Technology In Check

Let’s spend a few minutes looking at something which is tangent to working from home… managing software licenses. Now I’m sure many business managers read that phrase and say “What’s to manage? You buy software and install it!”. End of problem, right?

Not so much. Especially for organizations over 50 machines, license management can become a bit of a bugaboo. And when you hit the magic 50-mark, you also start showing up on the radar of auditing companies.

Here’s why caring can save you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Continue Reading »

Much has been said over the years about the pros and cons of telecommuting, and yet for some reason many business managers still feel a great deal of resistance toward the notion. As a professional geek this is something quite baffling to me. Especially in light of a recent article that reported on findings of several studies on the subject.

Managers know how to do the cost analysis, so I won’t go into that here. Instead, I’m going to spend a few minutes discussing some of the variables affecting remote users from a technology perspective, so that business managers can make a decision from a more informed position.

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We’ve all heard of the KISS principle, right? Keep It Simple, Stupid. It can apply to many areas of life, as I’m sure we’ve all seen. When you make things overly complicated, it just introduces more places for things to go wrong.

I was reminded of this while working at a client’s site last week. The technical support provider prior to my company had done some… shall we say, interesting… things to a laptop, which rendered a critical business application nearly useless. And the fact of the matter is that the changes that had been made had no real benefit.

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As promised, I want to talk about commodity computing this week. What it is, how it affects you, and how it relates to utility computing.

So let’s get straight to it, shall we? Continue Reading »

This week I want to take a look at one of the buzz-phrases that’s sometimes bandied about by computer types - utility computing. It’s an idea that’s generated a lot of interest in the past year or so, and I can understand why. The Wikipedia has an item on utility computing, but it’s a bit heavy on tech-speak.

So what is utility computing, and can your company use it? Or do you even need it? Continue Reading »