How to influence anyone

By David Maxfield

When it comes to influence, we stink. We stink as individuals, we stink as organizations, and we stink as a society. But here's a new view of influence that will help you lead change within your IT organization and beyond. ...continue reading 'How to influence anyone'

Windows Tip: OneNote OCR

By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

Occasionally I need to extract some text from an image, and typically you need some form of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to do this. Since I spend a lot of my time in the 2007 Office System family of products however, it would be nice if there was some built-in functionality that could serve this purpose. Well, it turns out that there is -- I just discovered that Microsoft OneNote 2007 includes an OCR feature called Copy Text From Picture, and you can use this method to copy text from all kinds of images including scanned documents like the kind you typically find on a site like The Smoking Gun. ...continue reading 'OneNote OCR'

Fixing Group Policy Gobbledygook

By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

A reader posed this question: "When I opened my Default Domain Policy in Group Policy Object Editor, some of the nodes under Administrative Templates were in different languages.... Do you know how to reverse this so that the outcome will be English only?" Here's one solution for fixing group policy gobbledygook.

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Preserving information in perpetuity

David Hill, Mesabi Group

Previous storage tips have discussed the need to preserve data for the long-term (a minimum of 10 to 15 years, but it's actually likely to be 50 to 100 years or more). A general solution does not yet exist, but there is a way to preserve carefully-selected and targeted documents for the long-term. Here's what you need to know about long-term retention of information.

Seven Ways Top-Performing Companies Get Ahead of the Pack

All leaders want to be part of a top-performing company. All employees do, too. And partners and customers seek out businesses that are at the top of their game, as well. It's natural to want to spend our working hours engaged with dynamic organizations that flourish, not struggling ones that flounder. But have you ever wondered what makes a company a top performer? Rick Lepsinger has, and when his company did a research study on a related subject, he discovered some surprising answers. ...continue reading 'Seven Ways Top-Performing Companies Get Ahead of the Pack'

Windows Tip: Enumerating local admin group membership

By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

Here's one way to list any local administrator account on a remote machine.

Security Tip: 3 steps towards securing virtual machines

Brent Huston, MicroSolved, Inc.

Securing virtual systems can be a challenge. You must deal with the normal issues of system and network security in addition to ensuring that the virtual machine (VM) remains secured. Here are three steps that will help increase the security of your virtual IT environments. ...continue reading '3 steps towards securing virtual machines'

The problem with long-term retention of information

By David Hill, Mesabi Group

If you look carefully, you will probably find that your information must be preserved for the long-term (anything over 10-15 years but quite possibly 50 years or more). But the problem isn't about the physical life of the media on which the data must be stored. The real problem revolves around logical migration. ...continue reading 'The problem with long-term retention of information'

Great career advice I ignored

Climb the corporate ladder. Keep your eye on the ball. Pay your dues. A lot of the conventional wisdom about how to succeed in your career is sound, and the oft-recommended linear path upward frequently works well enough. Many successful IT leaders are iconoclasts, however. They went against the grain, ignored advice or turned away from trends to find ways that were right for them. Here, they share some of their stories about the junctures where they disregarded prescribed career road maps, and they reveal how those choices helped them make it to the top. ...continue to 'Great career advice I ignored'

Storage Tip: Data de-duplication for for data protection

By David Hill, Mesabi Group

From a business perspective, reducing both the operational and capital costs of doing backup would seem to be the goal of every IT organization. From an operational perspective, improving service through improved onsite data restore times via using online disk for backups is probably another goal. But how to meet those objectives is the question. Data de-duplication may be the answer.

16 Ways to Keep Your Best Employees -- Without Breaking the Bank

By Joanne G. Sujansky, PhD, CSP

In today's highly competitive business world, your employees have a lot of options. Here are some innovative ideas on how to keep them from seeking greener pastures. ...continue reading '16 Ways to Keep Your Best Employees'

Unix tip: Scanning your messages file for warnings (take 2)

By Sandra Henry-Stocker, ITworld.com

Several weeks ago, I encouraged readers to automate the extraction of warning messages from their /var/adm/messages (or /var/log/messages) files and provided a script to do just that. In this article, we will look at a re-implementation of that script. The new version of this script was written by Jared Still, Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist and author of "Perl for Oracle DBAs". ...continue reading 'Scanning your messages file for warnings'

Windows Tip: Running scripts using alternate credentials

By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, you can run a program using different credentials than those of the currently logged-on user. Administrators often use this Secondary Logon feature to increase the security of their workstations by running as an ordinary domain user for most purposes such as browsing the Web and checking email. Then, when you need to open an administrative tool like dsa.msc, you either open a command prompt and use runas mmc.exe to launch the .msc file or you right-click on the .msc file itself and select Run As from the shortcut menu.

But what if you want to run a VBScript script using alternate credentials? You can use the runas command from a command prompt, but unfortunately right-clicking on a .vbs file doesn't bring up a Run As option in the shortcut menu. It sure would be nice if you could add this menu option, but how? Well, where there's a script, there's a way. ...Continue reading Running scripts using alternate credentials

Three Windows Tips

By Mitch Tulloch

I appreciate hearing from readers with cool tips. Here are three recent
submissions. Please note that I haven't had a chance to test any of
these tools, so they are presented "as is".

Annotating web content with JumpKnowledge

Pushing out Group Policy changes across a domain

Web filter blocks unwanted sites