Month: September 2011

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Maestro Business Opportunities

Where are the opportunities for Maestro? The greatest opportunities are in Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs)

A small-to-medium enterprise (or SME) typically has less than 250 users, occupies a common physical office, and has an entry-to-mid-tier ERP system for managing operations and financial reporting. It may have a well-defined IT infrastructure, often from a single vendor (e.g., Microsoft DNS/DHCP/domain controller, an Exchange mail server, a SharePoint knowledge server, MS-SQL database Server, etc.), or an ad hoc structure with peer-peer networking providing shared access to resources such as shared data and printers. 

However, a SME often doesn’t have formal processes for document vaulting, non-conformance and issue management, change management/version control, and product data management. Also the ERP system may be perceived primarily as a financial system since it often is controlled by the Finance department, and is not available to engineering staff or provide traceability for serialized raw material or finished goods. Although SME’s may be certified to a QMS  (e.g. ISO 9001), operationally they are often dependent on people-driven document-oriented processes. If electronic documents are used, they are often stored either where they cannot be accessed by all users, or in an uncontrolled network share. 

An SME can also be distributed, where employees do not share a common physical office. In this case, it will typically not have formal resources for sharing information, and will rely on email or ad hoc cloud storage (e.g. Dropbox, OneDrive or iCloud).

Maestro

Maestro can be used to consolidate existing systems, regardless of whether the SME is centralized or distributed. It can be hosted on a user workstation, on a dedicated server on the local network, or with a cloud hosting provider. Internal hosting may be preferred for its perceived security advantages, but hybrid and cloud architectures can be just as secure – if not more so, since the same security policies will apply regardless of whether the user is connected through the internal network or the internet.

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Information Management and Data Integrity

CA Magazine’s Sept. 2011 issue lists the top 10 tech issues facing the accounting profession, according to the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants. The number 1 issue is information management and data integrity.

This corroborates my own professional experience. For too many businesses, there is no way to tell which copy of a document is the one “true” version, all the more difficult if there are multiple copies of the document scattered across personal directories and shared network directories. Almost as bad, there is no way to tell what changes have been made to a document over time, by who, for what reason, and if they were authorized by someone in authority.

Big business solves this in typically big business ways, and with a big price tag. Achievo is a solution for SMEs (and medium organizations that know better).

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Converting text files between Windows and Unix

I develop on both Windows and Unix laptops for deployment on Unix servers, and invariably forget to save text files from Windows in Unix-format (in Windows, lines end with both the line feed and carriage return ASCII characters, but Unix uses only a line feed). It doesn’t cause any problems, but it’s sure ugly to look at on the server. Googling around, I found the following solution using the tr command.

> mv file file.tmp
> tr -d '\r' < file.tmp > file
> rm file.tmp

After putting up with what was really more of an ugly hack for about a year, I decided it was time to write a quick and dirty shell script to hide the mess – but before reinventing the wheel thought I’d try a quick ‘net search. After all, I can’t be the first one to do this, could I?

Asking Google again for how to convert text from DOS to Unix, but this time including “shell script”, I mostly got the same links to tr, sed, and perl tutorials that I got the first time. There were also a couple links to shell scripts, but almost hidden in the hits was a reference to “flip”, a ~250 line C program that has apparently been the de facto standard command since it was released into the wild in 1998.

flip does a lot more than I was going to implement in my quick and dirty shell script. It detects binary files and leaves them alone unless intentionally overridden. It doesn’t modify files that are already in the specified format, and it preserves file timestamps. It handles user interrupts gracefully and doesn’t leave behind garbage or corrupted files.

Compiling and installing flip from the FreeBSD ports collection took all of 20 seconds. I don’t know why I didn’t find flip a year ago, but think I’ll dig out my venerable Unix in a Nutshell and see what other utilities are out there I could use, but don’t know about.