Thoughts on the Admin2004 show (tech back next entry)
Ok, so we are in the air on my way back to
Boston. Notice I say Boston and not Chicago to St Louis. But
that can be saved for a weekend blog entry. It is a whole story in
itself.
The conference went quite well. A
great group of people came with good interest, intentions and questions.
I did run into one person that supports 6.5.1 mail gateways but most
of the internal server are still 4.6.3b with no immediate plans to upgrade.
I had to ask the question why. Well, it became apparently clear.
They have no crashes at all, the servers run on older hardware, and
they are also randomly placed throughout the US. I say randomly because
they are on vessels on the ocean. They have a 9k link to send
mail and IM isn't on the plan yet either. Makes perfect sense to
me, hard to upgrade when the server could be anywhere at any given time
right?
I did pose one solution, move the machine
to 6.5.2 with iNotes and let the user hit it that way on each vessel. More
portability to use any machine on the ship, plus no client upgrades to
even worry about. Speed is still local to each ship's LAN so there
wouldn't be a conflict. I even went so far as to suggest that when
they get new hardware to add the integrated Sametime. He liked that
whole idea and is taking it back to take a look.
I enjoyed listening to the numerous different
scenarios people had implemented for mail routing also. I did not
always agree with the architecture, but it was always clear why they did
it. I ended up giving them some things to talk and think about when
they got back in each of those instances. I would rather see the
sites sit back, review and think, then make an informed decision. I
made myself available to those sites to talk further.
Now one thing I did find, and it is the
point of my recent E-Pro newsletter series (sorry flying so I couldn't
grab the link, will get it later) was that no site in either of my IM sessions
had an IM use policy. The majority had Internet use policies, but
not IM use policies as Sametime was still gaining ground or being deployed.
I can say the overwhelming majority of the attendees in the IM sessions
did not even use public IM systems as we know them. On a raise of
hands, I would guess less far less than 10% of the total I asked actually
had or used an account on something like AOL, MSN or Yahoo. Only
one person ran Trillian. One of those things.
Ok, the upcoming posting schedule...
weekend..details on the flight
Mon some tech info I need to post for the
attendees.
Tue some info on where we ate and what
we saw while there.
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On Thursday, October 21st, 2004 by Chris Miller
