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Dear Colleagues,
Collaborate,
Create, Communicate..
Thank you to those who
gave us valuable input to the new ICT-KM website. The
new site will be launched at the AGM. One of the
interesting new features is “Behind the Scenes” where
those who work to make the program a success can share
their lessons, the challenges they meet, the
opportunities the program creates for them and the CGIAR
as a whole. Stay tuned: the inaugural article will
feature the “E-publishing” Projects and those who are
working with it.
Preparations for the
Annual General Meeting are under way.
The ICT-KM Program
activities will feature in a number of events: from a
presentation at Centers’ Day on Monday 25th
October, to coffee-break demos at the System Office
Booth on Monday 25th and Wednesday
27th October.
If you attend the AGM:
Do not miss them!
ICT-KM
2004
INVESTMENT PLAN UPDATES
Content for Development Thrust
The Content for
Development (C4D) team and IT experts from CIAT are
developing the C4D demo to show some of the features and
tools which will be available at the Virtual Resources
Center. The demo will be shown at the Annual General
Meeting for all to view, details as follow:
Sheraton Hotel
Booth 18 - Monday 25:
Morning coffee break
Booth 18 - Wednesday
27: Morning coffee break
Join us!
Second-Level Connectivity
The Second-Level
Connectivity Project has finalized the selection of
locations where this Project will work to improve
Internet connectivity. Staff from within the IT Group
across the CGIAR have been identified
to carry out the site surveys. We expect all site
surveys to be carried out within the next few months.
The site surveys will recommend the most appropriate
solution for improving Internet access and highlight any
other work that Centers need to carry out before the
solution is implemented.
The
Second-Level Connectivity Project will be holding its
Advisory Group meeting at CIMMYT on 19 October.
OTHER ACTIVITIES
ICT-KM Program Monitoring and Evaluation
Plan
Last month, we
proposed a draft "Plan for Monitoring and Evaluating the
ICT-KM Program and its Components" which suggested
monitoring indicators for both Program’s and Projects’
learning and reporting.
Most Project
Coordinators have reported back to us with the
formulated Monitoring Plan for each of their
Projects. Feedback was provided to them in regards
to their plans.
A
consolidated plan including all of the Projects
Monitoring Plans along with the Program's will be
assembled once all Projects have submitted their
Plans. We
expect all Plans to be finalized and implementation to
start in mid October.
Collaboration Software Review
The draft report from the
4 week consultation on CGIAR Collaboration
Software was shared with the CGIAR staff who
participated in the consultation. A final report
is expected in October.
System-Wide Software
Acquisitions
CGIAR staff who struggle
to keep up with these trendy new words have an online
tool at hand. A global contract with Oxford
English Dictionary has been renewed to the benefit
of all CGIAR staff. You can give it a try at http://www.oed.com/.
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Imagine yourself in a
Hotel room after a hard day's work. You want to
read your mail. You connect and start
downloading only to realize 30 minutes later that the
far-from-encouraging "30% completed" message has
appeared on the lower right hand corner of your
screen. After the tedious process is finished,
you find your mailbox filled with messages containing
large -extremely large- attachments. Worse, some
are of little or no interest to you. You wish
your colleagues had remembered the two golden rules of
e-mail usage: send a file only when it is necessary
and "ZIP IT!"
Help is now on the way.
The CGIAR has signed a contract with WinZip, so
when you really need to receive a file at least it
will be downloaded faster!
-
The latest CGIAR
software-wide agreement signed is the Surfcontrol
Internet filtering Version 5.0 with 3-year URL
database updates for the 4000 seats for
USD36,000. 9 Centers participated in this
special arrangement. Considerable savings have
been achieved as Centers are now paying only USD3.00
per seat per year compared to USD20.00 per seat per
year which they had paid previously. This
agreement was made through ILRI on behalf of the CIO
Office.
Dr.
Frank Rijsberman, chair of the ICT-KM sub-committee of
CDC commented:" We trust that together with the CIO
Office both communities will keep on working to ensure
more economies of scale are achieved and that our
scientists and staff at large are equipped with the most
adequate tools and technologies available."
Let’s Clean our GAL:
CGIAR Email
Naming Conventions
Nancy Walczak from IFPRI
led the efforts to update the CGIAR email naming
convention document – we hope to be able to have a
cleaner and more updated E-Mail Global Address List
available to all users soon.
Change in Management of IWMI’s
ICT
On 20
September a change took place in the IWMI ICT
Unit.
IWMI's
IT Manager, Sunil Weerasinghe chose to pursue career
options in the private sector in Colombo and left his
post at IWMI. Pierre Marchand has assumed the position
of Acting Head of ICT. Pierre is a
computer studies graduate and has been working at IWMI
on the Water and Food Challenge Program data warehouse
Project for some months.
Join me in thanking
Sunil for his work at IWMI over the past 18 months and
welcoming Pierre.
CDC Collective Action Retreat
A "CDC Collective
Action Retreat" was held at ILRI, Addis Ababa, 8-9 July.
The DGs together determined the changes needed in the
functioning of their existing mechanisms to create,
enhance and enforce the dynamics of collaboration. Some
changes will begin immediately; others will be finalized
during the October Mexico City Annual General
Meeting.
In the retreat it
was decided that to capture the opportunities and
address the problems the CGIAR are facing, key
recommendations changing the mandate and functioning of
existing inter Center mechanisms will be pursued to
benefit the whole CGIAR System. The thrust of
collaboration will be collective programs around common
goals with national partners, regional and sub-regional
organizations, etc, to deploy collective Center
resources more strategically and efficiently and meet
the articulated demands of our partners, as well as
emerging opportunities and responsibilities.
The cost-saving
activities pursued by the CIO Office together with the
Information Managers community and the IT Managers
community have also been acknowledged at the CDC
retreat.
A complete report
of the Retreat is available upon request.
^ back to top
TECHNICAL
CORNER...
Active Directory Project
IRRI joined its new
domain to the Active Directory forest on 22 Sep. Countdown
to this important project has started - only four more
sites with over 100 users are still to join. Most of the
Centers have migrated to Microsoft Active Directory and
are, therefore, ready to upgrade to Exchange 2003. The
new Exchange server includes many new features that
promise to make the life of the ‘mail addicted’ CGIAR
staff easier, especially frequent travelers.
Exchange 2003
WorldFish is
scheduled to upgrade to Exchange 2003 on 15 October and
CIFOR on 18 October.
IPGRI
has scheduled the Exchange 2003 upgrade on 15
November.
Notices were sent to
all Centers, requesting that they schedule the
installation of the Active Directory connectors in
preparation for the first upgrade.
^ back to top
DID YOU KNOW THAT…..?
Mail Travel
Access:
Many of you may not be
aware of TAS capability. Here is some
information about broadband options available using
TAS.
TAS has always offered
reliable dial-up connectivity; now, you can take
advantage of both wired and wireless broadband options
using the same familiar TAS Dialer. TAS seamlessly
and securely offers you access to the wireless networks
of TMobile, Wayport and a variety of other
providers.
Broadband hotspots are
available in fixed locations along your travel route
such as airports, hotels, convention centers, cafes and
more. All
you need is your laptop or handheld and you're set.
Check this website http://ipass.jiwire.com/
to see if your destination has a broadband option or
just use the Dialer as a directory. It is always a
good idea to connect and update your dialer before
setting off to ensure you have access to any new
connectivity options that have been added. Dialer updates
are automatic once you have established a connection, as
long as the option has not been turned off by the
user.
A connection tip for
wireless users: your dialer may
instruct you to disable WEP (wired equivalent
privacy).
Use the network utility on your laptop to perform
this function or ask your IT expert for assistance. In later dialer
versions (3.x and higher), this is done
automatically.
All users will soon be converted to the new
dialer.
If you have any questions
about TAS broadband or getting connected, please contact
Beth Mcmullen at b.mcmullen@cgnet.com
or Fred Garcia, TAS Product Manager, at f.garcia@cgnet.com. CGNET Support is
available at support@cgnet.com or
by calling +1 (650) 833-6000.
The Myth of
“Knowledge Management:
Have you ever
wondered what the difference between knowledge and
information is? Read: "The nonsense of 'knowledge
management'" Information Research, 8(1),
paper no. 144 is available at http://InformationR.net/ir/8-1/paper144.html.
Your Outlook Web Access acts
weirdly? You cannot reply to messages?...Check:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;883575
Preparing a
Survey:
Have you needed to
prepare a short survey questionnaire lately and wondered
how best to do it? Try http://www.surveymonkeys.com/.
^ back to top
TECHNOLOGY WATCH
This column is especially dedicated
to keep a regular watch for emerging ICTs of potential
interest to the CGIAR.
Virtual Server
Microsoft has
recently released a new product called Virtual Server
2005 which supports the partitioning of a single server
computer into several "virtual computers". This
could be applied in interesting ways to organizations
like the Centers of the CGIAR.
The
idea of a single physical computer supporting multiple
virtual computers has been common on mainframes, but
only recently applied commercially to PC-class
computers. The new Microsoft Virtual Server
product is low cost, has a liberal 180-day download
evaluation option, and will be supported by Microsoft
for production systems.
While in principle any server
application could be run in a virtual computer, in the
near term we expect to see use in the following areas:
Migration of old systems onto new hardware; addition of
domain controllers into Windows networks; isolated and
relatively low usage applications, such as fax gateways;
redundant copies of web or other important applications;
and small group applications, such as project-level web
sites.
Consolidating these low-use servers onto
virtual platforms can make them easier to manage, and
can cut hardware costs. It can also make them
easier to develop and maintain through isolation: each
application can run in its own virtual computer rather
than having to share a single copy of an operating
system and programming tools. This does
not reduce software licensing, bandwidth,
or backup and storage requirements; these are
the same for virtual computers as dedicated physical
ones.
As CG
Centers are already heavy users of Microsoft software,
the release of Virtual Server 2005 may open up this new
opportunity to the Centers.
^
back to top
UPCOMING
MEETINGS
CGIAR Annual General
Meeting - 25-29 November, Mexico
City.
IT Managers Annual Meeting -
2-5 November, WorldFish Center,
Penang.
^ back to top
Collaborate,
Create, Communicate...
this is the motto of the ICT-KM
Program. We believe that by expanding the CGIAR's
opportunities to work together and communicate we will
produce better science to help poor in developing
countries, and we will get that knowledge to
them.
Your comments are especially
welcome. Please visit the Website, http://ictkm.cgiar.org/
or write to ictkm@cgiar.org with
comments and/or ideas for the next monthly
update.
Working together for a better
future,
Enrica |
