Timewarp Technologies, LLC

One interesting resource for programmers is "The Daily WTF". It is a great place to read about things that should *not* be happening in your organization: antipatterns for code and business processes (mostly code).

A recent "The Daily WTF" discusses the plight of a company where a “rogue” programmer built an inefficient spreadsheet for a supervisor, only to find it was too popular and those inefficiencies brought down the database by overloading it with connections. Operating outside of IT, the understanding of enterprise requirements was not there. On the other hand, many have argued that rogue programmers exist because of unresponsive IT departments, and they provide a valuable service.

Often in production ASP.NET environments the web server is not part of a domain (per security guidelines) and yet would benefit from a trusted connection to the SQL server. Using trusted connections is well explained in this article:

Using trusted connections with asp.net.

In my development environment I maintain SQL on a different machine than I develop on as well. Although the best solution to trust is using proper application pools, Windows XP (from which I write code on and run my IIS tests) does not support them. In this case, the "editing the default context" solution works well.

Google is testing a new service: "Google Analytics". If you already use Ad Words, then this additional reporting can be useful for determining which words are getting you the best results. More than a hit counter, the product allows you to monitor four items to help you understand your marketing successes and failures.

1. Campaign tracking variables: These are URL elements you can use in web advertisements, e-mails, etc. These codes allow you to track the number of users arriving from different marketing efforts. Most marketing people have figured out how to use different landing pages or similar variables to track marketing responses, but these are particularly useful when combined with the other Analytics features.

This is one of those questions that should be asked about more often, "How do I protect my data". Many small businesses take unnecessary risks with their livelihood by ignoring the most basic concept of computing: the value of your data. Since most small businesses are based on Windows platforms, the information here is tinged with Windows terminology, but the ideas are generic enough to use in most environments.

Business owners understand the value of their data, otherwise there would be little need for a computer system. (Even if you only do word processing and a few spreadsheets, think of the difficulty of recreating that information. If you don't like that idea, then you need to create backups.) What is often not understood is the risk the data is placed in every day simply by using their computer system. Let us look at some common small business data environments to understand the risks and some ways to mitigate those risks.

Many people need to generate PDF files occasionally, but it can be an expensive proposition to get the latest version of Adobe Acrobat for every user in your office to create basic PDF files. Acrobat comes with many wonderful features for create sophisticated PDF files. Digital signing, encryption and forms that post to web servers are among a few that Timewarp Technologies uses Acrobat for. However, when all you need is get some pages from some unusual program and provide the results to a user without the ability to read the source or resulting files, PDF is a great solution. For that matter, if the end consumer should not be modifying the document, I highly recommend sending PDF instead of Word documents as they are safer and more robust.