Daily Archives: May 9, 2011

Microsoft, Tech, Windows 7

Dirty IT jobs: Partners in slime

Carcasses, garter belts, and anthrax — techs get nasty in the name of IT
You think your job is bad? You ain’t seen nothing until you’ve had to pick moldy food and cockroaches out of a dead PC or been asked to find out what your coworkers have been up to online when they were supposedly working. You definitely haven’t earned your IT creds until you’ve stood in two feet of water holding a plugged-in server while trying not to get electrocuted, found yourself inside a sniper’s crosshairs while you’re attempting to install a communications link, or had to worry about bombs going off while you’re futzing with network protocols.

 

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[ Also on InfoWorld: For more dirty IT jobs, see “The 7 dirtiest jobs in IT,” “Even dirtier IT jobs: The muck stops here,” and “The dirt locker: Dirty duty on the front lines of IT” | Find out which of our eight classic IT personality types best suit your temperament by taking the InfoWorld IT personality type quiz. ]

In our fourth installment of the Dirty Jobs series, we visit with the dedicated geeks who hold jobs like these and ask how they managed to survive or, in some cases, thrive under difficult conditions.

Next time you’re hating your job, remember: It could be worse.
Off the Record submissions

Dirty job No. 1: Systems sanitation engineer
Beer cans. Food wrappers. Cigarette butts. Moldy bread. Cockroaches. Things you’d typically find in the bottom of your average dumpster — only in this case, the dumpster is the shell of a discarded computer.

It’s all part of the job at Redemtech, an IT asset disposition firm that processes the aging hardware Fortune 500 companies no longer want. Somebody has to go through each piece and muck it out, decide what can be saved and what must be discarded, says Chomroeun “C-Ron” Sith, technical supervisor for Redemtech’s Grove City, Ohio, facility (and no relation to the Dark Lord).

Though it varies widely, Sith says approximately half of the systems he sees can be refurbished and resold. The other half gets recycled in an environmentally responsible way. Before that happens, they have to be inspected and cleaned  — and that’s where things can get nasty.

“Some of these things look like they’ve been sitting the back of a warehouse for years,” he says. “They come in covered in dust, with cobwebs, rat droppings, and roaches inside. Sometimes they’re so rusted that when you pick them up your hands turn orange. One of the systems we got in was covered in makeup. Every time my guys touched it, they got all glittery.”

Then there was the time they opened up a desktop CPU and found a dead animal.

“It may have been a rodent or a bird,” he says. “We couldn’t tell for sure. But it was definitely dead.”

Sith estimates less than 5 percent of the 6,000 to 10,000 items his facility processes each week arrive in such bad shape they have to be wrapped in plastic to avoid infecting his staff or causing allergic reactions. Still, that’s plenty.

“Every other week some associate comes to me and says, ‘I don’t want to touch that system, I can’t take these cockroaches any more, this is ridiculous.’ I get that complaint a lot.”

Dirty job survival tip: Don’t wear your Sunday best.

“I tell my guys, ‘You can wear whatever you want, but don’t get mad if you come home dirty,'” Sith says. “That happens about 99 percent of the time.”

Microsoft

Understanding Microsoft MCAD Certification

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Certifications are a immense way to improve your resume. These are of a great advantage particularly when you are aiming for aggressive job profiles in the enormously dynamic IT industry. Microsoft, one of the most important names of the IT industry has its own education and skill development department that provides teaching to students and others, and also offers various professional certifications and qualifications. Being a supposed company, certifications from Microsoft are standard all over the world, and candidates with these certifications are always given favourite over the others.

 


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A very well-liked certification of all is the MCAD certification, which stands for Microsoft Certified Applications Developer. The audience profile for this certification entails IT professionals or developers, and candidates who wish to go in for the MCAD certification are expected to have a smallest amount of one to two years of experience in construction, deploying and marinating applications.

Like all Microsoft certifications, the MCAD certification too has a set of examinations emotionally involved with it, that need to be cleared by the candidate. These include written papers to test the theoretical base and theoretical knowledge of the candidates. There are practical exams too in which the candidates are put in environments and situations similar to the kinds they would be experience in real-time jobs. Here, they have to carry out a set of tasks given to them.

Place this certification; the candidates will be able to show their ability in just beginning applications by making use of the Microsoft Visual Studio.NET. For training purposes, Microsoft offers classroom education, which can be either supplement with, or even substituted with the online lectures. Apart from these, there is no end of e-learning material obtainable over the internet which can be accessed by the candidates. Self tests and other mock tests too can be taken as exercise before the specific exams to test the height of foundation.

MCITP, mcitp certification, MCITP Training, MCSE, MCSE Certification, MCSE Training, MCTS, MCTS Certification, MCTS Training, Microsoft, Office

Microsoft Office 2010 takes on all comers

OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice, IBM Lotus Symphony, SoftMaker Office, Corel WordPerfect, and Google Docs challenge the Microsoft juggernaut

Ask most people to name a productivity suite and chances are they’ll say Microsoft Office, but they might also name one of the numerous competitors that have sprung up. None have completely displaced the Microsoft monolith, but they’ve made inroads.

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Most of the competition has positioned itself as being better by being cheaper. SoftMaker Office has demonstrated you don’t always need to pay Microsoft’s prices to get some of the same quality, while OpenOffice.org proved you might not need to pay anything at all. Meanwhile, services like Google Docs are available for anyone with an Internet connection.

[ Also on InfoWorld: “10 great free desktop productivity tools that aren’t OpenOffice.org” | “Great Office 2010 features for business” | Follow the latest Windows developments in InfoWorld’s Technology: Microsoft newsletter. ]

Microsoft’s response has been to issue the newest version of Office (2010) in three retail editions with slightly less ornery pricing than before, as well as a free, ad-supported version (Microsoft Office Starter Edition) that comes preloaded on new PCs. Despite the budget-friendly competition, Office continues to sell, with Microsoft claiming back in January that one copy of Office 2010 is sold somewhere in the world every second. (Full disclosure: The author of this review recently bought a copy for his own use.)

How well do the alternatives shape up? And how practical is it to switch to them when you have an existing array of documents created in Microsoft Office? Those are the questions I had in mind when I sat down with both the new version of Microsoft Office and several other programs (and one cloud service) that have been positioned as low- or no-cost replacements.

Microsoft Office 2010
Despite all efforts to dethrone it, Microsoft Office remains the de facto standard for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and to a high degree, corporate email. Other programs may have individual features that are better implemented, but Microsoft has made the whole package work together, both across the different programs in the suite and in Windows itself, with increasing care and attention in each revision.

Test Center Scorecard

20%    20%    20%    15%    15%    10%
Microsoft Office 2010    10    10    10    8    9    9
9.5
Excellent
20%    20%    20%    15%    15%    10%
OpenOffice.org 3.3.0    7    7    7    7    7    7
7.0
Good
20%    20%    20%    15%    15%    10%
LibreOffice 3.3.1    7    7    7    7    7    7
7.0
Good
20%    20%    20%    15%    15%    10%
IBM Lotus Symphony 3.0    7    7    7    7    8    8
7.3
Good
20%    20%    20%    15%    15%    10%
SoftMaker Office 2010    9    9    9    7    7    9
8.4
Very Good
20%    20%    20%    15%    15%    10%
Corel WordPerfect Office X5    6    6    6    5    6    6
5.9
Poor
20%    20%    20%    15%    15%    10%
Google Docs    7    7    7    7    7    7
7.0
Good

If you avoided Office 2007 because of the radical changes to the interface — namely, the ribbon that replaced the conventional icon toolbars — three years’ time might change your mind. First, the ribbon’s no longer confined to Office only; it shows up in many other programs and isn’t as alien as before. Second, Microsoft addressed one major complaint about the ribbon — that it wasn’t customizable — and made it possible in Office 2010 for end-users to organize the ribbon as freely as they did their legacy toolbars. I’m irked Microsoft didn’t make this possible with the ribbon from the start, but at least it’s there now.

Finally, the ribbon is now implemented consistently in Office 2010. Whereas Outlook 2007 displayed the ribbon only when editing messages, Outlook 2010 uses the ribbon throughout. (The rest of Outlook has also been streamlined a great deal; the thicket of settings and submenus has been pruned down a bit and made easier to traverse.) One feature that would be hugely useful is a type-to-find function for the ribbon; there is an add-in that accomplishes this, but having it as a native feature would be great.

Aside from the interface changes, Office 2007’s other biggest alteration was a new XML-based document format. Office 2010 keeps the new format but expands backward- and cross-compatibility, as well as native handling of OpenDocument Format (ODF) documents — the .odt, .ods, and .odp formats used by OpenOffice.org. When you open a legacy Word .doc or .rtf file, for instance, the legend “[Compatibility Mode]” appears in the window title. This means any functions not native to that document format are disabled, so edits to the document can be reopened without problems in earlier versions of Office.

Note that ODF documents don’t trigger compatibility mode, since Office 2010 claims to have a high degree of compatibility between the two. The problem is “high degree” doesn’t always mean perfect compatibility. If you highlight a passage in an ODF document while in Word 2010, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice recognize the highlighting. But if you highlight in OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice, Word 2010 interprets the highlighting as merely a background color assignment for the selected text.

Exporting to HTML is, sadly, still messy; Word has never been good at exporting simple HTML that preserves only basic markup. Also, exporting to PDF is available natively, but the range of options in Word’s PDF export module is very narrow compared to that of OpenOffice.org.

Many other little changes throughout Office 2010 ease daily work. I particularly like the way the “find” function works in Word now, where all the results in a given document are shown in a navigation pane. This makes it far easier to find that one occurrence of a phrase you’re looking for. Excel has some nifty new ways to represent and manipulate data: Sparklines, little in-cell charts that usefully display at-a-glance visualizations of data; and data slicers, multiple-choice selectors that help widen or narrow the scope of the data you’re looking at. PowerPoint lets you broadcast a presentation across the Web (via Microsoft’s PowerPoint Broadcast Service, the use of which comes free with a PowerPoint license) or save a presentation as a video.

One last feature is worth mentioning as a possible future direction for all products in this vein. Office users who also have a SharePoint server can now collaborate in real time on Word, PowerPoint, or Excel documents. Unfortunately, SharePoint is way out of the reach of most casual users. But given how many professional-level features in software generally have percolated down to the end-user level, I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft eventually adds real-time collaboration, perhaps through Windows Live Mesh, as a standard feature.

Among the many new touches in Office 2010 is a much more useful document-search function, which shows results in a separate pane.

Among the many new touches in Office 2010 is a much more useful document-search function, which shows results in a separate pane.