The Wiki-Connected Workforce

by Stephen Foskett / Dec 19

The most valuable asset many companies have is their workforce. They attract the best knowledge workers with higher salaries, amenities, and flexible working conditions, and expect them to travel and excel in front of customers. But there is one more thing they expect – contribution to the group knowledge base so everyone can share.

The key to encourage sharing of knowledge is to remove barriers and demonstrate value. Most content management and collaboration systems are somewhat difficult to use and access, especially for remote users, so they end up with low levels of participation. Happily, the Internet has a demonstrated successful solution to the problem of group-created shared knowledge: The wiki!

Hello, Wiki

Wikipedia is the most familiar example, a global encyclopedia created and maintained entirely by volunteer users. Anyone viewing an article is free to edit it, and users can also add new pages. In this way, Wikipedia has been able to harness the vast knowledge of literally millions of people, each contributing a tiny amount to an encyclopedic whole.

Under the covers, the wiki software provides critical support without being intrusive. It maintains a revision history, so other visitors can track and even revert unwanted changes. It also simplifies the creation of links between articles so users don’t have to copy or type long addresses. The presentation of information is simplified as well, with easy markup replacing complex HTML code for formatting. Finally, the wiki software manages the organization of articles, creating an index, search, and categorization scheme as articles and links are added.

The Business End

When businesspeople think about wikis, they often jump to conclusions based on their experience with Wikipedia, however:

• They may assume that wikis have to be anonymous, even though most wikis encourage or require users to create named accounts.
• They could also jump to the conclusion that anything added to a business wiki would be open to the whole internet, though it is simple to control access to some or all of the pages of a wiki.
• Finally, they might think a wiki is not suitable for rich content like tables, multimedia files, and documents, even though Wikipedia’s companion Commons contains a massive multimedia database.

Business wikis do not have to be anything like Wikipedia or the other wikis scattered throughout the Internet. They normally include user accounts and passwords to control access, and may be placed behind VPNs on corporate intranets for added security. Some even disguise their wiki underpinnings, appearing to the casual user as standard web sites. And wikis manage documents and multimedia files as objects, maintaining revision histories and simplifying linking and updates just like a content management system.

Leverage Openness

Business wikis exist primarily to leverage the same effects that built Wikipedia: Low barriers to contribution, simple markup, easy access, solid content control, and flexible organization and linking. And the nature of a wiki suits knowledge-based workforces since there is always a single latest revision of the whole that incorporates all of the latest thinking.

Although the Mediawiki software used by Wikipedia is free and open source, there are many other wiki packages to choose from. Some are more suited to businesses, with links to corporate authentication and access control systems and integration with email and calendaring software. These are also offered as pay-as-you-go managed services with corporate support contracts and services to get the whole thing started.

Regardless of which software is used, a corporate wiki can yield tremendous benefits, enabling collaboration and contribution of knowledge.

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Protect Yourself And Your Data

by Stephen Foskett / Dec 4

Physical Security for the Road Warrior

In this digital age, it is easy to overlook the critical element of physical security. Put simply, it is often far more efficient to steal or gain access to a physical object like a laptop or flash drive than to break into a computer system. And despite the sanitary and controlled environments many mobile employees often travel in, risks to personal safety are real. Therefore, it is sensible to consider the physical security needs of the road warrior.

Protecting Your Data

Digital Nomads love gadgets, but so do thieves. According to a 2008 Ponemon Institute study for Dell, over 12,000 laptop computers are lost in US airports each week, and 70% of these are never reclaimed. Other studies have shown similar losses at public places like restaurants, hotels, and parking lots. Thumb drives, portable hard drives, and smart phones share the top of the most-stolen list with laptop computers.

Because these are often crimes of opportunity, the simplest protective measure is to keep these devices under ones personal control at all times. Never ask a stranger to watch your bag, and do not leave computers or peripherals unattended in conference rooms or hotels. Special care is needed when passing through airport security: Never put your laptop or other valuable items through the scanner first, since you may be delayed while passing through the metal detector. Instead, place them in the middle or rear of your items so they will remain inside the x-ray machine longer.

Most hotel rooms have safes available, and these should be used whenever you must leave your laptop or other valuables behind. Although they are not foolproof, they are much more secure than car trunks, cable locks, or bell desks. If a safe is not available or is too small, use a Kensington lock to secure your laptop computer to a bulky and sturdy object like a desk. These will not stop a determined thief, but should be enough to discourage a snatcher.

Protecting Yourself

Many of us wrongly assume we are safe in the familiar surroundings of offices, hotels, airports, and restaurants. The rolling suitcase, airline ticket, and laptop bag marks us as targets even in these environments, and serve as enticing evidence of loot to be had.

One of the best ways of protecting one’s safety when traveling is always to be aware and prepared. Get directions ahead of time instead of asking or driving around. Consider whether your surroundings put you at risk: Select hotels in safer neighborhoods or where access is more controlled. Avoid public transportation when toting cumbersome bags, even if you would happily take it alone. Spending a bit more money is preferable to losing your valuables or coming to harm.

When you are away from the office or hotel, dress like a local and watch out for too-friendly strangers. Most people are helpful to others, but avoid those who ask prying questions of offer extravagant services. Con-men often prey on travelers, waiting near hotels, airports, and offices. For example, never take an un-licensed limousine or taxi since these nearly always end up being more costly or risky than desired.

Business travel can be enjoyable, but one must always be careful to avoid becoming a victim!

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Consider The Digital Nomad’s ROI

by Stephen Foskett / Nov 5

Many businesses today have staff working from home, and they reap significant benefit from this. Facilities costs disappear, workers spend extra hours working rather than commuting, and they can draw on a larger talent pool since they are not limited to the immediate vicinity of their facilities. But what is the ROI for the digital nomads themselves?

Commute Time

The United States Census Bureau reports that the average American office worker spends 100 hours each year …Read More

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The CIA Model for Digital Nomads

by Stephen Foskett / Oct 21

IT security experts apply a three-phase approach to security, considering confidentiality, integrity, and availability of systems. This so-called CIA model is equally applicable to digital nomads, and helps define the various areas they need to protect.

Confidentiality

It is critically important for most businesses to keep their data from prying eyes, both for internal business and competitive reasons and to avoid legal or regulatory trouble. This is doubly true for digital nomads, since they tend to take sensitive data with them and transmit it through a variety of means.

Laptop users should use encryption to protect the confidentiality of their data, since laptop theft is common. There are many options for encryption of data on disk, but most fall into two categories: File-level or full-disk.

Most operating systems, including most recent versions of Windows, include options for file-level encryption, and these have proven fairly solid over the years. Once they are set up, these are extremely easy to use: A user simply right-clicks on a file and selects “encrypt”. There are a number of third-party encryption options as well, and these vary widely in both ease of use and security. Note that these do not necessarily hide the existence of data, however, so a lost laptop would still reveal the name and type of files contained on it.

Full-disk encryption is not as widely deployed, but can be far more effective. Rather than requiring the user to select which files to encrypt, products like PGP Desktop and Windows Vista’s built-in BitLocker software lock an entire drive or partition, requiring a password on bootup. Note that BitLocker requires special hardware to work effectively, making it unsuitable for some laptops. Some disk drives also feature built-in encryption hardware, but these are much more rare.

Regardless of the encryption method used, however, key management is critical. No one wants to be locked out of their own data if they forget a password or experience a software or hardware failure, so make sure some alternative mechanism is in place to recover the data. And if a thief was to guess the user’s password or gain access to a running system, the data could still be compromised.

Remember the data on removable drives as well, since these can be even easier to steal or misplace. Portable hard drives used for backup or USB flash drives used to transport data must also be encrypted to avoid data loss.

Finally, digital nomads must be careful about which networks they use to transmit data. Open Wi-Fi access points might seem to be a handy bargain, but they have also been used to gain access to sensitive data. Hotel and corporate guest networks can also be used in this manner. It is better to rely on 3G modems which are harder to snoop. One should also always use VPN software or secure web sites when dealing with sensitive data.

Integrity

Keeping people out is sometimes less important than ensuring that one is working with valid data to begin with. Most people are aware of so-called phishing attacks, where an email entices a user to hand over their credentials, but there are many other potential attacks on the integrity of data. The same vectors used to give unauthorized access can be used to substitute untrustworthy data, and this can be just as damaging.

Many of the same technologies that protect confidential data can help with integrity. Encryption systems will ensure that data read from disk matches what was written, something that most filesystems surprisingly do not do. But no amount of encryption can protect from a user’s inadvertent writing of un-trusted data.

The first line of defense, especially for mobile workers, is training. Once again, open Wi-Fi hotspots and other untrustworthy networks should be avoided, and virus scanning and firewall software is a must. The Firefox web browser recently introduced a friendly mechanism to verify many popular web sites, but this is not widely deployed for corporate systems. Mobile users should also avoid relying too much on emailed content, since it can be compromised in transit, and should instead use more secure repositories and applications.

Availability

The final element in the CIA model, availability, is often overlooked. Constant travel can cause one to adapt to losses of connectivity by carrying more and more data along, but this opens the door to breaches of confidentiality and integrity of data. Conversely, an extremely secure system could be entirely inaccessible to a traveler, especially for those who spend a great deal of time in the air.

Digital nomads need to strike a balance, carrying enough data to get their work done but protecting the interests of the company (and themselves) by protecting it. Remote network-based backup can be a useful way of protecting laptop data, but these services can demand greater network resources than are available on the road, and restoring a great deal of data can be prohibitively time consuming. Digital nomads will augment these with mobile backups (to encrypted disk) in case a laptop is lost or damaged, since these allow for much quicker recovery.

The availability of 3G data is a tremendous help to the digital nomad as well, since they can be confident that their data will be accessible from wherever they are (on the ground). And nothing can substitute for a solid smartphone, giving quick access to critical email, calendar appointments, contacts, and light web browsing.

By paying attention to all three axes of the CIA model, digital nomads can enhance their ability to get the job done.

Stephen Foskett is a professional information technology consultant, providing vendor-independent strategic advice to assist Fortune 500 companies in aligning their storage and computing infrastructures with their business objectives. He has been recognized as a thought leader in the industry, authoring numerous articles for industry publications, and is a popular presenter at seminars and events. In 2008, he was awarded Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status in the area of File System Storage. He holds a bachelor of science in Society/Technology Studies, from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

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Out of the Office and Away From Home

by Stephen Foskett / Oct 2

Balancing work and life has never been easy, and this is especially true for the knowledge worker. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that we keep our jobs in our heads at all times, and modern electronics like the BlackBerry and laptop tend to keep it at our fingers as well. When our jobs require us to travel, work can effectively separate us entirely from our lives for days or weeks at a time. Road warriors must consciously try to focus on life, even as work pulls their attention away.

Always On

Let us first focus on the element of time: …Read More

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The Out-Of-Office Challenge

by Stephen Foskett / Sep 13

As an IT consultant for more than a decade, I have experienced a wide variety of work situations. I’ve commuted and sat in headquarters, a few doors down from the CEO; I’ve managed from remote sites with a dozen co-workers; and I’ve spent years working out of my home office and on the road as needed. Each has its own unique challenges, but none more than the out-of-office experience. If you want to work from home and the road, you must focus more than ever on organization and interaction or you will fail.

One frequent gripe I heard when working in a traditional office setting was that people would constantly interrupt, inviting participation and input just because of one’s physical presence. This phenomenon is certainly true: I spent easily half of my day in the office working with others on surprise assignments or in unforeseen meetings. And the reverse is true as well: Now that I work from home or client sites nearly all the time, I am rarely interrupted by others.

This solitude can harm, though. Being out of the office means not knowing which way the political wind is blowing, not hearing the latest news, and not being top-of-mind when input is needed. I would not be surprised if, statistically, remote workers see less rewards in terms of bonuses and advancement than those who sit in the corporate office.

The Technological Leash

Although IT-enabled remote workers like to lambaste their BlackBerries and laptops as technological leashes, they can help to mitigate the out-of-office challenge. My mobile phone usage skyrocketed once I became a mobile worker, so I began to use voice-over-IP services like Skype to contain costs while maintaining a higher level of connection. There is no substitute for in-person interaction, but a voice call is a reasonable alternative. Tip: Make a list of people to call and times to “check in” on a regular basis, especially if you rarely appear in the office in person.

Mobile email and calendaring is essential for the remote worker. The iPhone was seriously limited in its first year on the market since it could not even display calendar invites, but the new 2.0 software makes it eminently capable for Exchange users. No matter what platform is used, it is essential to actively monitor and respond to email and invitations throughout the workday in order to be an effective worker. Tip: Set the email signature on mobile devices like BlackBerries to match the one on your desktop email client – no one (especially your clients) needs to know you’re not at your desk!

No matter how good a mobile phone or PDA is, there is no substitute for a real computer, and modern notebook models are extremely capable. All remote workers should use a robust portable computer with all necessary applications, and should keep it handy throughout the workday. My home office consists of a high-quality multifunction printer/scanner, a large LCD monitor, an excellent keyboard and mouse, and a large backup drive. No desktop is needed – my entire virtual desktop travels with me wherever I go. Tip: Make sure you specify plenty of RAM and disk capacity on your notebook, and that you are using encryption and mobile backup technologies to protect your data!

Keeping Connected

The key to being an effective “road warrior” is to keep connected at all times. Use the phone, actively involve yourself in ongoing projects, and be able to get your work done at all times to avoid the “not here” syndrome.

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The Road Warrior’s Laptop

by Stephen Foskett / Aug 18

For IT-centric workers, being productive from the road requires more than just exceptional personal skills: A killer laptop is needed to replace an entire office full of equipment. Let’s consider what a modern road warrior’s laptop should include.

Power and Space

The ideal road warrior machine needs capacity to handle any modern computing task. Nearly every road warrior has to occasionally perform intensive activities like compiling code or encoding video, and these require serious capability in all three axes of computing: CPU, RAM, and storage.

The road warrior laptop should have a serious CPU, chipset, and graphics combination. Multi-core CPUs with plenty of cache will take the sting out of intensive computing, and modern architectures can provide good battery life, too. Don’t overlook the impact of a fast system bus and good graphics hardware, too. Integrated graphics chips are getting better, but a road warrior should have a discrete GPU and dedicated video memory, especially if video or photo work is to be performed. Tip: It may not make financial sense to spend hundreds more for a few extra megahertz, but make sure the system is configured with the latest-generation high-end chip.

Max out the RAM, too. Extra RAM will provide a serious boost to overall performance, and should help battery life since more data will be cached. The modern road warrior laptop should have 4 GB, and the next-generation OSes and chipsets will bump this to 8 or more over the next year or so. Tip: It’s easy to upgrade your own RAM on most laptops, and you can save some bucks!

Storage capacity is a must, too. Equip a road-warrior laptop with as much disk space as is available, and consider upgrading the hard disk on older machines as new sizes appear. Larger disks are generally quicker than smaller ones, and serious performers might want to step up to 7200 RPM drives for an extra jolt. No matter the size, a portable external backup drive is a must, but make sure it’s secure and encrypted to protect your data on the road. Tip: I like to lock my backup drive in the hotel safe while I tote my (encrypted) laptop around during the day.

Portability and Longevity

So-called desktop replacement machines are often too bulky for road warrior use, so try to strike a balance. 15-inch widescreen notebooks are a nice compromise between usability on the road and ease on the shoulders, but some might be able to get by with a 13-inch or smaller ultraportable, depending on their needs. Focus as much on the physical size and shape as on the weight, since a 1-inch rectangle might fit your backpack or briefcase better than a bulbous wedge. Besides, most modern machines weigh within a pound or so of each other.

Consider the weight and portability of the total package, too. Many manufacturers are introducing smaller and lighter power supplies, and this can make a huge difference to the road warrior. Invest in retractable cables and Kensington locks and keep the clutter down to reduce the load on your shoulder. Tip: Cutting out the cable clutter also helps keep airport security from flagging your rats-nest of a laptop bag for extra screening!

Although power outlets are becoming more common at airports, hotels, and even airplanes, an extra battery is a must. Always buy two of the largest batteries available for your machine and keep both fully charged. Tip: If you have an airplane AC adapter, check seatguru.com before selecting your seats to make sure a power port will be available!

Virtualize for Flexibility

Advances in computer virtualization can help the road warrior in unexpected ways. Install VMware or VirtualBox to enable outdated applications to run on modern 64-big operating systems. I keep a small virtual Windows XP image with older versions of Microsoft Office, Project, and Visio on my machine just in case I have trouble with the latest versions. Mac users love being able to use VMware Fusion or Parallels to run Windows applications alongside their favorite Mac OS X apps.

Consider support implications of your choice, too. Most larger IT organizations require a specific install for corporate use, and virtualization can be a lifesaver here. If your road warrior machine isn’t an approved standard, consider running the corporate image in a virtual machine. A friend of mine uses a MacBook Air ultraportable laptop with his entire supported corporate Windows XP image running under VMware Fusion. This allows him to have 100% compatibility and support in a lightweight package.

Connectivity

Finally, there is no substitute for the always-on connectivity of modern wireless phone-based laptop networking choices. Many road-warrior laptops have built-in 3G cards, but these might not be your best choice. A USB (or perhaps ExpressCard) device can be more easily swapped between machines as needed. A new type of wireless router is also appearing that connects directly to these external 3G cards, and allows their signal to be shared with a small group. Tip: External devices are also much easier to exchange if they should fail while on the road.

All wireless providers offer similar service at similar prices, and most do not offer substantial discounts when bundling wireless broadband with voice service. Consider whether you want to buy the hardware outright in order to get a shorter contract or if you would rather sign a two-year contract and get free hardware. Pay special attention to their coverage maps when selecting a provider, as this is a major differentiator between 3G and EV-DO service providers in the United States. Although these services are expensive, they are cheap compared to a few days of hotel or airport Wi-Fi charges!

Wi-Fi coverage has become far more plentiful over the last few years, and providers like AT&T, T-Mobile, Boingo, and FON make convincing pitches about their service. But my experience shows that the limited range of Wi-Fi makes it frustratingly unavailable when you need it most. Expect to see Wi-Fi access bundled with 3G service soon. Next-generation services like Wi-Max aren’t ready for prime time at this point and should not be considered a road-warrior-suitable alternative.

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