“This is a point of confusion for many of our customers.”  So began a tech support response that was the latest in a string of messages.  The good news is that this was the message that actually helped me solve the problem.  The bad news is that came at the end of almost a day and a half of frustration and confusion on my part.  I searched the help system.  I consulted knowledgeable colleagues (and got them confused and frustrated too.)  This was for an initial setup of a new system, so I expected there to be some annoying setup issues.  But I’m left wondering “If so many customers have the same issues, how about altering things so we don’t all experience this problem.”

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How is the information technology department viewed in your organization?  Too expensive, too slow, always say no, better to outsource?  If any of these sound familiar then it might be time to take some lessons from The Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value.  Overall the book is excellent — clearly presented with plenty of real examples to illustrate the various points.  I found it tough to keep my attention focused on the book, not because is was boring, but because the ideas rang so true I found myself thinking through how I might employ them in my own workplace.

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Just yesterday I had a request to create a tool to collect some follow-up responses from our staff regarding a recent university-wide workplace survey.   So we need something simple, easy to maintain, quick to launch AND that collects the responses in a format that permits easy and flexible reporting.  As I recently demonstrated our WordPress MU installation makes it easy to launch a project-specific site which includes user-login tied to the school’s central user authentication system.  So simple-easy-quick — doing this through WordPress gets me at least half-way there.  And I remembered a recent suggestion in my Twitter feed to look at the WordPress Surveys plugin.

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A new open source project from FaceBook, HipHop for PHP, could bring big improvements for PHP developers.  From the description on Facebook’s Developers site HipHop for PHP will translate PHP code into C++, reducing cpu usage by as much at 50%.  And for a big site like FaceBook, written in PHP, this is a pretty significant improvement.  The ease of writing in PHP, with the performance benefits of C++ — sounds like a great combination.  There is nothing except an announcement so far, but expect more very soon.

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Jay Collier at Bates ponders the strengths of Drupal and WordPress MU.  In my experience WordPress is quicker to get going with, and for most web sites it can rise to most any challenge.  And it is the king of multi-site installations.  Drupal has a steeper learning curve, but can better support needs such as a work flow-content approval path, or something less traditional, like a content repository system.  In meeting a business need the technology is normally the least important element — what are your goals, who is the audience, what do they need, etc. — those are the important questions.  Once you have those answers you go looking for a technology.  My advice?  Look at WordPress first — if it doesn’t do what you want, in a quick straightforward way, keep looking.  But in my experience that won’t happen very often.

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Yammer use took off in our workplace late last year, but since everyone has returned from the Christmas break interest seems to have dropped off somewhat.   Maybe something like TeamBox, with its richer toolset, might be more attractive.  Teambox organizes communication around projects.  Users are members of projects, and a project has communication divided into conversations, task lists, pages and files.  The concept seems to have similarities with Google Wave, but at first glance the user interface seems a lot more familiar.  And TeamBox is open source allowing installation on your own server — so you can own the data.  And can customize the app (built with Ruby on Rails).  Now I just need a project to test it with… Read the rest of this entry »