mirco's.net

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  Not getting anywhere…

  Mirco 11:06 on Friday, 22. May 2009 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: administration (4), aperio, autofocus, blogs, changingroom, citydreams, consolidation, corporatemag, decisionexample, demo, design, elements, equilibrium, features, flickr (3), folio, freemium, magazine, meganews, merge, nami, news, photoblog, portfolio, restructuring, thelatest, themes (2), undercon, unstandard (2), webdev, Wordpress (2)

  Remember I wrote something about restructuring my (currently 4) blogs and combine three of them into one?

  Not? well, it’s already been 4 months and I’ve not been getting anywhere close to that. Partly because of my lack of time between my working schedules, and part of my lack of experience with wordpress themes.

  The initial plan was to create a new theme that reflects the different parts of content I’ve been covering in these three blogs. currently I think it would be easier to take an existing Magazine style theme and tweak it to my needs, but I’m still in a decision phase.

  Here’s what I came up with until now:

  Freemium seems to be one of the most versatile themes currently out there. Lots of tutorials on how to customize this theme. But since it’s that popular, this would just lead to another boring blog layout.

  TheLatest is a magazine like new theme. Feature wise it has everything I’d need, so with a litte effort to spice up the dull color scheme this would have good potential. MegaNews is pretty much the same in over crowded. more and narrower columns and huge advertising spaces… which I don’t need at the moment.

  CorporateMag is a sleek contemporary blueish design. It has some nice features and probably need to be replaced with next years fashion. One thing that caught my eyes were the stretched images. Seems like it uses the same pictures for both the feature bar and the article header, which is slightly wider and though stretches the images out of proportion. I hope this is not intended and only a bug in the demo.

  The Unstandard does a good impression, and only needs some minor modification for the headline images. everything else in clean and very lightweight.

  Another clean theme is Equilibrium with a similar approach. Image header with a short text excerpt and support for featured content.

  A creative couple of themes would be Nami and City Dreams, although I’m not sure how much of re-coloring it will need to fit these two to my type of content.

  During these last months a seconds idea came to me. Why not take some of the photos I’m loading onto Flickr and make a separate photoblog. There’re some nice themes out there that would suit this idea.

  AutoFocus would support not only a simple photoblog but with the clean text article format also a more story telling or news themed scenario.

  Aperio is has similar features, but with it’s 4 column single post pages the text posts are displayed in a very narrow format that is not suited for longer posts.

  Folio Elements is a very good example for a Portfolio only theme. You can scroll through single photos with small text portions… nothing more.

  The Transition from one Blog to another has to be styled too, so here are two very beautiful examples of what to display in between blog releases:

  The Changing Room and UnderCon. Both support FeedBurner RSS and Email and are fully customizable.

   

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• 

  Relying on the Unknown

  Mirco 9:41 on Tuesday, 2. September 2008 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: activedirectory, assignment, business (2), change, changemanagement (2), chaos, company, Consulting (2), customer (2), delegation, department, dns, domain (2), failure (3), it, management (5), merge, merger, problem

  When merging different companies, one of the most crucial building blocks of future success is a fully merged and centralized IT Management. Why? Because every attempt I witnessed to try something else created chaos. And that’s something you really don’t want within your IT department.

  A small example. One of my customers bought some small companies and integrated them into their Active Directory, leaving every local administrator with a domain administrator account, because that’s what they had before the migration. Sounds fair for the administrators, but a few weeks later some of the mail servers stopped sending email.

  Someone made some small changes to the DNS service, which was Active Directory integrated, so this reduced the potential causes to the Domain Admin group members… all 120 of them. At first this doesn’t look like a huge number, but if you consider that every local administrator and at some sites even local support personnel had domain administrator privileges, it is much to great a risk to be left unchanged.

  Another small example, at another company. While rolling out a new directory structure and migrating every company site into it, all local administrators where reduced from local Domain Administrators to being Domain Users with delegated privileges. Some of them fought fiercely to regain their old “power” and the CIO was forced by some executives to reinstate them.

  The funny thing was one of them sent an email with a question, that most of the central hotline staff could answer, about a problem he had at his site only minutes after the CIO requested to rejoin this particular administrator. The request was cancelled, after we forwarded this email to the CIO.

  The main problem when merging IT departments is, that in most cases you don’t know anything about the people and their skills. Even if, in this case, they have been running the local IT at some sites for years this doesn’t mean they know what they are doing.

  We all know communication is a crucial part of business success and since IT is a crucial part of today’s businesses it’s even more important to know what is going on in your network, on your servers and who is making changes to what.

  That’s why change management was created.

  Sending an email with a problem to a distribution list of 40 administrators doesn’t necessary solve a problem. It will more likely produce another: The problem assignment.

  This approach has two possible paths of solution.

  1. Everyone thinks somebody else is already on it and ignores the email
  2. Two or more Admins will try to solve the same problem at the same time

  In most cases none of these paths will solve the original problem, because every change of one admin will lead to inconclusive result for the other, thus resulting in more changes.

  Taking some time to think, define and plan how your IT environment should work and how this plan can be realised is the first an one of the more difficult steps, but it in the end it will be worth the effort.