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June 30, 2002
Blogs for System Status Communications
My organization operates hundreds of servers in several data centers and a network that connects over 250 separate locations. One of the problems we have is status communication to various interested parties. Tonight I decided we should have a system status blog that uses categories with separate RSS feeds for various severity levels and systems. For the low price of $40/year we could have:
- One easy spot to post status announcements, which would be ordered in exactly the right way.
- A web-based record of status.
- Multiple RSS feeds of the various systems and severity levels.
- Easy integration into the personalization feature of our intranet; RSS feeds would show up as gadget boxes for people who want them.
- The ability to easily subscribe to RSS feeds and digest them in various ways for people with special needs.
How could you not like that?
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IM in the Enterprise: Part II
A few weeks ago, I wrote:
While [free IM tools] suits my needs pretty well on base functionality, I'd hesitate before endorsing it as a corporate tool. In addition to the need protect the contents of message with encryption, a coporate tool needs:
- the ability to use the company's LDAP directory for accounts and passwords
- better methods of finding who's available
- logging and monitoring of messages
- filtering capabilites for viruses
A recent article in ZD Net News, talks about the issues for corporations who want to use IM in the workplace and for IM providers like Yahoo! and AOL.
I'd like our customer support (for internal IT customers) to offer IM as an alternative to the phone for people with support problems. We'd need logging and monitoring capabilities for that to be viable. And I'm not about to pay a $50/head licensing cost for a commercial IM solution---that's $1M. An IM product is not worth $1M to us. Looks like its time to spend some time playing with Jabber.