With today’s mobile and geographically dispersed teams, subscription-based eSignature platforms like Adobe EchoSign and DocuSign are more secure and sane options for sending documents for signoff than emailing PDF documents, having the recipient print them out, sign them in ink, scan the document to PDF again, and then send them back to the sender. Take one of these eSignature platforms a step further and integrate it into a CRM or document workflow, and documents can be sent securely to multiple mobile users who can sign off the documents from their iPhone.

via Three free apps for securely signing documents with your iPhone | TechRepublic.

 

Project management can be a very mobile profession, and there are quite a few project management apps available for tablets. Tablet clients for cloud-based apps and standalone project management apps each have their drawbacks, but the potential is there to manage an entire project from the mobility of a tablet.

via Tablet apps for project managers | TechRepublic.

 

Learning Drupal is a personal project of mine of mine this year, so reading this book was definitely part of my education. I compliment the authors on the friendly and warm writing style in the book. The book provides a solid introduction into the world of Drupal including starting with a history of content management on the web, and then delving into how Drupal works.

Some notable parts of this book (for me at least) are:

• The Drupal Jumpstart chapter is a quite comprehensive introduction to content management and how Drupal works as a Content Management System (CMS). It then takes you through hands-on exercises of how to create basic content elements like pages and articles using Drupal.
• The book balances on hands-on exercises like the Job Posting Board in Chapter 2. This is a strong selling point for the book if you like to work through exercises to learn a new platform. Some readers may be turned off by this approach because they look for more reference oriented books.
• Media Management in Drupal can be complex but the book delivers a Media Management chapter that walks you through a case study and thorough coverage of how to work with images in the Drupal world ending off with hands-on exercises to put together what you learned.
• The Managing Publishing Workflows chapter should be mandatory reading for people learning Drupal to build their first portal or website especially its coverage of taxonomy, the Workbench Suite, and Workbench access.
• The Online Store chapter offers some great guidance for embarking on building your first ecommerce site with Drupal. You can follow an the introduction to building an eCommerce site even if you aren’t a programmer or system administrator.

I recommend this book if you are looking for a solid introduction to the world of Drupal. This is not the first book I’ve read about Drupal this year, but it is certainly the first book I am going to consult when I want to learn something new about Drupal or to help me troubleshoot a technical issue.

 

I’ve freelanced during my off hours for a large part of my career successfully but with a few bumps in the road along the way. However, as much is written about the freelancer fumbling, the employer/client can also drop the ball and put what should be a simple exercise into the wall. Some ways include:

• Not sizing up properly whether a project can be done offsite during evening and weekend hours. It can be easy to see such a freelancer as a full-time if you only have minimal experience working with offsite  team members or even outside vendors to begin with. Some projects simply cannot be done offsite for political, cultural, or even karmic reasons not to mention technical hurdles.
• Not properly, accounting for a project team member working during off hours in the overall project schedule can setup that part of the project for failure. It’s up to the client and the part-time freelancer to be very judicious in scheduling since part-time availability can mean that the freelancer cannot always turn on a dime like the other project team members who are full time employees.
• Poor communications between the part-time freelancer and the client can have the blame fall on both or either side. It is best to include an addendum in the project plan if not even the contract that spells out the turnaround time for communications, document reviews, and any subsequent edits and revisions. None of this might be an issue on project teams that span time zones or in email heavy organizations where team members on the client side check their email in the evenings on their laptops and/or mobile devices.
• On the subject of document reviews, while a part-time freelancer can nail their deadlines each time, the document can still go back to the client then is swept down into the depths of their Outlook inbox.
• The Customer treating the project as out of sight, out of mind because the writer isn’t onsite.
• Choke the project with all sorts of unnecessary overhead like tracking spreadsheets and multiple status reports that strangle the hours

In our current down economy, part-time freelancing is something for both accomplished professionals and prospective employers to embrace. The freelancer gets to diversify their income and help build a war chest against the next layoff. The prospective employer can get a writer or other freelancer to focus on getting results with little or no downtime to pay for as they might have to with a full-time contractor onsite for 40 hours a week.

How does your company manage part-time freelancers?

Image by stock.xchng user: statianzo

 

Business Intelligence BI is becoming a strategic tool for businesses as they try to navigate through the current economic shoals by staying up to date on critical business data. Now, tablets can take the advancements of the dashboard to a mobile form factor.In fact, mobile BI apps can help democratize business intelligence and put instant access about sales, logistics, product, and customer data into the hands of mobile workers, like sales people and field engineers. In addition, you don’t need to be a report writer to pull data out of a mobile BI app, which makes it an ideal tool for an executive team who might lack the technology skills but still need access to corporate data.

via Put mobile BI on your corporate tablets | TechRepublic.

 

Fleishman’s approach in the book is to take the reader through install, setup, and working with the various BBEdit features, working with documents, writing more efficiently with BBEdit’s tools, editing text, wrangling text (automating reusable text elements), search and replace, and then through working with web pages and sites. He does a great job of putting together how BBEdit users had to put together working with text, managing web sites, and managing projects to maximize BBEdit.

The valuable part of the book for me is the automation coverage, which I plan to put to work on some of my own personal web projects when I get a chance. After reading the book, I am also now going to take more of a project-focus when using BBEdit on projects in the future rather than my old way of treating HTML pages on an individual level.

In the future, I hope TidBits Publishing can spring for some eBook design lessons. If not, hopefully O’Reilly can offer them some mentoring in the fine art of eBook design or buy them light gray note boxes for Christmas.  Notes in a horrible shade of urine yellow pock the entire book. They are distracting and detract from a book that has some strong sections. The heading font colors in the ePub version aren’t aesthetically pleasing either.

The book also has some screenshots with examples that don’t fit the book (I am looking at you Figure 12!) and Fleishman gets too chatty and conversational at times that could have readers going for the search option to find what they need  or just plain getting irritated if they have limited reading time.

I give this book points for its technical depth and approach even though I grew irritated with it at times due to Fleishman’s chattiness and the eBook’s poor design and distracting aesthetics. The redeeming qualities of the book outweigh the negatives making this book a good choice for anybody who wants to learn BBEdit better.

 

Endpoint security may seem like a daunting task if you are a Small to Medium Business (SMB) with the accompanying specters of expensive equipment and big dollar consultants made even worse in light of malware and the other online security issues facing organizations today. However, when you get down to it, endpoint security is more accessible today than ever before.

Here are five ways to save time and reduce your investment on endpoint security:

1. Always approach endpoint security with a plan. Making the move to endpoint security with a plan is move that can save you both time and money. The plan should include your security requirements, backup plan/regimen, and proposed budget, and research on market leading solutions. From this information, you can determine a short list of prospective vendors. The best news about endpoint security solutions today is that the major security vendors have SMB class endpoint security solutions in their product lines that have flexible pricing tailor made for SMBs scaling up and scaling down endpoint security as a company grows or reduces headcount.
2. Institute a strong end user education program. User education is one of greatest endpoint security tools that won’t cost your organization a lot of money. There are a number of free IT security resources and templates for acceptable use policies available online. The goal here is to get your end users to be your first line of defense – speaking up if something looks out of place on their PC and deepen their understanding about online security risks. Better-educated end users means less security related calls to your help desk.
3. Deploy Software As A Service (SAAS) web security. SAAS based web security has dual benefits of time savings and reducing your investment. The “pay as you go” pricing model and flexible menu of security options that SAAS offers SMBs is hard to ignore because it means purchasing only the security you require but still getting the opportunity to scale up and scale down their security with the ebbs and flows of your business. Outsourcing the administration and infrastructure also saves your IT budget and means that in-house IT staff can focus on client facing projects that can contribute to the bottom line of your business. The outsourcing provider also has in-house security experts that are typically out of reach salary wise to SMBs, which is another nice bonus.
4. Avoid consumer security solutions inside your enterprise. The most basic endpoint security solution is a firewall and antivirus on the PC and it might seem commercial off the shelf security software can take care of your desktop security needs, However, don’t forgo a centrally managed endpoint security solution for consumer grade security as an SMB. Putting security configuration and decisions into the hands of end users can result in costly and time consuming security issues that can impact your business and divert your IT people from billable projects.
5. Consider free endpoint security solutions and non-traditional alternatives. We live in cash strapped times, so your SMB may want to consider free endpoint security solutions and non-traditional alternatives because they are better than nothing standing between your corporate data and the Internet. However, heading down this security route is fraught with compromises including spending a lot more man-hours.  Non-traditional alternatives include reducing the threat vectors in your enterprise like Windows PCs (easier said than done for most of us), standardizing software and configurations, disabling unnecessary Windows services, setting up a strong operating system/application service pack and patching regimen. There is a lot can be done to secure your endpoints by doing by locking down your existing hardware and network infrastructure with will just cost you man hours and time.

Final Thoughts

Saving time and reducing your investment on endpoint security starts in your approach and balances on finding the right SMB security solution (SAAS or locally hosted), end user security training, and an understanding of the security alternatives available in your hardware and network infrastructure.

Image by stock.xchng user: ArminH

 

Here are some things organization can do to foster a culture of SharePoint champions:

Put SharePoint administrator control on the team level. When a SharePoint administrator is ensconced behind multiple monitors inside in an IT department with a hundred other more pressing responsibilities, a SharePoint site becomes an obstacle growing cobwebs. Project teams are either going to ignore or look to circumvent SharePoint sites if making site changes is a web of approvals, Remedy tickets, online forms, waiting, and more waiting.

Embrace the SharePoint power user. SharePoint 2010 at Work by Mark Miller has a great write up about how you can work better with SharePoint power users in the end user community. SharePoint power users spread across the project teams in your organization can be the shot in the arm an otherwise lukewarm reception to SharePoint and help dispel cynicism from previous subpar SharePoint experiences.  The SharePoint Power User can be a SharePoint implementation team’s best friend or worst enemy as the case may be.

Develop, document, and communicate SharePoint governance policies. Along with putting SharePoint administrator control on the team level and showing the SharePoint power users in the organization some love is time to develop, document, and communicate SharePoint governance policies to the SharePoint user community. The policies aren’t meant to be a buzz kill but rather help set some site standards, support policies, and related policies to help ensure SharePoint meet is potential inside your organization. Lastly, there should be some training and/or communications about SharePoint government policies to empower the SharePoint champions studding out in the various project teams and departments in your organization.

Make SharePoint a central project management platform. Organizations can realize many benefits from centralizing their internal and client projects on SharePoint. Dux Raymond Sy in his book SharePoint 2010 for Project Management describes how to build a very useful (yet, code free) Project Management Information System using SharePoint 2010.

Look for the code free solutions your organization can create with SharePoint. With the right user roles, there are a number of code free solutions that organizations can create out of the box with SharePoint.  With a  book like, Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Creating and Implementing Real World Projects and the right roles, there is a lot non-coders given the right amount of time to use SharePoint out of the box to solve some of their project level issues and improve productivity. Going the Code Free solution avenue is great for fostering a culture of SharePoint champions because some development direction and tools are in the hands of the people who want SharePoint to work the most.

How are you creating your own culture of SharePoint champions?

 

Here are some lessons I learned:

Spend more time on the MAMP (drawing board). In retrospect, I should have built out the full site on MAMP and not stopped at just being able to install Drupal and getting it talking to MySQL. I should have held off on my victory lap until after I had a fully functioning version of willkelly.com running on MAMP on my MacBook Pro. I should have played with willkelly.com in the sandbox a wee bit longer before releasing it to the public web.

Setup modules more methodically. If I had it to do over again, I would have taken a more methodical approach to installing Drupal modules and themes. The second time around I took the methodical approach and it worked so much better than my first run.

Focus more on social media integration up front of the project. While I’ve had willkelly.com as a domain since the late nineties, I seem to get most of my online traction through this blog you are reading right now, LinkedIn, and Twitter. My Google Analytics account tells me in gory detail which of my web properties gets traffic and at some point I may look at merging willkelly.com and willkelly.org into one site.

What lessons did you learn the first time you installed Drupal?