Re: taking deployment/operations considerations into account

Hi,

We want to make deployment continual over the net.
To improve our feedback cycle and to get the material in service faster.

We want a third secure place for off-site backups, that we can verify
exists, and that verifies that our backups aren't junk.

Al Chou wrote:
> Your situation sounds nearly pathological, but in the interest of furthering the intent of my thread:  do you think there's something that the design of your software product could have incorporated that would make dealing with the deployment environment you find yourself in easier
I was looking at the FTP backups that Open Office(OO) offers and pondering
having a secure offsite respository of working files.  The monitor/spy 
software
doesn't let our software do proper ongoing backups. Open Office bypasses 
it better
than Word, probably because it's less well-known. Having such backup 
capability
inside other software such as OO means its more likely to survive here.

More and more, we're adopting open source standards because Microsoft
stuff is too well known and too easy to manipulate to degrade what we do.
I can get and use audacity/gong for sound work without hierarchical /control
or money overviews.

When I turned my PC off yesterday afternoon,  I noticed that it displayed
a little window message that it was unable to save my roaming profile
(the monitoring software cripples such things).  I don't have a roaming 
profile,
but somebody else might have one for me so he can do things 'as me'.
This doesn't show a 'trust' pattern or a 'security' pattern, but instead
a kind of control and power structure pattern. We see that a LOT.

The real shining light that comes out is that it all depends on people.
It doesn't matter if one puts up electronic or physical walls and 
permissions,
and check ins and check outs if some people simply bypass them.

Putting people in one place working together as a team, and shedding the
ones who steal the toilet paper (Yeah. We have had none now, for some days.)
does a lot. 

We've flattened our approach - working as an interdependent team
with minimal hierarchy in response to a truly nutty 
'Confucian'/confusion hierarchy.

Grow trust and verify with visually compatible same room work practices, 
not common values.

bye,
vic
(Yes it's true. I've watched a Chinese woman steal toilet paper off the 
roll in the loo.
Taking it off the roll instead of taking the whole roll is 'usage' and 
therefore "ok". )

-- 
“for great design, design for the activity” -- Don Norman (user interface design)
Vic Williams   13066824980