CPTTM CIO newsletter issue #15

Dear CIO/IT managers,

This CPTTM CIO newsletter is to bring useful news to you, CIO/IT managers in Macau, for references without obligations, so that you can do your jobs easier and better! Hope you like it. if you'd like to unsubscribe or recommend your friends to subscribe, just let me know. Old issues are available here.

Topics in this issue:

• Case study 7 on applying ITIL at CPTTM
• Get ITIL references for FREE
• Read this if you're buying new projectors
• Netherlands city & Spain region switching to OpenOffice
• Malaysia to adopt ODF
  

Case study 7 on applying ITIL at CPTTM

One of the best practices in ITIL is "Monitoring for incidents using automated tools so that they are fixed before the users noticing". At CPTTM Cyber-Lab, we use the zabbix to monitor for things like: Is a certain server up? Is the web service up? Is the POP3 service up? If not, it will email the network administrators and start making annoying beeps using its built-in speaker (so that even if the email can't get through, we can still hear it):

Get ITIL references for FREE

• You can check out the Microsoft Service Management Functions (freely available online). You can see it as ITIL with concrete examples and guidelines. Very cool!
• You can borrow ITIL books for free at the Cyber-Lab Library.

Read this if you're buying new projectors

If you're buying new projectors, you should seriously consider buying DLP projectors instead of LCD projectors. What's the difference? The output quality of LCD projectors will deteriorate in 15 months if they're used for 3 hours per day, while DLP projectors don't have this problem at all (reference). For the moment the prices of DLP projectors are just a little bit more expensive than the LCD ones.

Netherlands city & Spain region switching to OpenOffice

A Netherlands municipality (like a county in US) called "Groningen" has decided to switch to OpenOffice from MS Office. By doing that they will save US$418,500 annually. They plan to use about half of that to pay for the migration (one time only). For more info, see here.

The Extremadura Regional Government of Spain is switching to OpenOffice.  For more info, see here.

Malaysia to adopt ODF

The Malaysian government plans to adopt ODF as a national standard by the end of this year, following similar plans in Belgium, Denmark, France and Massachusetts. This makes sense. In 1980's, everyone used WordStar for word processing. Now the company making the WordStar software is long gone. Now how can one view the files saved in WordStar format which is closed and proprietary? Can we still open .doc files in 25 years?

Feedbacks

Any questions, ideas or experiences to share? Contact me at 781313 or kent at cpttm dot org dot mo.

Until next time, 

Kent Tong