A contract with Carbonite was signed last week. Initially, IT staff will be working with current backup service customers using "Connected" for their internet based backup solution and replacing it with Carbonite.
The new service will be significantly cheaper that either Connected or our own in-house Veritas NetBackup solution - both of which are used for laptops and desktops.
Access to the new service will be provide through the Software Download Site and available for general use by the end of the year.
Google continues to bring out new features in Google Docs. For those of you using Gdocs for real time collaborative editing (the same doc at the same time with multiple editors) - improvements in our ability to see what others are updating, the ability to communicate in an ad-hoc Gdoc centric chat session, and improvements to the options for sharing stand out.
The spreadsheet and drawing applications are gaining functionality as well. We often see these incremental improvements when the rest of our customers see them and it is useful to revisit the new features link at the top of the Google document - it may surprise you that so much is being added.
Camtasia relay Version 3 is expected to come out soon. We will upgrade our test environment when it does, and start to recruit volunteers willing to test the software.
go here for details on what version 3 will offer.
The IT Division has over 100 virtual machines running on an enterprise VMware based environment. The Infrastructure Group within the Lab’s IT Division has been deploying virtual machines using VMWare in a pilot mode since January 2007
Three primary reasons why we think this makes sense: Energy Savings, space optimization, and increased efficiencies in deployment of new applications.
- Energy savings accrue due the reduced use of physical servers for testing and development environments, which typically have much lower duty cycles, yet consume a significant amount of energy while powered up.
- Increased Efficiency: much quicker response in setting up test and production environments, ability to have virtual machines for product and service evaluations-to perform ‘what if’ scenarios without buying a physical server. It will also reduce costs in acquisition of underutilized single purpose physical servers.
- Space is a critical resource at the lab. By consolidation of physical machines into institutionally provided computer room space using virtualization technology, office space can be reclaimed to support the significant growth in lab employee count.
We have extended use of the VM environment to experienced system administrators who work in the IT Division on behalf of a customer. Because we can restrict the scope to experienced staff, the costs for providing the service can be reduced.
The Smartsheet road map can be found here. For those of you who would like more granular permission assignment, it looks like some improvements will surface before the end of this calendar year. (the ability to lock down editing of a particular column, for example.
We would like to confirm the scheduling of a production outage for the evening of 11/9 from 6pm - 10pm.
We have identified several bug fix/enhancement requests to Google.
1. Calendar Loading issues: from time to time a resource or personal calendar fails to load. We have created tickets for a number of these occurrences, as they are reported to the Help Desk.
2. The ability to save a meeting which requires an already booked resource has been reported to Google as our number one issue. At the least, we expect to see a warning come up prior to saving the meeting.
3. When a meeting is scheduled that involves a number of different attendees and a conference room at a time that is available to all, we find that subsequent views of this same meeting show confusing results. Some attendees will have nothing in the time slot (in the "Find a Time" tab) and others will have a single bar labeled "busy"). What you see depends on the permissions you have on the person or resource calendar. See this FAQ for more info.
Commons will be upgraded to version 3.4 by December 1. A development site is being set up to insure our third party macros and plugins will work with this version. This development site is expected to be ready by November 15 and will be made available to frequent users of Commons. Julie Petersen is the project manager.
Release notes and a short video on new features is here
A longer 30 minute video on the Atlassian blog site can be found here .
If you are a traveler or if you just want to the protection of having a version of your calendar (or a co-worker or resource calendar) available on your desktop or laptop when access to the internet or google itself has been interrupted, off line mode is for you.
If you are interested, go here .
It's the #1 feature request from Berkeley Lab users. Now you can turn off Gmail's Conversation View. Learn more>>>
IT has helped coordinate a sitewide license for ChemDraw. Anyone at LBL can use the software at no cost. Learn more>>>
We have also arranged for an on-site technical seminar on ChemBioDraw. The first session will be held from 10am - 11:30 am in the bldg 66 Auditorium on Wednesday November 10. A second afternoon session will be held in Emeryville (JBEI) from 1:30pm to 3pm.
Topics to be covered include:
- Hot Keys
- Synthesis Tools
- Stereochemistry
- Nicknames
- Hotlinks
- Name to Structure, Structure to Name
- NMR Tools
- Sequences
- ChemDraw for Excel
- Tables
- TLC Plates
- and many more
Priority Inbox can help save you time if you’re overwhelmed with the amount of email you get. It attempts to automatically identify your important incoming messages and separates them out from everything else. Gmail uses a variety of signals to prioritize your incoming messages, including who you’ve emailed and chatted with most and which keywords appear frequently in the messages you opened recently.
Gmail now offers the ability to turn off conversation view. Read more here http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/turn-off-gmails-conversation-view.html
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Fall marks the anniversary of last year's successful mobility competition and an opportunity to take stock of where the Laboratory is with its mobile strategy. At this time last year, our calendar and collaboration systems were supported by a small minority of mobile devices, and then only with kludgy third party workarounds. Email, since it was based on the open standard IMAP, was supported by many devices, but "push" was unavailable. Today, with our transition to Google Apps, we are pleased to provide the Laboratory with full support for email and calendar services across almost all modern smartphone platforms. Further, both the Google Apps collaboration apps as well as our enterprise wiki Commons support viewing today, and will be supporting editing in the near future. If you're an iPad user, you've also benefited from Google Apps tablet web-interface, which provides a nearly fully functional Gmail web client in a form-factor designed for tablets. This is a small example of the continuous innovation in mobile we're expecting as part of our partnership with Google.
At the same time, the evolution of the devices and the capabilities of their browsers continue to make new things possible without major changes to our underlying systems. For example, last year, filling our your timecard on LETS with Mobile Safari on the iPhone wasn't possible - Today, it's reasonably straightforward. Our application hasn't changed, but the browser's capabilities have.
In the next year, we're looking forward to further evolutions of our mobile strategy. The mobile portal m.lbl.gov will be updated and we're expecting the launch of a local iPhone app store designed to distribute custom LBL applications. We'll also be working with the operations divisions to understand how mobile (including the ideas submitted in the contest) fits into the overall strategy for enterprise applications. For example, we're currently working with EHS to pilot a mobile-phone based safety walkaround application. We're also piloting a safety refresher course that's mobile and location-enabled, allowing for a new, more interactive (and hopefully effective) training experience.
In my next update, I'll cover the advances we've seen on the science side in the past year. In the meantime, be sure to visit labtech.lbl.gov for information about mobile devices and capabilities, and places to submit your ideas for mobility at LBL. -Adam
