CIO woes

Being the CIO is quite a bit different than being the HPC manager. A couple of months ago I talked about doing a pilot project with an open-source office suite, open-source email. Well, now I'm on the other side of that discussion, and it is especially important since I am in a small (i.e. not multi-billion dollar) corporation. We have about half the company using OpenOffice and Thunderbird/Lightning for email/calendar. The entire company isn't on one solution, however, so that presents its own challenges. With users on three mail clients (some use Outlook, some use Evolution, and some use T-bird) someone in the IT department needs to keep up with all of that software. Some people use OpenOffice, some use Microsoft Office. Some are only provided with a Linux workstation, others have only a Windows box. Some are on Office 2007, others on Office 2003.

Cleaning house is never fun, but now it's my house and I do need to streamline support costs and make things more efficient. I believe we can get there with a good open source suite. More on that as things unfold.

Speaking of open-source, I read a good book several years ago at the urging of Duncan Child, one of my previous associates, called "Dreaming in Code". It walks through product development of Chandler, a "personal productivity assistant". Version 1.0 is now available, so I downloaded it for my laptop. (Hey, I'm the IT manager, I can do whatever I want.) It looks like it might be useful, but will require more off-line experimenting. Unfortunately, there is no time during working hours to do anything but work. Not a bad thing, just a comment. Well, the clock is ticking, back to work.

Have a great day!

Bill