ITIL is a set of best practices put forth by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) of the UK Government for better IT management. We (CPTTM Cyber-Lab) are implementing some of its practices and it is not hard at all. Here I'd like to share with you how we're doing it.
For example, one of the best practices in ITIL is "Track the incidents to make sure they're resolved in a timely fashion". What does it mean? We have all seen that some problems reported by users are never resolved by our IT people, maybe because the problems are hard to diagnose or hard to resolve, or maybe they are simply forgotten (you know, help desks are always busy :-) This practice says that if we log every single incident, then we will be able to see which incidents have not been resolved so that we can take proper action.
How are we doing this at CPTTM? We are just establishing such an incident management process. The key points of the process are:
We're testing this process with our incidents regarding OpenOffice and inside Cyber-Lab. It seems to be working well. Our technical support people does need to spend a little bit more time to log the incidents, but it is now very clear what incidents are still left unresolved.
This is not hard to do, but it helps so much to ensure a smooth IT environment for our users and thus justifies the existence of our support team. If you have any question regarding ITIL or a tip to share, let me know.
OpenDocument Format (ODF) is a file format supported by OpenOffice, SUN's StarOffice, IBM Workplace, KOffice and etc. It has just been approved as an ISO standard for Office files. For government departments that make some of their files available to the public, if a proprietary format such as .doc or .xls is used, then citizens will be forced to buy a particular product from a particular vendor in order to view such files. The net result is that their rights to access public government information are restricted.
Unformately, MS Office doesn't support ODF. However, the OpenDocument Foundation has created a plugin for MS Office to read and write files in ODF. This plugin will be tested by the State of Massachusetts. It means your users can continue to use MS Office while publishing files in ODF.
You can achieve another huge benefit if you use an open format even for your internal files: You'll be free from lock-in to a particular vendor. When purchasing Office applications, do you want to tell your boss that you have to choose that single vendor because only it supports the format that you're using? What do you tell your boss if that single vendor suddenly stops supporting that file format or simply goes out of business? It may sound unthinkable that large vendors like Microsoft may go out of business. However, even Bill Gates admits that Microsoft will go out of business one day. It's just a matter of time. If you want your files to live longer than a particular vendor, an open format is your best deal.Some time ago when I was using my home computer trying to download updates from Microsoft, I was prompted to confirm to download a software tool called "Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications". I said Yes and so it was installed. What does it do? Every time the computer is booted or a user logs in, it will check if your Windows is illegal or not. If yes, it will popup a message alerting the user that it is an illegal copy. So, if by incident your copy is unlicensed, please follow its instruction to buy a license key. This can be done easily through the Internet and you don't need to reinstall Windows.
Microsoft is also launching a similar
program to check MS Office. For
those users who are not using
licensed copies of MS Office, they should really purchase a
license or switch to OpenOffice which runs fine on Windows. For
example, I use OpenOffice at home and don't have MS Office at all.
Any questions, ideas or experiences to share? Contact me at 781313 or kent at cpttm dot org dot mo.
Until next time,
Kent Tong