One assignment I've undertaken at UEN is to serve on the technology steering committee of a local school district. We met today to review progress over the past 5 years. That's meaningful to me because I've been associated professionally with this district for that entire time.

A few facts caught my attention. First, this district handles 55,000 incoming e-mail messages every day. Of that number 12,000 are actually delivered. The rest either contain virus laden attachments or are spam. That's 43,000 nuisance messages that don't get through.

The technology to provide this filter was purchased at a cost of $130,000. That seems like a lot. I started wondering if the expense could be justified. My analysis was as follows. If 43,000 useless messages were delivered and each one consumed 1 second of addressee time then 43,000 seconds would have been wasted. Eight hours equals 28,800 seconds. That 43,000 seconds would amount to about 12 hours or, more importantly 1.5 FTEs. If the average cost of an FTE is $45,000 annually then an average of 2 seconds per message would justify the cost of the software in 12 months.

But the cost of these nuisance messages would be much greater than 2 seconds. Each message delivering a virus would amount to at least an hour of time to recover, probably much more. Since most virus victims aren't aware of being compromised, the time just spent identifying infected machines can run into multiple hours of a security specialist's time.

If the average message reached a human and consumed just 10 seconds then the breakeven cost of the technology could be as short as two months. Now that's an impressive technology investment.

The other fact that impressed me was the cost of upgrading PCs. Each year the district replaces many machines, nearly 200 for administrators alone. Each one takes at least 5 hours to completely upgrade. Wow! That's a lot of work. It made me appreciate Apple's upgrade utility.

I recently used that utility to move to a different Powerbook. The standard installation prompted me if I had another mac that I was moving information from. I checked the appropriate box (yes, I had another mac) and hit the continue button. The rest was easy. An hour or so later I was done. I thought that there would be a bunch of cleanup, but everything, including passwords, came through.

I only had two small problems. First, my profiles didn't populate in the VPN client. They were on the new box, were easily found and reinstalled. Second, my Radio blog software did not work. It took me several days to resolve the issue. I tried to reinstall my radio account from scratch with a backup. Finally, I e-mailed Radio support. It turned out that I was making it way too hard.

Within 20 minutes of my email to Radio I had a response. Within 5 minutes my Radio account was working. All I had to do was throw away my Radio file (the one that was installed as part of the upgrade). Then I renamed my hard drive to match the old Powerbook. Lastly, I took my entire Radio folder (directly from the old Powerbook) and dropped it in the application folder of the new box. It worked fine. That was cool.

I wonder if windows has a similar upgrade utility. Apple's product works well. Upgrading will never be a problem again. Well, at least let's hope not.........
9:43:33 PM    comment []