General

Goodbye Password, Hello Security!

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Hot on the heels of Microsoft’s man-of-the-moment comments on passwords – he suggested you should write down passwords down in a “very secured place” rather than forcing users to remember umpteen dozen passwords – comes this article on CIO.com suggesting that the password has had its day.

An interesting thought, yet to be proven, and until we see some true standards there I think we’ll have the password for a while longer. Of course, I continue to live in fear that one day I will forget all my passwords and I will simply cease to exist.

Postscript: a recent anecdote of a client who accidentally encrypted an assignment at uni through vainly bashing at the keyboard is a salient lesson to those of us who have ever wanted to take a computer out back and teach it a lesson.

Speaking with an ISP

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A well-documented problem for many people – at least in Australia – is having Telstra Bigpond as your internet service provider (ISP). The problem is not so much having Bigpond as your provider, as understanding their approach to business and what you need to do to keep them on their toes.

A colleague has been on a “1GB business plan” for $59.05 per month for the past three years. Not being tech-savvy – he’s really only interested in doing things with the computer, which is a novel concept for some people – he’s never really explored his options there. Telstra changed their plans and charge rates eighteen months ago, but unless you specifically request it, they leave you on your old plan and conditions. Telstra’s argument is that they can’t make value-judgments as to what’s “better” for a client so therefore they do not change your plan to a “better” one when it comes in. So in this instance – a 1 GB plan that is no longer available, with a 15c per megabyte excess charge, stayed in place. The fact that there is a 10GB plan, with no excess, available for $59.95 (a whole $0.90 extra) was never specifically advised.

Things have been going fairly swimmingly for some time, but unfortunately my colleague bought his daughter an iPod, and she started filling the iPod with (I’m sure it’s legal) music from the internet. So far, the excess charges could have bought a nice CD collection…

The lesson is, always monitor the Bigpond plans and keep aware of what you’re fees and charges are through sites such as Whirlpool. Telstra won’t tell you. A capped fee is best – your TD (Teenage Daughter) risk exposure is minimised then. As a Telstra shareholder, and rubbing my hands with glee at one level, with trepidation at another, I do wonder how many other Telstra customers like that there are out there.

Desktop Search Tools

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One of the fascinating new tools that have come to the fore over the past several years is an array of tools to assist you to retrieve the work you have already done – the work that is currently sitting in what could loosely be termed your knowledge library (if you’re not well-organised).

These tools include things such as Google Desktop Search (which is just out of beta), the MSN Search Toolbar, Yahoo Desktop Search, X1, and the Copernic Desktop Search. I have done a lot of research since this tool was mentioned at the IT Management Day (I chaired the day in Brisbane, at least partly because I chair the COE – oh, and I happen to live in Brisbane, so that may have helped) by Rob Roe of KAZ Technologies, and from the reviews I have read on the internet and my own experience, I think Copernic is a winner.

X1 costs – and since I am an accountant (there is a time-delay lock on my wallet), and the other tools are free and of great quality, it was never going to get a look in.

The MSN Search toolbar – well, apparently it doesn’t play nice with Mozilla Firefox (my preferred browser). It’s also from Microsoft (I like a lot of Microsoft products – they often just work without ten years geek experience), but the tendency I have seen is to bloatware and security issues. I was unable to confirm this, however, because the real killer for this product is it needs Windows XP to run, and like 40% or so of the business world, I still run Windows 2000 on my laptop.

The Yahoo search bar remains way too close to the beta program for me, so I didn’t really look at it too much. From reviews I’ve read, it seems to be a bit of a resource hog when indexing (even when you’re working).

Normally, Google would have been my tool of choice (what can I say – I already have one new verb “to Google”, meaning to thrash about and find stuff), but although it had a nice and simple interface, and the results were available in a browser, the Google tool is pretty much brain-dead in indexing just my local hard drive. There is a plug-in (too close to the old word, “hack”, for me) to search network drives, but it’s primogeniture is a little hard to determine and it comes with now arranties. Besides, this tool is only just out of beta.

Feeling a bit frantic, I downloaded and installed the Copernic deskbar, and it works for me. Although it doesn’t work with Groupwise (our email system of choice), that’s probably not a problem since neither do any of the other tools . Copernic works with network drives out of the box, it has a nice taskbar search tool, and the background indexing is nice and unobtrusive. I don’t understand why these other tools work only on the local hard drive – beyond the few script kiddies out there and consultants that work alone, it isn’t good practice to have valuable documents sitting on C:.

Some problems I did have with Copernic were when I tried to run it with Groupwise (I have Outlooked installed, so it tried to index Groupwise with somewhat disastrous results – the indexing essentially kept freezing my computer). It isn’t rated for Groupwise, so that’s probably not a surprise.

Also, I found that when I had the preview pane on, a couple of spreadsheets (I think with macros in them perhaps) caused a lovely blue screen of death – so I turned that off. I do suspect that may be a Novell incompatibility.

Finally, because the taskbar takes up some acreage, I decided to turn that off. Which I did. When I went to turn it back on – no luck. I racked my brains about it for 20 minutes how to resolve it and then decided the simple approach was best – I uninstalled the thing and re-installed, and then allowed it to reindex it. It took about half an hour of my life – and I won’t try turning off the taskbar again. The reindexing was unobtrusive (and continues to be) and I have 12,775 documents indexed fairly quickly, I thought, while I zapped out for a coffee.

So in summary, I am using Copernic on my laptop, and I have been very impressed so far (speed is excellent!). A side benefit is that if you show results by date, you can quickly see those files you have been working on recently (presuming, of course, the documents you have indexed are your documents – this will depend on how you work with a team). A tool like this raises issues for IT Governance, desktop stability, and IT installation policies, but that’s a topic for a different post.

Special Edition of the Australian Accounting Review: Information Systems Research

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One of the exciting things on the Information Technology & Management Centre of Excellence’s work plans for this year is a special edition of the Australian Accounting Review. If you don’t know of the AAR (and if you studied an Honours degree in business over the past twenty-five years, you probably should know about it), it is the pre-eminent Australian research journal for accounting and business.

Speaking for myself, I do occasionally get a little twitch in my eye when I think back to all those research papers I had to critique out of the AAR, but I’m getting over that. Honest.

At any rate, a call for papers has been issued, and the response has been very enthusiastic – much better perhaps than we had anticipated, and the editorial committee (Dr John Campbell, Shauna Kelly, and myself) are now finalising the papers that will be included in the special edition.

I will probably will document (OK, definitely will) the launch of the special edition. This is a project I am particularly proud that the COE has been able to bring to fruition, and the quality of the papers that have been submitted – from some of Australia’s foremost researchers – indicates a future need for such a journal. However, at this time, it is a one-off and the COE will review the project to see whether we do this more often – at the moment, I am thinking biannually, but perhaps it’s an annual thing (or if it’s a complete bomb, we’ll call it a success and not repeat the experience).

I suspect the whole “complete bomb” thing is not an option, just on the basis of my reading of the papers I have seen so far. Australian research is a strong thing, and information systems is no less strong than any other area of Australian inventiveness, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. I am looking forward to the final fruition of something we first talked about at least three years ago (when Tony Hayes was the Chair), and if this was the only thing we could achieve, I would have been a happy man. The fact that we’re almost done with our current work program is testament to the dedication and assistance of the people on the COE, on our policy and research advisor Jan Barned, and more particularly on the ability of CPA Australia to attract and foster the abilities of very talented people.

Who do I mean? Well, perhaps you’ll have to beg, borrow or steal a copy of the Special Edition of the Australian Accounting Review: Information Systems Research. I’m sure it’ll be a best-seller.

Organising Your Work

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Somewhere along the way we may, just perhaps, have lost focus on the purpose of computers and personal information systems. This presentation (it’s a little tongue-in-cheek) provides some good tips on organising yourself and some handy hints.

I should note that this presentation was developed by Microlaw in the United States.