In my previous posting on The Fallacy of Minimum Hardware Requirements I talked about the differing motivations and expectations behind a set of Minimum Hardware Requirements for an application and I ended the thoughts by saying that one should question any such set of requirements that is greater than 3 years old. In November 2004 Open Text published a series of White Papers called "Livelink Minimum Hardware Requirements for 100- or 1000-User Populations" for the four main infrastructures of the day (Win2k with SQL, Win2k with Oracle, Solaris with Oracle and HPUX with Oracle) and although I was running the team that created these papers and I know that they remain relevant in some senses, I think the wisdom they try to provide should be questioned. Now questioned doesn't necessarily mean it is wrong, it just shouldn't be taken at it's face ... a lot has happened since 2004.

Minimum Hardware Requirements

Such a simple topic, huh? All we need to understand is the minimum amount of resources required to use a product, surely that should be a simple thing for a vendor to answer. It is their product and nobody knows their product better than them, right? Well answer they do but beware those answers because they are not necessarily accurate and the motivations for providing the answer are often entirely different from those that are asking the questions.

Administrator

GATE Village is simple to use and most Village Members will find that the interface provided is sufficient to meet their needs, but those members running a Trusted Neighbourhood and Business Premium Account holders have options available to them that they probably do not want to share with all their fellow Trusted Neighbours. These tasks are usually performed by Administrators.

The types of tasks an Administrator might do is to rename a content type, revert to a previous revision, manage who can access private pages, create SHOUTout and other special content types, and enable/disable certain functionality for users they are respsonsible for.

The main GATE Village Administrator account is called "gvadmin", the user "GATE" has some adminitrative permissionsn but is restricted from accessing many content types (associated with Trusted Neighbourhoods and Business Premium Accounts).

Public

Whenever the word "Public" is used by GATE Village employees in context to GATE Village content, it means that the general public may access (read) the content. This always includes unauthenticated visitors to GATE Village (so-called anonymous users). Public content will always be accessible to Internet Web Search Engines.

In Part One I talked about finding the smoking gun of activity happening within exi

Tthis week I've had two experiences which served to remind me once again just how much innovation and growth there is in computing hardware.

Email! A great example of a nearly ubiquitous tool that relatively few people appreciate how difficult it is to actually provide as a stable service.