is there any way to automate or do a bulk upload for Google Apps calendar resources."  Off the top of my head I answered I did not remember there being anything within the admin console, but I was sure that was probably an API out there for it.  

If you are familiar with Google Apps then you know that the APIs use two different libraries, GDATA and ATOM.  GDATA is where all the Google specific APIs come from, but it requires the ATOM library to run.  I go browsing through the GDATA library, which is very well documented within the code, but after about 10 minutes I come up with nothing.

The code is very well documented and organized.  Finding things is almost never a problem.  I thought maybe I was just missing something so I start checking some forums.  Turns out I am not the only one to notice this hiccup.  The only solution I found was to use scripting, tools like Selenium or Curl.  While they do work, this is a very simple function and would be extremely useful to administrators.

I wonder if my pleas will be heard up in the cloud?  Google, honestly, I know you are working hard on Google Wave but help us out.

Come on everyone let's share

I was checking out Google Apps, like I do almost every day, and I happened to find a spiffy new look to the place. It has finally started looking a bit more professional, rather than as if the interface was designed by elementary schoolers. Do have to say I liked the old look too, but Google does need to attract a slightly older crowd. 

Turns out the Google Docs has now allowed the ability to share folders. If you put any doc in a folder it automatically becomes shared with everyone that has rights to the folder.  Everything works like a breeze for sharing with individual users.  

To make Google Apps enterprise/production ready it needs to focus in on groups.  Rather than having to add each user individually a creator should just have to add the correct group from the domain and everything should work as if all users were added individually. 

Sadly, this is not what I have observed.  Even sharing just single docs within Google Docs does not work correctly.  I share a document with a group, that is defined within the admin console, if I do not send an invitation with a link all members within the group will never see my shared document.  A document will only show up inside docs if the user clicks on the link inside the invitation. 

I understand for reasons against having the document be auto populated within Google Docs if it is shared with a group.  If it is used in a enterprise people might go sharing crazy.  Then you would never be able to find anything.  Personally, I think there should be a setting that allows documents to be auto populated or not.

The same problem comes with sharing folders.  Not the items within folders, but the folders themselves.  I do not know if this is intentional, but I find it to be a flaw.  Google hear my cries, I love Docs but fix the group sharing or it won't be enterprise/production worthy!

Sweet . . .

Several weeks ago I was asked to help someone in my company create some forms. I work for a rather small company ~ 90,000 employees. I am a very small cog in a very big machine.

I was more than happy to help out with the request, I had nothing really important going on at the time. My co-worker was introduced to Google Apps, more specifically Google Docs. My group has a pilot for Google Apps and we had some extra licenses laying around, so I created my co-worker an account.

The company I work for uses Lotus Notes or Survey Monkey for most of its survey needs. It was nice to show someone something new. I was asked to replicate a questionnaire that was given to me in a pdf file. It took me about 10 minutes to do so and I shared the spreadsheet with the co-worker. Fully expecting to never hear anything again, 2 week go bye and I check the document history, I am still the last one who has viewed the doc. I give the co-worker a call and leave a message asking if they plan on using the survey I created. If not then was going to delete my co-workers account but save the spreadsheet and file it away.

I get no response, but the next day I see a department wide e-mail asking everyone to fill out a survey. To my credit I did not laugh too loud when I realized it was my questionnaire. The best part is since I am the document creator I can see the responses, do not worry everything in the survey is public data and I could not get someone in trouble even if I tried. Plus Google Docs has a full document editing history so if I do change anyone's response there is a log that I was the one who did it.

This is just my little victory dance that something I did was actually used. Too many days I feel like some peon in my little grey cube, which is probably exactly what I am. This is just me happy that I was able to influence "The Man".

Lotus Notes . . . wait a minute

So I was surfing the net like any other day and I happen to find an interesting article named "Get out of the email business". I found this to interesting since I do research for cloud computing and email is a major thing we are going after. When you outsource something, you should only outsource things that are not mission critical and are a commodity. Email is perfect for this.

I am fully expecting it to just be another boring article about cloud computing defining what is, . . . again. To my surprise it was about a new offering that is coming to the market, LotusLive from IBM. Now I do not know what email service you use at your company but LotusNotes is definitely old and busted. Some may disagree with me, LotusNotes has lots of collaboration and extra functions that no other email system out there has. This is true but there are so many other options out there that work better than what LotusNotes can do now. "Back in the day" it was awesome. And it is no longer "back in the day".

For a long time I was trying to convince others that cloud computing is not a product but more of a different way of doing things. There are some companies that are going after the market as differentiators, Microsoft, and others as cost savers, Google. I am sure it is fairly well known you can get the Google Apps suite for $50 a user per year. By far beating out an on premise costs for email system. LotusLive is coming out at $36 a year if you have a yearly contract or $3.75 if you pay monthly. IBM is now letting users pay month rather than yearly, micro payments here we come. This is under even what Google offers, that's impressive.

Hold the phone one minute though before you start singing praises or think someone beat Google at its own game. LotusLive offers an inbox size of 1 GB per user not 25 GB. While my post is a knee jerk reaction to seeing this offering I have yet to actually get my hands on it. All that aside it is something I will taking a hard look at.