Thursday, July 17, 2003

Organized RSS RSS is a powerful content aggregation tool. It is useful in more applications than just blogging. At ITS, we have developed an RSS tool that will make it available to state agencies for creating things like press releases, articles on www.utah.gov and on business.utah.gov, the new doing business in Utah portal and soon to be the home of One-Stop Business Registration. This RSS tool is called news.utah.gov. News.utah.gov is not intended to be a blogging tool for personal weblogs, however it works in much the same way as a personal weblog. It is based on the Movable Type blogging platform, but again, it is not intended to be a blogging tool. The types of news feeds that are out there now are things like "Utah Business News," which is being consumed right now on busines.utah.gov. Control over the feeds that are created will be very strict. News.utah.gov is also an example of a project that used existing code bases to develop an effective application that can run in an inexpensive environment. The environment this is running in is a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) environment. ITS should be adding LAMP to its hosting product portfolio this year. I am the hosting product manager, so I will be working towards that end. 7:04:59 AM

	Wednesday, January 29, 2003

From 5th to 3rd In my previous post I wrote about the need for PRDs and strategy. The time has come for me to focus more heavily on producing those documents that are needed for my product. Until now, I have been heavily involved in project management, and in operational affairs. I am going to have to back away from those activities and focus more heavily on writing. This transition from heavy involvement to necessary involvement can only occur under the following circumstances: There are sufficient project plans and project management resources in place to cover project management needs. This is difficult because we have even fewer project managers than we have product managers. Project management is an intense responsibility that requires focus and dogged-ness. Operations and CRMs need to take the lead in customer communications. I shouldn't be worrying about operational communications. Of course, the job of the product manager is to be a customer advocate, but I should not be coordinating testing schedules. Any project that is not UMD, Content Management, or Authentication is going to have to go on the back burner. It is dificult to pull away from activities that accomplished something, like the AT environment project, but I gotta do it. It's like travelling up a hill at 65 MPH and shifting from 5th down to 3rd. The thing is going to make some noise, and it may slow down some, but it has to be done. 1:54:09 PM

	Wednesday, January 22, 2003

Option 4 Sometimes I am impressed by what people can do. Today was such a day. I wrote yesterday about a security option for actuate that was not technically the best choice. Well, some folks made the technically superior choice available by doing some work last night. Right on. We are inching ever closer to being able to say we have a full open systems acceptance test environment. 1:27:55 PM

	Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Actuate Security We met in the war room this morning to talk specifically about an interim actuate security model that will allow us to better control access to all of our actuate servers. The basic gist of it is that we selected an option that, while not technically elegant, it is the best choice because of time and resource constraints. It provides adequate security for what we are doing right now. Those that had action items will need to report on them tomorrow. 3:25:17 PM

	Friday, January 17, 2003

Special Friday Meeting Action Items I am blogging this from our special Friday session of our war room meeting. It was decided that we would hold a special session to discuss firewall issues for actuate. There are security issues that need to be resolved before we can secure ITSWEB15 and 17. Basically, we will be moving to actuate 6 in the future, and our security situation will change, but for now, we are working on some firewall issues. Here are the action items that we decided on: Action Item Assigned To Due Date Draft Security Plan for Actuate Ben/Dick/Mike/Dean/Dale/John 1/21 Draft risk assessment Dale Today Communicate a progress update to customers Dave 1/21 Establish a monitoring solution Dave/Forrest/others 1/22 9:16:20 AM

	Thursday, January 16, 2003

Action Items I was not at the war room meeting this morning due to a flight I took for my birthday. I will be posting pictures on davemcnamee.com, it was quite an adventure. Action Item Assigned To Due Date Configure web agent in AT Ben Today Configure realm in AT Ben Today Configure rules to protect realm Ben Today Configure policy to protect rules Ben Today Configure AT w/Dev Actuate Ben 1/21 Create list of what is allowed Dick/Ben/Tier 3 1/21 1:17:44 PM

	Wednesday, January 15, 2003

A Note About this Page Folks, please don't mistake this for a "Project Management" page. I am not the Project Manager. I just wanted a place where I could post pertinent information about the acceptance test project and war room assignments. Feel free to approach me with any questions. 3:05:53 PM

Action Items The following action items were identified: Action Item Assigned To Due Date Deploy UserInfo to ITSWEB14 Ben, Doug Today Move actuate export from 15 to 11 Dick Today Configure 11 w/Actuate 5 Dale Today Verify firewall in place for Actuate John Today Create list of allowable IPs for 15 and 17 Dale, Dick, Ben 1/21 Make sure customers know about web14 auth change Dave 1/21 Figure out AT/Database issues for all platforms Ben 1/21 Resolve issue w/DWS on monitoring reports on 17 Dave 1/21 Figure out Actuate Licensing Dave 1/21 11:33:28 AM

War Room For several months now we have been holding daily War Room meetings to move the acceptance test environment project forward. We have had representation from multiple sections in ITS, and I would say we have made a lot of progress on it. I am glad to be back involved in that process. For those that haven't had a war room experience, let me explain a little bit about what it is. Basically, it is a free-form free forum where members of a cross functional team or other interested parties meet at a regular time each day to discuss progress on a particularly important project. It is meant to encourage quick completion of action items, and to build some momentum around a project. It is supposed to be informal, with people coming and going as needed. Usually it is held in a room with multiple whiteboards or other collaboration tools. 11:08:49 AM

© Copyright 2003 Dave McNamee. Last update: 7/17/2003; 10:25:39 AM.