Category Archives: Work

Cisco AMP for Endpoints

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Several months ago we bought into Cisco AMP for Endpoints. There was a lot of work right after that, so we set up the management account and put it aside. Months later, I felt a little awkward about it, so I thought I would devote my April to Cisco AMP for Endpoints.

I just uncorked my AMP for Endpoints account, for this post and going forward, when I write AMP, I mean Cisco AMP for Endpoints, because it’s a mouthful. AMP itself seemed forbidding and difficult, but then once I started working with the site, configuration wasn’t that bad. I decided to test AMP in my environment by starting a “Factory Fresh” copy of Windows 7 32-bit in VirtualBox on my Mac, with 4GB of RAM assigned to it. A standard humdrum little workstation model.

I downloaded a bunch of starter packs, including the “Audit” model, the weakest of them all. I installed it on the workstation and the site responded well enough, noticing the install. As I was working with the system, I noticed that AMP complained that the definitions were out of date on the client, so I went hunting for a “definition update” function. There isn’t anything the user can trigger, you have to wait for it. Oh, that’s not good.

So then I had AMP on the test machine and I thought I would try to infect it. So I found a copy of EICAR, which is a sample file that all these technologies are supposed to detect and find hazardous. Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) sees EICAR well enough, and really gets upset by it, immediately stuffing it into Quarantine and sending an alert. AMP also detected EICAR and because it was in Audit mode, just sat on its hands. Which I expected.

So then I found a bunch of sample malware files on a testing website, because while EICAR is useful for basic testing, it’s as relevatory as a knee-jerk reflex. It’s nice to know there is a reflex, but it’s not the same as an actual malware infection. I opened the ZIP file, typed in the password and all these malware samples came spilling out into the downloads directory. So, a workstation that is quickly becoming filthy. That’s my use-case for AMP.

So after “infecting” the computer with the files, and the tamest model, which is just to have them in a folder, I went to AMP and told it to switch the model on the test machine from Audit to Triage. That took almost twenty minutes! Are you for real on this, Cisco? Twenty minutes!!!

So I knew what I had on this workstation, but I pretended that I was the admin on the other side, with an unknown workstation connected, reclassified with Triage and waiting. I knew that the computer was infected, and as the admin, “not knowing what is going on” with the endpoint, I sent a scan command. This is the worst case scenario.

On the AMP side, I didn’t see anything at all. I panicked around looking for any hint that the AMP system recognized my scan request, and so I sent five more scan requests. Obviously, one scan request should have done it, but I wanted to make sure that I worked around even an imaginary screw-up in Cisco over scanning. Nothing. Workstation just plotzing along, infected files just sitting right there in the Downloads folder, just waiting for double-clicking end-user to make a tame infection a wild one.

Obviously this is the worlds worst scenario, one were SEP somehow is gone, not installed, or somehow lost its marbles, leaving AMP on its own to run defense. Scan! Scan! Scan! — Nothing at all. AMP just sits there just merrily SITTING THERE. Like shaking a coma patient, is very much what it felt like.

So then I started with the Help feature, request help, okay, I knew how this would go. This would lead to TAC. God help me. Cisco’s system didn’t know what AMP was, hahahahaha of course not. But there was a chat system in a teeny tiny little button, so I tried that. Someone! Hallelujah! They found my contract and linked it up, and started a case for me. When I went back to the test system, AMP had done it’s work. FINALLY. It only took twenty minutes! A lot can happen in twenty minutes. How many files could have been ransomware-encrypted in those twenty minutes?

So now I await a response from Cisco TAC. During the chat I declined the entire phone call angle since Cisco TAC people cannot speak English, or at least, I cannot understand their speech. So I told them that I would only communicate over email. So lets see what TAC has to say. We spent a lot of money on this, so obviously I’ll likely deploy it, but man, I am sorely disappointed in a system where every second counts. On reflection, Cisco AMP for Endpoints was probably a mistake.

Strategy to Inbox Zero

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Earlier in the week I had talked to a friend about my unmanageable email pile in my Inbox, about 78 pieces of email just sitting there, dwelling on the edge of my consciousness and weighing on me. Is there something there that I should take care of? Did I miss something important? So I started to chat and to do some research.

There are many strategies out there, and I adapted them for my own use, and so far it has worked out marvelously well. Here’s how I process my email:

  1. Create sorting folders. I created a host of new subfolders in my work email account which runs under a hosted version of Microsoft Exchange. Because folders sort alphabetically, I forced the sort using number indexes and dashes.
    1. 1-Email Management
      1. 1-Today
      2. 2-This Week
      3. 3-This Quarter
      4. 4-FYI
      5. 5-Toodledo
      6. 6-Done/Sort
    2. 2-Help Desk
    3. 3-To Evernote
    4. 4-Barracuda
    5. 5-Syslog Alerts
    6. 6-ATP
  2. Then I sort the Inbox into the “Email Management” folder structure. If something has to be done today, it goes to 1-Today, and so on and so forth. My first consideration is the due-date for the item in my Inbox. If the item is purely informational, it goes into the 4-FYI box.
  3. I have rules set up in my email application, which happens to be Apple Mail. If I get email from Toodledo, my favorite To-Do system, they are moved into that folder. Anything from my Spiceworks Ticket sytem ends up in the 2-Help Desk folder. The messages from my Barracuda backup appliance end up in the 4-Barracuda folder, all my incoming Kiwi Syslog alerts end up in 5-Syslog Alerts, and finally the Advanced Threat Protection from Hosted Exchange reports get filed in 6-ATP. Rules are a huge part of keeping your neck above water when it comes to emails. There are a lot of purely informational emails that have zero urgency and very low importance, you want to keep them to go through them, but they don’t need to clog up your Inbox. Rules can help you sweep a lot of these away automatically. Always flag your junk mail, review that occaisonally to drag it for any false-positives.
  4. If an item is a request for help from work, and it didn’t come in as a ticket originally, those need to be pushed into the ticketing system. Thankfully Spiceworks allows you to forward emails into the ticket system by sending forwarded mail to whatever mailbox you’ve configured for the Spiceworks system. There are a litany of hashtag controls you can place in the email body to configure how tickets are arranged. My Cisco CUCM system is configured to also kick voicemails to me as attached MP3 emails, if they are requests for help, they likewise end up being forwarded with some extra flavor text to stomp down on confusion.
  5. If an item isn’t help, is urgent, is rather important, and has a clear date and time I will forward the email to my Toodledo using the configured email address on that system. Toodledo has a flag system that works on the Subject line. My preferred method is to alert people to events, include Toodledo as a BCC addressee, and then add at the end of the Subject line this text fragment: @work :1 day #{duedate} where the field duedate is whatever the date is that is relevant. Send it, forget it, it’s in the Toodledo list.
  6. The next step is to cycle through folders in Email Management, starting with Today and then reviewing all the rest. The Today folder is the action items that can be done today, or are due today. After completion, simple things are thrown away, but anything more elaborate or anything that touches on CYA gets sorted into the 3-To Evernote Folder.
  7. Evernote is a bottomless notekeeping system that I also use, and I leverage Evernote as a destination for all my CYA emails, and each quarter the extracted Sent Items from my Exchange account. I don’t trust Microsoft at all, I’d rather keep things in Evernote. Microsoft has a 50GB quota, Evernote does not have a quota. At the end of each week, I have a “Sharpen The Saw” task in Toodledo that I run, and a part of that is running along the structure in the 3-To Evernote folder, which includes all the emails across the branches of the company I work for, and all the vendors I have relationships with. Every Quarter, I search for all the emails for the previous block of time, soon Q1-2019 will be over so I search for all Q1-2019 emails and also move them into Evernote.
    1. The Evernote move is accomplished in two steps. The first step is to extract all the attachments out of the emails in my Exchange account, I use Mac Automator for that purpose, and here’s how it’s configured:
      1. Get Selected Mail Messages – Get selected messages.
      2. Get Attachments from Mail Messages – Save attachments in: “Attachments”
    2. I then run the Automator workflow, and all the attachments are put in a folder on my Desktop called Attachments. I then bulk rename them with their folder, a date such as 20190301 (YYYYMMDD), and then select them all and drag them into the right notebook in Evernote.
    3. Then I highlight all the relevant emails in my Mail App that I intend to send to Evernote, and I have created a General Service in my Mac called “Send To Evernote” which is actually another Automator Workflow, called “Send To Evernote.workflow”, that has this content:
      1. Run AppleScript: 
        1. on run {input, parameters}
 -- Slightly modified version of Efficient Computing's AppleScript: http://efficientcomputing.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2012/03/17/copy-email-message-in-mail-app-to-evernote-applescript/
 tell application "Mail"
  --get selected messages
  set theSelection to selection
  --loop through all selected messages
  repeat with theMessage in theSelection
   --get information from message
   set theMessageDate to the date received of theMessage
   set theMessageSender to sender of theMessage
   set theMessageSubject to the subject of the theMessage
   set theMessageContent to the content of theMessage
   set theMessageURL to "message://%3c" & theMessage's message id & "%3e"
   --make a short header
   set theHeader to the all headers of theMessage
   set theShortHeader to (paragraph 1 of theHeader & return & paragraph 2 of theHeader & return & paragraph 3 of theHeader & return & paragraph 4 of theHeader & return & return)
   --import message to Evernote
   tell application "Evernote"
    set theNewNote to (create note with text (theShortHeader & theMessageContent))
    set the title of theNewNote to theMessageSubject
    set the source URL of theNewNote to theMessageURL
    set the creation date of theNewNote to theMessageDate
   end tell
   -- move the email message to archive and make it bloody obvious
   set background color of theMessage to blue
   set acc to account of mailbox of theMessage
   move theMessage to mailbox "Archive" of acc
  end repeat
 end tell
 return input
end run

           

      2. It takes some time, but it efficiently moves the text parts of the emails selected into Evernote, using my default Notebook, called IN BOX.
      3. I select everything in the Evernote notebook IN BOX and move it to where it has to go, the destination notebook within Evernote itself. The messages all end up in the Archive folder, so then after that I hunt them down and delete them out of Exchange. Then empty the trash out of Exchange.
  8. In the end, I have a very slim Exchange account, a well fleshed out Evernote data store where I can search for all my email CYA details that I might need later on, and it also works on the web and over mobile apps as well. It’s very handy.
  9. It only took me a little while, maybe an hour tops to sort my Inbox and get to Inbox Zero. Then the cycling through the subfolders helped give me a handle on both urgency and importance, and I have a far better sense that I am actually on-top of my emails.

 

Whiteboard Secure?

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The first time you start to involve yourself in cryptography you start on a path to suspicion and paranoia. Nearly every discussion about cryptography involves two example parties, Alice and Bob. Alice is always trying to keep secrets from Bob, and these two characters are used to illustrate everything from public key cryptography to man-in-the-middle attacks, and a lot more than just these examples as well.

This entire line of reasoning starts to kindle thoughts about how you go about your everyday life and just how much of your personal data, your privacy, your secrets are all leaking out around the edges. For all the efforts of your own personal Alice, there is a Bob out there, maybe, trying to dig up things you aren’t watching over or never expect.

A portion of cryptography, or more generally espionage in general comes down to the things you leave behind. Some folks think that strip-shredding sensitive papers is enough, while others consider upgrading to crosscut shredding to be the gold standard. For really sensitive papers, I personally have considered the only really effective way to prevent them from being reassembled is through burning and beating with some sort of implement to mix up the ashes. All this is to prevent information from leaking out where you never intend for it to leak out from. A big part of this, and in a lot of film noir detective stories, is phone numbers or passwords written on sticky notes or on a notepad. Sometimes people will write something down on a series-bound stack of papers with something like a ball-point pen, because it’s handy. The ball-point does put ink on paper, but it also can emboss paper below the sheet you are working on, and with a gentle swipe of pencil graphite, the ghost of what was written re-appears.

While I’ve been working at my desk, I got to thinking about convenient surfaces that I could take notes on, which would be handy and easily erased and reused. A while back I stopped at the dollar store and got a nice little whiteboard and a selection of dry-erase markers. Super cheap, super convenient. The whiteboard has proven to be very convenient and useful in my workplace and for $2, a non-issue when it comes to the pricetag. It struck me that this cheap cardboard and plastic whiteboard assembly could also be a very secure way to write temporary notes, say banking details for example. I can write a whole line of values and account numbers, passwords, whatever I like and with a swipe and rub of an eraser rag, whoosh, all of the details are gone forever. As I examined the whiteboard and considered this, I thought of ways that the wiping process could be reversed. There is no embossing onto a lower layer to worry about, and there doesn’t appear to be any order of anything at all on the surface or the wiping rag. So I would at least think on the outset that a whiteboard makes a very fine and secure temporary notepad to write anything on, because once wiped off, perhaps also with alcohol or Windex just to be very careful, I can’t imagine there is any way to unwind the clock on the erasure process. No way to get back what was written.

Now there is no application for this sort of security in my life, other than perhaps writing down account numbers, my SSN, or perhaps the password to some sort of system here at work, but if you are looking for a way to write temporary notes and not have to worry about security – a whiteboard at the dollar store certainly seems to be a solid approach.

The Ethics Of Contact Lists

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So far it has happened to me twice. I have received contact from people who are very much no longer with organizations that I have a relationship with. The first contact was from a telecommunications technology company, obviously remaining nameless with the offender also remaining nameless. I had recognized the name from a previous connection when I was working with a current telecommunications company that is related to my workplace. The messaging was catered to create a fear response and panic move on my behalf to drum up business for the account executives commission. They had my name and my email address, they worked at a new company, and there is no reason why they should contact me as there was no prior contact with their new company for any purpose where I should expect contact. Essentially they copied their customer list in one company, and then when they went to another position elsewhere just uncorked the list and hit up all the contacts, in a targeted fashion. The first time was remarkable, but I thought it was a situational outlier.

Today, after I got the mail out of my home mailbox, I found another card from a previous contact with which I had made a few financial arrangements with the person, they were no longer with the financial institution that I do business with on personal terms, but a wholly new company, whom I had never had contact before. Again, the person copied their customer list from one company and carried it with them to another company.

I find all this to be wrong. It could even be regarded as corporate espionage. Right now it’s a simple matter of just tossing all these cold contacts suddenly warm again right in the secure recycling bin. There is no way that I’m going to contact any of them, but because I regard this as wholly inappropriate use of privileged information, each time I spot it, the relationship is dead on arrival. I don’t want to talk to these people, and doing this underhanded thing is worth exactly what I’m willing to pay for it, which is to throw it all away and not even give it a single thought. You stole the list, you are attempting to be clever and sneaky. I will not be a party to it.

I, of course, won’t identify companies or name individuals, but I find this to be utterly reprehensible, and as a practice, I’m calling it out. If you quit a job where customer lists are handy, you leave those lists behind, and you find a more wholesome and honest way to approach customers. So, off the offending mail goes, off to the recycling bin!

We’re from AT&T, We Don’t Know The Word, “Stop”

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I wrote this letter as a reply to the fifth or sixth sales representative with AT&T. They are attempting to sell us fiber optic data services. I directed them to our Telecom MSP as a professional courtesy, as I do to all sales folk who directly appeal to us. It’s just good business practice, the MSP exists to handle the complexities of telecommunications for us.

Hello,

You’ll be the fifth AT&T sales associate that I have written this to, so here goes… Please direct all sales inquiries for the COMPANY domain to MSP. Person 1 and Person 2 have been CC’ed to this email. Please feel free to share this detail with any other AT&T sales associates who might want to contact us, or not, as we are just forwarding all of this to our Tcom MSP. 

We are now considering AT&T to be harassing us, but since your company doesn’t seem to understand cease and desist, we’ll just keep on sending all of you to our MSP. I would ask to be taken off the list and to “Please Stop”, but AT&T isn’t interested in stop. Perhaps AT&T doesn’t have a clear definition of the word stop.

Here… here’s the definition of stop:

stop |stäp| 

verb (stops, stopping, stopped) 

1 [ no obj. ] (of an event, action, or process) come to an end; cease to happen:his laughter stopped as quickly as it had begun | the rain had stopped and the clouds had cleared.

• [ with present participle ] cease to perform a specified action or have a specified experience: she stopped giggling | [ with obj. ] :  he stopped work for tea.

• [ with present participle ] abandon a specified practice or habit: I’ve stopped eating meat.

• stop moving or operating: he stopped to look at the view | my watch has stopped.

• (of a bus or train) call at a designated place to pick up or let off passengers: main-line trains stop at platform 7.

• Brit. informal stay somewhere for a short time: you’ll have to stop the night.

2 [ with obj. ] cause (an action, process, or event) to come to an end: this harassment has got to be stopped.

• prevent (an action or event) from happening: a security guard was killed trying to stop a raid.

• prevent or dissuade (someone) from continuing in an activity or achieving an aim: a campaign is under way to stop the bombers.

• prevent (someone or something) from performing a specified action or undergoing a specified experience: you can’t stopme fromgetting what I want.

• cause or order to cease moving or operating: he stopped his car by the house |police were given powers to stop and search suspects.

• informal be hit by (a bullet).

• instruct a bank to withhold payment on (a check).

• refuse to supply as usual; withhold or deduct: the union has threatened to stop the supply of minerals.

• Boxing defeat (an opponent) by a knockout: he was stopped in the sixth by Tyson

ORIGIN Old English (for)stoppian‘block up (an aperture)’; related to German stopfen, from late Latin stuppare ‘to stuff.’

Please Stop. 

Please Go Away.

No, We do not want any. Even if we did, we don’t anymore.

Thanks

We’ll keep getting helpful AT&T sales reps until I create a spam filter for the att.net domain and route everything to the trash, which really, I should do out of professional courtesy to AT&T. If it wasn’t for the fact that they at some point could email me about repairs, that would be something I could seriously consider. Alas, I may have to just start ignoring them with my delete key.

Unless they … stop… HA! HA! HA! They don’t know the word, “Stop.”

AT&T Is A Pox

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AT&T Sales Associates are a ripe bunch. They reach out at random and contact people who have nothing at all to do with telecom around here. I tell them that we aren’t interested and they keep on going. Keep on flogging their products to people who don’t understand what they do nor can they approve anything about it. So I told them all to just stop it. To take all their sales pitches and go to our Telecom MSP.

To which, their response was remarkably shady! Shocker!

If you no longer wish to receive email information from AT&T, please click here https://www.e-access.att.com/abgmas_n/imail/dispatcher?action=sm.unsub&ct_id=########### Or send notice to: AT&T Business, 55 Corporate Drive, Room 24C27, Bridgewater, NJ 08807.If you are an existing AT&T customer, you may still receive transactional e-mail messages concerning your current products or services.

My last message to them was:

Hello,

And this right here is why we only do business with AT&T through our Telecommunications Managed Service Provider.

No reply needed.

Goodbye.

No love lost. It was a rather surprising turn, you’d think that salespeople would treat the primary decision-maker with something less than shade. Perhaps something more like “Sorry for the trouble, we will update our records!”

Ah well, it’s AT&T. The lesson here is, the statement “it’s AT&T” pretty much explains all you need to know.

And with every waking breath I wish that Alexander Graham Bell continues to burn in hell for what he did, strapped right up there with Thomas Edison, jammed as clear up Satan’s anus as both can fit.

Mercury Retrograde!

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If you work in IT, have anything at all to do with technology, you should be aware of these two dates and times:

Mercury goes Retrograde in Pisces (29o 39″) on March 5, 2019, at 6:19 pm Universal Time, 2:19 pm EDT and 11:19 am PDT.

The Direct Station occurs in Pisces  (16o 06″) on March 28, 2019, at 1:59 pm Universal Time, 10:59 am EDT and 7:59 am PDT.

It is coming up for us on the Eastern Time Zone, in just a few minutes. After that, everything will be impossible, bonkers, or unbearably loopy for about four weeks.

You have been warned!

Monelli’s Bar

Aside

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Just got back from the lunch buffet at Monelli’s in Portage. So much food, the prices are great and the food is pretty good, but it’s all carbs so this afternoon is going to be a bit of dragging anchor. Dear Keurig Wan-Kenobi, you’re my only hope…  LOL!

Darn Tough Socks

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The start of this Winter season inspired me to organize my wardrobe and store my summer clothes and reveal my winter clothes. Living in Michigan as I do, Winter is something you do not fool around with and the best way to prepare yourself for anything that the outside may have to offer is to dress for the conditions. As I was pulling previously stored winter gear out of storage, I came across a pair of Darn Tough socks I had bought, or were a gift, years and years ago. They were woolen, featuring Merino Wool and quite long, definitely over-the-calf in length. Generally I cannot sleep well unless my feet are warm, and so I almost always sleep with some sort of socks on my feet, and since these were woolen and the warmest I had, they served that purpose quite well.

Then I noticed there was a hole that had been worn into the heel of these particular pair of socks. I have a pronated gait, so this sort of wear and tear is common for me. I noticed the label down by the toes and figured I would replace them with another pair, since they worked so well for so long. I went to the website and discovered more about the Darn Tough brand. They take incredible pride in their products, even to go so far as to offer a unconditional lifetime warranty on their socks. Send in the blasted out pair, and they’ll credit you for a new pair. I was blown away by this, you don’t see pride and pro-consumer qualities like this anywhere, at least never in my lifetimes memory, except for Darn Tough. This started me exploring and reading and discovering that Merino Wool is not scratchy, that it has a litany of really quite shockingly good features, warm in the Winter, cool in the Summer, naturally fire-retardant, and naturally anti-microbial. It also dries very quickly and transports sweat away from the skin and releases it better than a lot of other fabrics. Pretty much every review I read online flogged the daylights out of Darn Tough, claiming they were the best socks that they had ever owned. So I gave them a shot. I washed the blasted out pair, then shipped them to Darn Tough. A few weeks later I got a gift card for the cost of the original pair!

So I bought three pair to see what all the hubub was about. I prefer long socks, so practically knee-high are for me, which in the industry is called OTC for Over The Calf. I picked their Paul Bunyon socks, the pricetag was rather shocking for socks, but after a while of wearing these socks as my daily pairs I can say that they are the best socks I have ever owned, hands down! They are soft, they check off every expectation claimed by the manufacturer, and then some!

After that, and with the gift card in hand for my warranty claim, I bought a few more, some for sleeping, some for work and daily use. If you are tired of cotton or polyester-blend socks leaving you with sopping wet feet, smelly feet, or cold feet, find something you like at Darn Tough. You won’t be sorry you did.

Slack vs. Jabber

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Several years ago I started working for a new company. Their phone system was stuck in the past. The past, like Version 4 when Version 10 was being sold. So we had to upgrade, there really wasn’t any other way around it.

Enter Cisco. As VOIP hardware manufacturers go, if you stay in the silo you’ll have a pretty good life. Call Manager, Unity, and Presence are a heady combination. I decided early on to hire a local company to help me with the design and the initial layout and setup, and I will always regard that choice as one of the best I have ever made, professionally. They did an amazing job, and their staff are absolute tops in their game. They are expensive, but in the end I think worth it. So they came, helped install the Cisco Business Essentials 6000 server, and all the heavy lifting that was needed to get all three products up and running, so that people who were using the old system saw next to nothing different about how everything worked. That’s a kind of holy grail in IT.

A part of the trio of products was Cisco Presence, or to use a shorthand about what it really was, simply Jabber. Jabber is an instant messaging platform, and I had quite a bit of experience as Jabber is, at least ostensibly, an open-source system. I had lots of Jabber experience back at my previous employ and I was looking forward to seeing Jabber rolled out across the company that I now work for. The previous employ was centered on Apple technology and as an IT administrator, Apple was like waking up in the Garden of Eden. It was an earthly delight. The Apple iteration of Jabber included a CLI option switch that allowed you to instantly join everyone in the Jabber directory, nee an LDAP directory, all together. It was called “–auto_buddy” and I loved that feature. It was the killer part of Jabber from Apple. When I added someone to OpenDirectory, I could open a Terminal and throw this one command and all my work would automatically add all my coworkers together, everyone is everyone else’s buddy. It was great, I really enjoyed it.

So then, years forward, on with Cisco Presence, their implementation of Jabber. Off searching for my favorite CLI friend, “–auto_buddy”, only to find out, none of that exists. And so, that hobbled Jabber immediately. Instant Messaging’s ROI is only really salient when you have everyone engaged. You can’t really argue about ROI until that point, because when you have only a handful of people actually connected, they don’t see the point, because not everyone is connected, including the people they want to communicate with right now. If you can’t do a thing immediately, then what is the point of doing it at all? This is the core reason why a lot of tech adoption trips and falls on its face. Especially with collaboration solutions like Jabber. Until everyone joins and uses the system, convincing them that they should use it might as well be one of Hercules’s tasks, like cleaning the Augean Stables. So without my ability to link everyone up, with “–auto_buddy”, I had a piecemeal system. Without the ability for everyone to see everyone else, adoption tripped and fell flat on its figurative face.

Shortly thereafter, it exited the cultural consciousness until years later, when a new coworker had stoked interest in it all over again. But it was doomed, not this time by the lack of demonstrable ROI or the lack of “–auto_buddy”, but rather by compliance control. By the time I had installed the required pieces for compliance, the entire affair was loaded into the figurative airlock and blown out into space.

Before the end of Jabber, and running currently is another system, one that I find more engaging at least personally and that is Slack. It’s free to use, which is a huge help, and also available everywhere. I don’t have to limit it behind the walled garden of our corporate VPN. That is a huge benefit and really eases the use of it, in every case. I can immediately see the benefits of using Slack, especially in groups like mine, in Information Technology. So that’s currently the extent of it. Again, tech adoption is flat and terminal, the selling point for Slack is still tied up with the same point for Jabber. You can only demonstrate the ROI when you have full engagement, and you can only get full engagement when people see the rewards of ROI. So even Slack is just a moribund as Jabber was. But at least with Slack there is room for enticing directions it could take. I’ve been kicking around the notion of examining Slack’s position in a B2B framework. Like between MSP’s and their customers. The MSP starts a Slack and invites their customers to join. Then each customer has a channel that they are invited to. Then the company staff at the MSP hop on Slack and use it for their own benefit. Everything is segregated using Slack’s internal controls, so the MSP gets a benefit immediately and the customers can effectively chat up their reps with a single click on an app, a website, or their phones. This could enhance the collaborative power between customer and provider. Invoices posted, updates about payments, and with IFTTT looming in the background, new automated benefits could be crafted and rolled out to customers immediately.

This could also revolutionize B2C relationships as well, but that would take more corporate bravery than even the B2B solution would. I don’t actually expect anyone to seriously accept my shoot-the-moon ideas, but I would like to imagine the world where I could start my Slack app, see all my professional relationships and be able to communicate with them that way. Maybe someday if Slack succeeds and more people ask the right questions. More people actively interested in collaboration would also help.