Comment REVOLUUUUUTION (Score 1) 76
This must be part of the 'literacy revolution' posted elsewhere on
http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/08/28/1147215/Were-In-the-Midst-of-a-Literacy-Revolution?from=rss
This must be part of the 'literacy revolution' posted elsewhere on
http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/08/28/1147215/Were-In-the-Midst-of-a-Literacy-Revolution?from=rss
If you don't want to go the google appliance route, Notes works great, is cheap to set up, and simple to administer.
One db.
One form with a couple of fields
One view
Render to the web
Write a simple agent that crawls your directory structure, snags the files and attach each one to a Notes doc. Stuff in the directory/file name if you care.
Let Notes build an index (and it can index damn near any file).
Poof - done.
Remove user's rights to leave crap in file directories and make 'em put new stuff into Notes and you have something that's maintainable without a ton of work.
If you then want to get fancy, you can make users enter some meta data before they can save new docs.
You can set up access control, etc, etc, etc.
Documentum costs about a quarter mil just to get it in the door and a boat load of cash to make it useful. (at least it did in the late '90s).
Notes server license a couple grand. If you need user authentication, it's around $150/client (ask your rep for prices because IBM is working tons of price schemes). If you don't need authentication, all you need is the server license.
Notes really isn't all that expensive. The server software can be had for less than a couple of grand and the clients cost about $150. If you opt for an ongoing service agreement, you pay per year and get updates. If you opt to buy and hold, your initial cost is the total cost. It handles email, apps, security, your web presence, etc. There are any number of third party apps built on Notes so if you don't have a developer, just buy a package. If you're a fan of 'Getting Things Done', it's been done (nicely) in a Notes app.
...plus indian equivalent of FCC actually man dating net neutrality as per law...
There is an Indian agency responsible for Man Dating? Pretty forward thinking country, that India it is...Now if I could just figure out how one dates a net neutrality.
If you look at pretty much any 'big' software (Oracle for instance), it includes the same exclusion.
In regulated environments, it's the responsibility of the system user to define the intended use of a system then validate to that intended use. Just because the vendor says 'do not use for important stuff' doesn't mean WE can't validate that the system works for us the way we want.
The comments others make about the validation effort are spot on. If I patch one of my production servers, I'm supposed to do a risk assessment, determine what might be affected by the patch, develop a test plan to address the potential risk, get the test plan approved, execute the test plan, document the results, write a report, get that signed, then get signed authorization to implement the patch. Think 'Service Pack' which contains a hundred or more discrete patches...
Toss hands in air, patch and pray...
It's worse for medical devices because you CANNOT patch and pray.
Oh, and while you're trying to figure out how to manage software that's not in your hands, you (the software engineer) are supposed to be creating the 'next big thing' for your company so you can keep making money.
That's why we have a couple of systems on our production floor still using Win 98. Not stupid, but a practical choice.
fortune: No such file or directory