Spring cleaning has come early for me this year and has given an overwhelming urge to finish a number of things that have been put on the back burner for some time now – most of which involve making changes to how things are done on a daily basis…
To start with I’ve taken the plunge and switched to a Mac. Before anyone starts in with the Windows vs. Linux vs. Mac nonsense my decision ultimately was based in something very simple. By switching I have forced myself to abandon the tools that I have been used to using so that I can use and enforce new habits with new tools. This is incredibly important for my Companies (Creative Thought, InetOps, and Phyber) and our internal staff. Productivity, communication and collaboration are incredibly important to us and while there are excellent tools and applications available for Windows (arguably some of the best) they all come with a price – vendor lock in. Simply put for our operations it is far more efficient for us to use Linux based workstations for our engineers and have common web based systems for the organizations as a whole to use. By unplugging my Windows desktop and only using Linux and by switching from a Windows based laptop to a Mac I have forced myself to break my habits which will help me re-enforce this behavior with the rest of the staff. We will still have Windows desktops and laptops in the companies and I still like Microsoft – this is just the best course for us to take.
Switching to Google Apps. Don’t get me wrong I love Outlook + Exchange. I’ve been installing and supporting Exchange since version 5.0 (before the Internet connector was standard). We will continue to run it for Creative Thought for features like the Blackberry Enterprise Server and Delegation for email mailboxes/contacts. For InetOps, Phyber and my personal email Google Apps is easy, works and is zero hassle. Plus the docs/spreadsheets are pretty cool.
Switching to Movabletype. This blog was originally powered by Movable Type. At some point a couple of years ago I switched to WordPress because the feature set was just so much better (development was current, plugins were available, etc…). I’ve always missed some things about Movable Type like a templating system I can understand and more importantly static files on the file system. PHP + Mysql is fast, but nothing is as fast as static html. I still have a lot of customization and tweaking to do to this site but this should be the last time I migrate and change the URL structures (of course I am not promising anything).
Switching phone systems. Haven’t quite figured this one out yet. I’ve been a fan of Asterisk since the 1.0 release, about a year ago we moved onto sipXpbx which I really like as well. Why are we moving again? BLF and SLA. Basically I want to be able to mimic key system functionality and have a phone line appear on two different phones. When one person picks up one phone it would show in use, if a second picks up they are in conference. Right now we transfer between extensions which is workable but annoying. At some point in the future one of the open source IP PBXs will support this functionality and then we will look at moving back.
Switching cell phone carriers. Currently on Cingular – looking at T-Mobile and Nextel for business phones.
And this is only a partial list of the major items.