Bill Dean of Sword & Shield discusses how to save money and simplify work during eDiscovery.

Want to know how you can directly save costs without sacrifice? I am just going to say it, stop “TIFFing” out all of the documents that you review for your client. When you finish drafting your complaint or motion for summary judgment, do you convert it to a TIFF before you perform the final review? Then why are you converting all of your client’s documents to an image before you review them? The document conversion aspect of processing is one of the biggest wastes of money in eDiscovery. Many feel that this processing phase of eDiscovery is the most expense, TIFFing every document before you review it is a large portion of that expense.

You’d think sysadmins wouldn’t need to be told not to do a whole lot of work they don’t have to do, but perhaps the stress of litigation throws the natural laziness out the window.

As you can see, using a basic unified eDiscovery platform for the processing phase can save your client 75% when compared to TIFF conversions and 66% when compared to early case assessment platforms. For simplicity, I have not provided estimates for native processing and then the use of another review platform. That scenario would be in the same price range as the ECA option. I have also not included the costs of production. One last note is the price used for the unified eDiscovery platform is the pricing model that we provide to our clients and pricing of other unified eDiscovery platforms may vary.

I need the option for an Exchange shop where management won’t allow any expenses for unified messaging.  However, I like both Google Apps’ Postini and McAfee’s MX Logic for unifying messaging and eDiscovery.

via eDiscovery – Someone Has to Say It | Sword & Shield Enterprise Security, Inc..

Hugh MacLeod on conversations:

1. Understand why what you’re offering to do for other people is interesting, important, meaningful etc then start telling people about it.

Think about this one. Hard. If you don’t know, then how will other people know? Exactly. They won’t.

Everyone is a salesman. Ever bump into the guy who can’t describe what he does for a living, and isn’t in a top secret government agency?  Ever hear his wife try to describe what he does?

It’s not exactly a convincing sell that he does something important, interesting, or meaningful.

Number 4 reflects exactly why I converted NerdHerd.com into a blog:

4. Start a blog.

Blogs are funny things. Say something smart, people pay attention. Say something dumb, you’re ignored. We big media folk just can’t seem to get our heads around that concept, for some reason. Regular blogging can help train you to better discern between smart and dumb. Makes it easier to extend this to the rest of one’s business.

Currently, I’m focusing on posting smart things others have said, while warming up to the idea of writing smart material myself.

Here’s to the future!

via thoughts on “smarter conversations” | gapingvoid.

This’ll be very handy for small business owners and contractors.

Line2 gives your iPhone a second phone number — a second phone line, complete with its own contacts list, voice mail, and so on. The company behind it, Toktumi (get it?), imagines that you’ll distribute the Line2 number to business contacts, and your regular iPhone number to friends and family. Your second line can be an 800 number, if you wish, or you can transfer an existing number.

To that end, Toktumi offers, on its Web site, a raft of Google Voice-ish features that are intended to help a small businesses look bigger: call screening, Do Not Disturb hours and voice mail messages sent to you as e-mail. You can create an “automated attendant” —“Press 1 for sales,” “Press 2 for accounting,” and so on — that routes incoming calls to other phone numbers. Or, if you’re pretending to be a bigger business than you are, route them all to yourself.

via State of the Art – Line2 Allows iPhone Users to Sidestep AT and T – NYTimes.com.

I’m looking forward to a new version of OpenSolaris:

Six months after completing the deal for Sun, Oracle officials say Solaris 11 will arrive in 2011, and that SPARC performance will at least double every other year through 2015.

Oracle will release the next version of the Solaris operating system next year, and will double the performance of its SPARC processors every other year.

via Oracle Outlines SPARC, Solaris 11 Plans – IT Infrastructure from eWeek.

I recently built an XP virtual machine with IE 6 for a client, perhaps I’ll suggest this as an alternative.  We’ll just need to validate that IE6 on Linux renders web pages identically to a Windows installation.

Ever fancied running Internet Explorer 7 (or even earlier versions) on your Linux machine but didn’t find an easy way of doing it – admit it, wine doesn’t work that smoothly – IEs4Linux is the solution for you, check it out, or the complete guide.

via SecuriTeam Blogs » IE7 on Linux.

Whole-site acceleration: something to investigate when looking at methods to speed web content delivery.

Content providers and e-tailers alike have come to understand that the traditional content delivery network (CDN) model is ill-equipped to globally and strategically accelerate content delivery. Content providers and e-tailers also recognize that their Website performance has a critical and tangible impact on their users’ experience, customer site loyalty and revenue generation. Whole-site acceleration promises to be an ideal solution to optimize all communications between the origin server and the user. However, there is still some confusion about what constitutes whole-site acceleration.

via How to Optimize Website Content Delivery Using Whole-Site Acceleration – Enterprise Applications from eWeek.

Looks like it might finally be time to replace the DHCP & RightFax server here… and that other machine in the back of the data center that doesn’t have a documented hostname or IP address.

Today is an important day for the network administrator as Windows 2000 ends its extended support period. This means that security hotfixes will no longer be available for the operating system for both server and professional (workstation-class) editions of the operating system. While it is now a ten year-old operating system, many people surely have some straggling installations that are still on this popular OS.

via Windows 2000 Extended Support ends: Your options as an administrator | Network Administrator | TechRepublic.com.

Options continue to open for methods of credit card processing and PCI compliance.

The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) is expected to release guidance later this year on the use of tokens to replace credit card data, a move that could benefit some payment processors that sell technologies using encryption and tokenization to eliminate sensitive card information from merchant systems.

In a recent interview, Bob Russo, general manager of the PCI SSC, said he didn’t expect any major changes to PCI DSS, which is undergoing a revision this year. But guidance documents are being developed to help merchants decide whether investing in encryption or PCI tokenization technologies is a wise move.

and

Depending on the industry, merchants have the ability to store the data either encrypted or replaced with a token on their own servers, or send the data to the payment processors systems, where it is stored for later use. One industry expert said the PCI guidance will make it clear that merchants could be PCI certified if they have no ability to access the sensitive data.

via PCI tokenization guidance could benefit payment processors.

John Weathington lightly outlines DMAIC and how to apply it to a consulting practice.

Now we’ll look at the more popular and established Six Sigma application called DMAIC Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control, which is the formula for improving any process. Like DMADV, DMAIC is a structured sequence that we’ll follow to improve our consulting process.

via Improve your consulting process by following DMAIC | IT Consultant | TechRepublic.com.

Six Sigma is an excellent way to get some use out of those statistics classes you took way back in college, and to analyze a process, identify the sources of defects, improve the process, and validate that the changes actually reduced the quantity of defects.

I learned Six Sigma when I worked for GE, and still look for ways to apply it to whatever is causing pain for me or my employer… or even my family.

If you’ve now using or about to begin switching to Windows 7, Robert Shimonski has written a fairly in-depth overview of Windows 7′s security capabilities, and how to harden the OS, including manual tuning and the usage of security templates from Microsoft.

Regardless of which version of OS you are running, this is a good set of steps to follow to start out fresh, clean, streamlined, and secure:

Step 1 – Installation of Base OS selecting any options during installation the increases security and not selecting unneeded services, options and programs.

Step 2 – Installation of any Administrator toolkits, security tools and needed programs.

Step 3 – Remove services, programs and unneeded software. Disable or remove unused user accounts or groups.

Step 4 – Service Pack update, hot fixes and service packs. Update all installed programs as well.

Step 5 – Run security audit scanner, template, MBSA, etc to assess current security level

Step 6 – Run System Restore and create a restore point. Backup and Restoration application for disaster recovery.

Step 7 – Backup the OS with a way to quickly restore it in the event of disaster.

This list is a simple guide. You can add more steps and extend this list further. This list is not definitive, but a good start in getting an idea of where to start when applying security to Windows 7 after a base installation. If completing a fresh install of Windows 7, then the next step is to remove any unwanted software, services, protocols and programs that you do not want or need running on it. This can be done easily in the Control Panel.

via Windows 7 Security Primer Part 1.