It
is Monday morning. You have just come back from a three-week vacation in
the Bahamas. The office seems the same as when you left but you can sense
something is brewing in the background. You have not even taken your first
sip of coffee yet and are already an hour behind schedule. Your once
trusty date book, carrying numerous nicks and scratches like battle scars,
betrays you as you glance down at the hieroglyphic squiggles of meetings
you do not even recall making.
All the while you are being hampered by questions from departmental
users as to why their letter-sized printouts are coming out in legal
format. Soon you begin to feel like James Stewart in Vertigo minus the
musical score. After finally quieting the pitchfork and torch-bearing
Frankenstein-like mob gathering around your desk, you try to log onto the
network. You draw a blank. Everyone is looking over your shoulders. The
cursor blinks on and off, its rhythm never broken. It can wait… the mob
cannot. Your hands are frozen to the keyboard. You begin to wade through
everything in your mind when something suddenly dawns on you, "What on
earth's my password again?"
With the amount of information being stored electronically, it is
becoming increasingly important to secure data in an effective manner and
not provide fodder for bored hackers. If you are like me, you may have
more than a dozen passwords to remember. There may be network passwords,
Internet-site passwords, e-mail passwords, combinations to secured rooms,
and the list goes on. How do you maintain all these bits of information
without compromising security?
Here are some tips and tricks to help you maintain your
passwords:
Never
use the same password to secure multiple accounts. In other words,
you should not use the same password you use to log onto the network to
log onto a secured intranet or Internet site. Would you really consider
using a single key to open your front door, start your car, and secure
your safe deposit box which holds the only evidence of an unknown
alternate ending to Casablanca where Rick actually ends up with
Ilsa?
Never
use words found in a dictionary. Many hackers use
brute force, dictionary attacks in order to crack your password. A
"dictionary attack" basically makes use of a cracker utility that takes
a list of dictionary words and encrypts them one at a time using the
system's (such as Windows NT) encryption algorithm. If it finds a match,
your password has been cracked!
Avoid
picking passwords from items found near your office/desk, names of
family members, or birthdays. Why? They are just
too easy to guess!
You should choose passwords that contain
at least five characters.
Your passwords should be a
combination of any of the following:
Uppercase characters
Lowercase characters
Numeric values
Special characters (such as "!", "~", "*")
You
should "cycle" your passwords every now and again. Many System
Administrators configure user accounts with a "life span" thus
forcing users to change their password after an allotted time. They
may also have a setup whereby your previous passwords are kept in
record so that you do not use the same ones over and over
again.
Never write your passwords down. If you must write
them down, do not write the full password. Instead, what you can do
is write a "reminder." For example, if your password was
"Betel45geuse," you can write down "B*45g*" where the "*" would
represent the missing characters.
Never share your password with anyone else. Sometimes
hackers may use "social engineering" techniques to obtain passwords.
The hacker may pretend to be a System Administrator and trick you
into revealing your password via e-mail or over the
telephone.
Find a scheme that works for you. You may decide to
use a password that is easy to remember but in a "scrambled" format.
For example, you can apply a pattern such as pig Latin (i.e.,
"rover" becomes "overray"). Another pattern you can use is to turn a
phrase into an acronym (i.e., "All work and no play" becomes
"awanp").
The single most important thing to realize about an intranet is that it is a growing entity. If you wipe your brow in relief after rolling out your intranet and think that that was all there was to it, you are going to be in for a surprise.
E-Learning ranges from simple online orientation sessions for new employees to full-fledged certification programs. Although the term "e-Learning" can be broadly defined as the use of a network for the delivery of training and educational material, this delivery can occur in a number of ways. This articles defines these methods to help you decide which one is best for your organization.
Over the past several years, industries around the world have been slowly warming up to the idea of e-Learning – a virtual "classroom" where the instructor and students may be scattered over continents. E-Learning can range from simple online orientation sessions for new employees to full-fledged certification programs.
Storing and presenting information found on the Web can be done in a variety of ways. Many users of the Web are accustomed to the simple bookmarking process; however, the content located at the saved URL may change on a daily or a monthly basis. All of the products listed in this article attempt to help individuals do Web clippings in less than 10 minutes with various options to present content professionally to colleagues and clients.
To some individuals, archiving their Competitive Intelligence documents starts and stops with saving information on their hard disk or filing away papers in a cabinet in a corner of their office. Fortunately, archiving documents entails more than saving and filing online or off-line. A few steps that are constantly ignored in the archiving process are searching, retrieving and re-dissemination.
Your team has just being assigned a project that involves you working from a remote location one day and from behind your desktop the next day. Add to the equation that you will be collaborating with one person from oversees, one person from marketing in another city and you are aware that your two colleagues find it difficult to set aside time to work together. How are you going to share notes, work schedules, and ultimately, make decisions online? Sounds like a job for an intranet solution? In this month's Intranet Corner, we will investigate and discuss the true meaning of Intranet-In-Box, the evaluation process behind purchasing an application, and Current products on the market.
It is not often that something can be described as both the cancer and the cure. Because software vendors are making their Web-server products easily available to willing wannabe Webmasters, it is becoming increasingly difficult to lend credibility to a corporate intranet with the spread of small, non-sanctioned departmental "hobby" sites. This article shows you how do deal with this problem.
Knowledge Management is the buzzword of the year. As with many new terms, the definition of knowledge management depends on who you're asking. For a small organization, it is difficult to really know what it means. In this article, Intranet Corner gives you some pointers and definitions.
In this month's Toolkit, we have chosen and investigated a handful of software products that translate business vocabulary and documents. Among the seven products selected, some have the capabilities of translating a given text into a number of languages and a select few are able to translate into one language. It is strongly advised that you have a well-trained translator edit the output of the product before declaring it to be the final draft.
An Enterprise Information Portal can transform the workplace, but be prepared for a struggle as good information architecture collides with the existing IT environment and corporate culture. Enterprise efforts can bog down. A limited functional or department deployment can serve as a test bed. Among the major concerns are: Existing Contracts; Metadata Matters; and Taxonomy--the Greatest Challenge.
Working with your IT department should not be an exercise in frustration. If you would like to build a truly useful intranet site for your company, you will have to work in tight collaboration with your company's technical staff. This is not as lofty a task as you might think.
Do your users find it difficult manage their industry's links between Netscape and Internet Explorer? Do they have bookmarks floating around on their hard disk without files to put them in? We have selected a few useful tools that will enable you to help them transfer bookmarks between browsers, edit descriptions, and share links in the privacy of your firm. Whether they are an information specialist or an individual responsible for tracking key sites for your firm, these products will help them organize and distribute bookmarks with clients and colleagues.
How Big 5 consulting firms (Booz, Allen and Hamilton, Arthur Andersen, Ernst &
Young and KPMG) use intranets to manage their
employees', and industry experts' knowledge and what they can
teach us.
Managing Knowledge: A Practical Web-Based Approach Book shows how to evaluate intranet content in the context of corporate goals, and then how to implement an intranet-based knowledge management strategy that reflects these goals and critical business processes.
What on earth do you do when you need to communicate and share company-wide information to a diverse corporation
spanning several countries? Well, you could get seven thousand paper cups and two hundred-fifty thousand miles of string but
how messy would that be? Bell, Marconi, and Gutenberg have made communication and information sharing easier for the world
and sent countless carrier pigeons to the unemployment line. Intranets can do the same for your corporation if the project is
handled right.
You have known that you needed an intranet for a while now but where do you begin? Rome may not have been built in a day but software manufacturers are trying to make Web site design as seamless as possible. In this article, we focus on the tools you will use to build and manage your site.
Even within a group of people, people do not behave the same: some people will check their email frequently and some other will ask their assistant to print all messages and file them into a folder so that they can read it in the plane.These are some examples of the types of communication which would work well, depending on the role of the people you are targeting.
What do Boeing, General Electric, Motorola,
Ericsson, Microsoft, Cisco, Teleglobe, Amoco, Shell, Merck, France
Telecom, the Canadian Government... have in common? They all use an
Intranet to manage their business intelligence.
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