White House CIO Describes His 'Worst Day' Ever 333
dcblogs writes "In the first 40 days of President Barack Obama's administration, the White House email system was down 23% of time, according to White House CIO Brook Colangelo, the person who also delivered the 'first presidential Blackberry.' The White House IT systems inherited by the new administration were in bad shape. Over 82% of the White House's technology had reached its end of life. Desktops, for instance, still had floppy disk drives, including the one Colangelo delivered to Rahm Emanuel, Obama's then chief of staff and now Mayor of Chicago. There were no redundant email servers."
Re:Not a bad number (Score:5, Informative)
Zimbra. The enterprise version also has ActiveSync support.
Re:Not a bad number (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not a bad number (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Floppy... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Similar situation... (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, I've got a very thin skin when it comes to management making any sort of technical claim. They're usually about 50% lie, and of the remaining 50% truth, only about 1/5th of that is factual with the rest being augmented by misunderstanding, disillusions of grandeur, and over-simplification to pull up the full 100%.
This was the first relevant article kicked up by google:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9142268/_Lost_Bush_e_mail_settlement_requires_that_White_House_reveal_IT_practices_ [computerworld.com]
The e-mail problem began in 2002 and 2003 after the White House moved from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange. As it moved to the new platform, the President's IT staff also discontinued use of legacy, circa 1994, electronic management and archiving system, called Automated Records Management Systems (ARMS.) Development began on a new archiving system that ran into its own issues and wasn't implemented.
Without an automated archiving system, the White House relied on manual processes to archive e-mails, and that's when the problems evidently began. Files were mislabeled and commingled on back-up tapes containing all types of information.
The public didn't find out about this for years until federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald disclosed it in 2006 while investigating the outing of Valerie Plame.
The Bush Jr. IT infrastructure was broken from the day they installed it and remained broken for the full 8 years he was in office.
The current White House uses Drupal/OpenAtrium (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/02/11/ [whitehouse.gov]
http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/feb/14/white-house-using-open-atrium/ [developmentseed.org]
www.openatrium.com
For civilians trying to avoid another HBGary-type SQL-injection cascading breach, building a PHP website using the Drupal framework means benefiting from the eyeballs that watch sites like whitehouse.gov, and others. These same eyeballs, and many others contribute their security patches back to drupal.org. Although I imagine their OpenAtrium groupware is behind a firewall.
OpenAtrium is 100% free open-source server software, that reaches out really well to tables and other mobile devices too.
Re:Floppy... (Score:5, Informative)
If only... None of the HP machines we've bought at work in the past couple of years have had them and we buy both the slimline desktop variety and mini-tower PCs. The few Dells I've seen likewise don't have any floppy ports on the motherboard.
As for build-your-own PCs, or ones from companies that assemble generic parts into PCs, very few come with floppy ports on the motherboard. Indeed, the only non-industrial Intel motherboards I know of that have a floppy port are the ASRock Extreme boards - and that's powered by a SuperIO chip on the motherboard, as chipset support for floppies was dropped by Intel years ago.
Note: the reason I mention all this is because I'm looking at getting a Z77 motherboard in the next few months with a floppy connector, so that I can hook up a 5.25" floppy drive I've acquired (purely for the heck of it, before anyone asks - I've a big box of old disks from the early 90s that I wouldn't mind rummaging through, the PC I used for those having been chucked out years back). ASRock are pretty much the only option nowadays and I have no doubts that when Haswell comes out next year the old 37-pin floppy connector will be well and truly extinct.
Re:Love it (Score:4, Informative)
Please stop perpetuating the lie that union workers are "unfireable". Unions do not protect workers from being fired for gross incompetence, theft, sabotage, and so forth. What they DO give you is the right to 'progressive discipline', where you can't be fired for wearing the wrong color shirt or being two minutes late for your shift, without a hearing with a union representative advocating for your interests.
Until American workers enjoy some of the protections of their European counterparts (even if limited to being required to provide a REASON for a termination - employers in 'at will' states can fire you and say to your face "we're not going to tell you why"), then unions will be necessary in this country.
Re:No surprise (Score:3, Informative)
he country was in the middle of a war and their party groomed no leader to continue it.
Still the case
Which side had 6 years of uncontested control?
Neither
Which side failed to run a ship that could endure the storm?
Both
Re:Not a bad number (Score:3, Informative)
You miss the fact that he INHERITED that system. That's how politics works.
Oh, you mean like when Dubbya showed up, and all the W keys were missing from the keyboards...
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,619013,00.html [people.com]
Except that the GAO investigated and decided that there wasn't enough evidence to prove any of the "missing W' allegations. I did like the "office of strategery" sign though.
Re:Not a bad number (Score:1, Informative)
That story was shown to be "largely bunk":
http://www.salon.com/2001/05/23/vandals/ [salon.com]
Re:Not a bad number (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, unfortunately, Exchange works very well for many businesses, and it's providing something that they need. You may ask, why do you want to combine scheduling and email into the same application and back-end?
The answer is obvious to people who've used Exchange. You send meeting invites through email. When you're sending the invite through email, your email application can also tell you whether the intended recipients are already busy. You can also schedule resources (e.g. a conference room or projector) and view availability while creating your email invitation.
And why include contacts? Well that, I'd hope, is obvious. All email applications keep a contact list anyway, since they need to store email addresses. If you want to create a contact database that includes email addresses, you may as well include that in the email application.
Tasks? Well, for many of us, our task list comes straight out of email. I get an email, and I need to create tasks for what I'm going to do in response. Plus, "tasks" and "calendars" are logically linked together as tools for effective task-management.