Category: Thought grazing

Some of the blogposts from the Cardiff u3a Thought grazing site are duplicated here.

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Two tools you should have a look at

Been experimenting with a couple of tools recently:

Evernote – a means of saving scraps of information (from webpages, photos, pdfs, scans, etc) into a repository that is then available to you from the “cloud” – really useful if you move about; are working on a document; want to access it from anywhere … and it’s not the final article. Sort of multi-media equivalent of a post-it sticker that you can get at, anytime you want. Available for both windows and mac, so you can use it to transfer info between platforms also. If the document/project is more than just ephemeral then you could transfer it into another favourite of mine – dropbox.

The other one is – tungle.me – a very clever scheduling and calendaring tool. This enables you to have sight of any number of calendars eg Sametime, Gmail, Yahoo mail, Entourage/iCal (and the contacts associated with these systems) all in one place and then to invite people to meetings, or allow people to book meetings with you, on the basis of your published calendar. For instance you can see my availability at http://tungle.me/davidharrison – it doesn’t show what I’m doing (hope I’m not revealing too much).

However, for those on the move; or those using multiple calendars – this could be a godsend. One thing to note though. When you setup your tungle account, if you want to sync with Sametime, DON’T use Google as your identity provider. The Tungle widget that sits (running in the background) in the Notes client doesn’t know how to handle OpenID and/or anything other than simple username and password. So, regretably, you have to set up a tungle account – I learnt this from experience … I now have two tungle accounts – one of which I won’t be needing for too much longer 🙂

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Shared services by stealth

A colleague (Huw Gulliver) was talking to me the other day and he was recalling the “good old days” when we got things done by talking to each other and realising that doing things together just made plain sense. In some situations the idea was so strong that the business case was easy to make and it was then easy to secure external funding to do it – the Welsh Video Network being a case in point; in other cases it was more a case of sharing expertise and working collaboratively together to just get things done. At other times the funding was there, we just had to work together to deliver the solution – the Metropolitan Area Networks of North and South Wales being good examples.

What these projects did however was to encourage IT staff in different institutions to work together towards a common goal in their joint interest. This is the thought I’m seeding/reminding you of today. It’s not a great revolutionary thought, but it’s one that has to be shared because in times of gloom and doom the natural tendancy is to look inwards and think about preservation, rather than think imaginatively (outside the box) and progressively. So that’s where the “big idea” that Huw shared with me comes in.

What if all the institutions in Wales were to share rackspace as a policy rather than thinking of a mega data centre type initiative. You would get disaster recovery on the cheap. In the good old days we used to look for sites that ran the same hardware/software to provide such a service, and very few such schemes actually worked. The beauty of this idea is that the hardware is owned by the home, not the hosting, institution; you’re just borrowing rack space. The electricity charges are offset by you hosting for someone else. The network charges are insignificant, given our exceptional wide area network in Wales. All you need to do is move kit around. Here comes the trick!

Starting from this point, which is self-interest business continuity, you can so easily ramp it up to be off-site data storage with those sites that have the capacity providing additional rack-space at a cost far less than could be found commercially. The trouble with traditional shared service initiatives is that the first step – “giving it all away” – seems so scarey. Doing it this way lets you review your decisions and options every step of the way.

Think about it!