menome

For the past 3+ years, at Matrix we have been evaluating smart phones for corporate use. For most companies, the selection of a smart phone device is a non-issue: its RIM's Blackberry product and associated BEZ (Blackberry Enterprise) server.

Being a Waterloo University engineering graduate, I certainly would have no qualms about going the Blackberry route for a corporate smartphone device. However, working through the evaluation process at the corporate level puts a different perspective on these devices.

The biggest issues are: cost (device, dataplans, setup), maintenance, usability (not always in that order) and finally farther down the list - application platform. By application platform I am referring to custom business applications that are outside of contacts, email and calendar. I suspect as time goes on the application platform item will become more important at Matrix, but right now its not a priority.

Matrix users at present though have very basic requirements for a smartphone - they want it to work well as a phone, and be able to use it as a tool for managing their calendar, contacts and email in that order.

The Blackberry excels at these, but its requirement for a server to enable corporate messaging makes it more costly than other offerings, when you factor out the device as an application platform.

While the Blackberry Enterprise Server provides more value in terms of features, the market it was designed to serve has changed since its inception. The security measures on other platforms, while not as sophisticated perhaps as the BEZ, are good enough to be effective (more about this later). The dataplan monitoring and restrictions were something that used to be important - but now that phone companies are being forced to provide more logical plans that offer data pooling and reasonable data limits, the requirement for centralized monitoring has diminished significantly. The BEZ acts as a platform for software development - but other platforms are now providing sophisticated developer tools as well.

Finally the BEZ requirement adds yet another server (albeit virtual) that requires licenses, maintenance, updates, expertise and attention. The additional requirement of a CAL for devices connecting to the BEZ add another layer of cost - especially when you consider that many companies already pay for Exchange CALs.

So at Matrix, the focused shifted to evaluating mobile devices that could directly connect to Exchange via the Exchange push mechanism - which narrowed the search to Windows Mobile based devices.

 (More)

Just finished reading The Big Switch – excellent book. The key to making the firm I work for (Matrix Solutions) successful is to minimize overhead and infrastructure costs as much as possible. While Matrix’ only product is information, as your book points out, we are in the business of collecting, interpreting and managing knowledge for our clients – not building and managing IT infrastructure.

Therefore - I am always looking for ways to reduce costs of IT by leveraging wherever possible the kinds of ‘utility’ services discussed in the book, and have for some time been a believer in SAS.

Matrix right now is still very much in the ‘older’ model of IT services, in which we still own and manage an IT infrastructure based on Microsoft servers and applications which the company owns. (More)

A recent update issued by Microsoft Update appears to cause a:

svchost.exe -- application error the instruction at "0x745f2780" reference memory at "0x00000000". the memory could not be 'read''.

This issue renders computers running windows XP completely useless.The hotfix offered by Microsoft does nothing to solve the problem.

Fortunately you can find a fix for this issue here: on the Tech Blender blog

For convienence, I have posted the solution from the site here as well (hit more after the rant to get the details)

===== rant =====

This sort of thing really makes me angry, since there is no recourse.

You can't phone Microsoft without paying them to fix the problem they created. The Windows Update system which is supposed to help protect users from these types of problems, was in fact the source of the issue.

Their own fixes didn't solve the problem, and their own knowledge base proved useless for this issue (not the first time either). The only reason I was able to find the solution at all was thanks to another company (Google) making a search engine that provides better information than any of Microsoft's resources, and the fact that another tech professional was kind enough to make the fix available for free on his blog.

I didn't find the blog post on Google when the problem hit my machine before Christmas, so I was forced to do a full rebuild - a job that required several days. I am involved in keeping a network of over 200 largely Windows based computers up and running, which is hard enough without having the company that makes the software break it: let alone all the viruses and other problems.

I certainly appreciate the complexity and dependancies associated with maintaing somethign as complicated as Windows.

BUT that is no excuse for absolution of liability: especially considering how much we pay for Windows and other Microsoft software (although it mostly seems to be Windows that is the source of problems, and not Office).

We have had the issue affect several machines already that have also had to be rebuilt, since we did not have a fix until now.

Based on the fact there are over 42 pages of comments relating to this issue on the Tech Blender blog post, I can only imagine what the total cost in terms of lost time caused by this actually are.

If this were a car, or other 'physical' product with such a widespread problem, there would be a recall or some kind of compensation for the problem - but because its software, for some reason its magically exempted from any liability, and we are forced to sit back and quietly accept the losses caused by what appears to be poor quality control.

=== end rant ===

 (More)

It is always sad to see what starts out to be a promising innovative new technology get corrupted to satisfy the demands of the dollar.

Perfect example of this is the immensely annoying co-branded Dell/Google search Crapware that showed up in my IE (most of the time I use Firefox, but at work - well...there are a number of systems defendant on IE. ) whenever I miss type a URL or enter a URL that doesn't exist.

The 'Crapware Search Assistant' Spams my browser with a whole pile of Crap that I don't want. Fortunately (or so I thought) a set of uninstall instructions were buried on the page that tell you to look for 'GoogleAFE' or Browser Search Assistant.

I could not find an application by either of those names in my Add/Remove programs. I did find one called 'Search Assistant' that I removed.

That didn't do it.

I had to try 5 different methods of getting rid of the Crapware before I finally found one that worked.

Click if you want to read the entire sordid saga...

 (More)