Computer, Computer parts, Computer history, Desktop computers, Computer help, Computer science

Locking Down Workstations

For years the office PC was truly a personal computer. Whether a standalone system or part of a network of PCs, the PC was controlled by the user. He or she had access to all files and folders, could install any applications, and had unquestioned control over settings and use. The PC was a revolutionary tool, making workers more productive and more informed-there was little reason to question such unfettered access.

But cases of abuse arose, such as excessive web browsing, gaming, and other indiscretions. Acceptable use policies were eventually established which were intended to assert the employer’s ownership and control over the PC while sanctioning a certain amount of personal use. The reality was, of course, that there was little the employer could do to monitor and enforce such policies.

” With recent developments in operating system security, such as Microsoft’s XP group policy management, systems administrators are able to greatly limit the access and control long enjoyed by users.”

In fact, recently there has been a dramatic backlash. IT organizations are imposing draconian lockdown policies upon user workstations which prevent any installation or change to the system. This addresses the abusers, but also undermines some of the advantages of the decentralized, distributed workstation for those trustworthy and conscientious workers who need some flexibility in their computing environment. In addition, harsh lockdown policies send a message of distrust and suspicion to employees, which is contrary to the service-oriented spirit IT should be fostering.

Recommendations:

A sensible approach should be taken in managing user access and in implementing group policies. Although administrative access should be viewed as a privilege and not a right, a middle ground can be taken which accommodates the interests of both IT departments and users.

1. Workstations in common or high-risk areas should be locked down to allow access to specific applications only.

2. A range of profiles with varying levels of privileges and access should be offered, and managers should be allowed to make judgments about who should have which profile.

3. Although full administrative access should be the exception rather than the rule, profiles for trusted workers should be open, disallowing only high-risk activities such as changing IP addresses or modifying rules.

Conclusion:

Managing IT resources and network security require good risk management. But managing risk does not mean eliminating risk. You must balance the need to secure IT resources against the goal of providing the organization with quality IT services. A one-size-fits-all lockdown approach to workstation management is an easy solution to controlling and securing workstations, but it is not service-oriented. Offering a tiered approach to workstation lockdown and leaving the decisions to managers may be the best approach to accommodating competing interests.

About Jonathan Coupal:

Jonathan Coupal is the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of ITX Corp. Mr. Coupal manages both the day-to-day and strategic operations of the Technology Integration Practice Group. Among Mr. Coupal’s greatest strengths are evaluating customers’ unique problems, developing innovative, cost effective solutions and providing a “best practice” implementation methodology. Mr. Coupal’s extensive knowledge and experience enables him to fully analyze client systems to recommend the most effective technologies and solutions that will both optimize their business processes and fulfill immediate and future goals. Mr. Coupal and his team build a high level of trust with clients, establishing ITX as their IT partner of choice.
Mr. Coupal holds certifications with Microsoft and CompTia, including MCSE, MCSA, Security+, Linux+ and i-Net+, and served as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for the development of the CompTia Linux+.

About ITX Corp:

ITX Corp is a business consulting and technology solutions firm focused in nine practice areas including Business Performance, Internet Marketing, IT Staffing, IT Solution Strategies and Implementation, Technical Services, Internet Services, and Technology Research. To learn more about what ITX can do for you visit our website at http://www.itx.net or contact us at (800) 600-7785.

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Alexa Toolbar - A Good Help on the Web

For many of us, life on the web is not complete without referring time and again to one or more toolbars. Near to 60% of all web-users I’ve visited thus far have their browsers sporting trendy toolbars, most commonly Google toolbar. As ubiquitous as they may be, we all have personal choice of toolbars like branded items, though it seems only a handful are more popular over a wide cross-section of surfers.

But, what is a toolbar?

Most often a toolbar is like a main menu-bar residing alongside in popular browsers, usually Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Like browser’s menu-bar, a toolbar too provides many options to viewers, the main aim being bringing focus to surfing on the net. Various hues of toolbars are available, majority of them being free of cost, but one feature that is common in nearly all of them is the ability to easily browse for relevant information from respective search engine. A second feature found in most toolbars is blocking pop-up and pop-under ad, which of late has proved to be more of an irritant than help.

How does toolbar fit in?

For people who frequently surf the net for information, a toolbar is of great help. The world-wide-web contains wealth of information ready to be tapped for use. Yet, for many, getting precise information is more often than not a frustrating experience. If you happen to refer to this book, titled “Google Power: Unleash the Full Potential of Google” [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0072257873/] by Chris Sherman, you would know that to get right information would rather require practiced skill so as to formulate your query perfectly. That is to say, if you’re not pretty skilled to do your searches, you may in all probability need to fine-tune your searches again and again. And this is where the toolbars come as great help. Toolbars do not eliminate pain of searching. It instead assists in pruning your browsing time so that you can devote more time to do what you want to with the information collected.

A subtle difference can be made out in the working of various toolbars. Thus, while search toolbars allow searching in your favorite search engines directly, meta search utilities are for searching multiple search engines simultaneously.

Alexa toolbar - how it helps?

One of my favorites is Alexa Toolbar. The variety of information that can be culled from Alexa toolbar about any webpage (and of course a website) is truly amazing. Alexa owes it to millions of users of its toolbar, for 2 of the most important toolbar information (Related Links and Traffic rankings) are basically aggregated culminations of what its toolbar users do while surfing the net.

But first, let us go through Alexa toolbar’s main features and how they’re helpful to web-surfers like you and me.

Traffic rank at-a-glance

The most impressive is perhaps the unique at-a-glance traffic ranking of any website. The figure displayed denotes the traffic rank of a particular website. Remember this is not the actual traffic rank. This figure is just a reflection of where a particular website is positioned in the long queue of those websites that are visited by users of Alexa toolbar. Now, if you feel this ranking is flawed, so it is. No doubt there. Yet, many people rely on this figure for the simple reason that in absence of any other similar data, Alexa toolbar users do form a good sample (even if insignificant compared to total web population) to provide some basic unbiased information.

Links to similar websites

The second very useful information that can be had from Alexa toolbar are links to some more websites that are similar to the one being presently viewed. A great help that. Why? Suppose you are looking for information on, say mosquito repellent. You start by searching the term on your favorite search engine, which then throws up a list of urls’ closely matching your search term in the SERP (search engine result page). As you select a url from the list and browse the related website that deals on the subject of your search term, you will simultaneously be shown links on the toolbar of similar other websites. If you feel the current webpage or website is not up to your expectation or if you are inclined to explore more options, you may simply click on the link of a similar other website shown on the toolbar.

When you follow one of those links and visit the new site, 2 things happen. One is of course that you are able to view a similar website without much of an effort. Second is that you will get to see a new set of related links on the toolbar that may be partially or fully same or different from the earlier ones. You will thus have multiple options of websites while you roam from one site to another looking for required information without the hassle of repeatedly referring to search engines. This feature allows you to save time you would have otherwise spent for searching afresh. Isn’t that a topper? You bet.

What else?

Quite a lot. For example, you will know ‘reach’ of your website per million toolbar users, which other sites link to yours (pretty common feature), search in various platforms (like stocks, news, dictionary and thesaurus, default search being in Google), email a webpage to your friend, be quickly taken to Amazon (Alexa is an Amazon company) for shopping and so on.

But what perhaps takes the cake is the feature provided in collaboration with WayBackMachine [http://www.archive.org/web/web.php], said to be the largest internet archive online. When you click the link (toward the right end of the toolbar, the ‘page history’) you will be taken to WayBackMachine’s search result page that details year-wise links of your website since the time it has come online. You click a link that says say ‘April 12, 1999′, and pronto you get to see what your website looked then. I felt pretty nostalgic while recently checking my painting website. Like seeing my childhood pictures in half-pants, eh! To download Alexa toolbar, click here [http://download.alexa.com/index.cgi].

Not for Firefox

Well then, an Alexa toolbar does indeed make web-life easier. There is though a major drawback. Firefox does not allow Alexa toolbar, and so Firefox users will remain bereft of Alexa’s advantages. However Firefox does permit using Quirk’s SearchStatus [http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/], which is quite a useful tool. SearchStatus is basically a toolbar extension for Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox users.

The advantage with SearchStatus is that it shows (if chosen) both Alexa Ranking and Google PageRank for a webpage in a remarkably unobtrusive manner. Locate it at the bottom corner of browser or on menubar at top, you may not even notice it is there. Authored by Craig Raw, SearchStatus is very cool in the sense that it offers nearly all that Alexa toolbar offers, plus you get to see some features of Google toolbar as well, including the all-important PageRank.

Do you need more?

The answer is a qualified ‘yes’. You may also need Google toolbar to make your web-life more complete. Let me explain. If you are an IE user, you may certainly like to install Google toolbar, for how else would you automatically know the PageRank of a webpage! On the other hand, if you make do with Firefox, you may perhaps omit Google toolbar if you have installed Quirk’s SearchStatus.

But then Google toolbar is so feature-rich that without it you will miss out on many advantages. I am not going to explain Google toolbar anew. Click here [http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/static.py?page=features.html] to know all you need to. The bottomline therefore is if you are an active surfer, you will most certainly benefit from both Alexa toolbar (or its ‘derivative’ through SearchStatus) and Google toolbar. As they say if it is good to be informative, it is still better to know how to remain informative. To that extent, toolbars are a necessity on the web, if not must-have.

A freelance web designer and content writer, and an avid web watcher, Partha Bhattacharya owns and operates WebInfo, a free hot internet web marketing and webmaster resources. Ideal for both start-ups and regulars alike. Dealing mostly on current topics, Partha’s blog is a good primer to understand tricky issues on search engine marketing.

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The Reality of Search Engine Submissions

Over the last few months, search engine submissions have changed dramatically. Now is the time to analyze the way we’re submitting our Web pages and to rethink our submission strategies.

Regretfully, I still see people paying big bucks to search engine submission services who will submit their pages to thousands of search engines for one “low price.” What they aren’t told is that the act of “submitting” their pages has nothing to do with top search engine rankings. Even taking a step back, submitting doesn’t guarantee indexing.

Fact: The majority of traffic to your site will come from the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! search engine, and MSN. Therefore, submitting to “thousands” of search engines really isn’t doing your site any good.

Let’s take a serious look at the reality of search engine submissions. Do we need to pay a submission service to submit our pages to the search engines? Can the search engines find our pages on their own, or do we have to pay them to index our pages? Let’s look at the variables and try to save you some money.

Search Engine Submissions . . . Ways to Submit Your Pages

1. Don’t submit! Let the search engines find your pages through links on other Web pages or Web sites.

To be honest, this is my favorite, most “stress-free” way to submit to the search engines. Think about it. You create your Web page and optimize it. You make sure to link TO the page from another page on your site, such as your site map. The idea is that when the search engine spiders your site map, it should find the link to your new page, visit the page, spider it, and index it. Can I guarantee it will happen? Of course not. That’s why you need to monitor your spider traffic and your rankings to make sure that the page makes it into the search engine’s index.

Search engine spiders were created to SPIDER the Web. That’s their “job” — to crawl the Web and index new pages. I have always found this method of “submitting” to be the most effective.

2. Submit pages through free add URL pages at the various search engines.

My main concern here is that the search engines have always said that over 90% of all submissions through free add URL pages is spam. I have never wanted my submissions to be lumped in there with all of that spam.

Therefore, I personally stay away from free add URL pages. In particular, I never submit to Google through its free add URL page.

3. Use Overture’s Site Match to submit to Yahoo!’s family of search engines.

Overture’s Site Match (http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ays/bjump/sm.jhtml) has taken the place of the old Inktomi, FAST, and AltaVista paid inclusion programs. However, Site Match isn’t just a paid inclusion program — it is also a cost-per-click program, with the cost being based on the type of industry you’re in. You pay a flat fee for your site to be reviewed, and then you pay a cost per click as well. The paid inclusion spider crawls the page every 48 hours, so you’re able to tweak it to try to get better rankings.

Site Match gets your pages into Yahoo! Web pages, FAST, AltaVista, Overture supplemental results, HotBot, and more, so the visibility is certainly impressive. It’s important to note that Site Match pages are shown with the regular Yahoo! crawler results with no distinction between the two.

If a page is important to you and you’re having problems getting it picked up by Yahoo!’s family of search engines, you may want to consider Site Match. However, it can certainly get expensive if you have a number of pages to submit.

4. Do we need software programs or search engine submission services that will submit our pages to thousands of search engines for one “low price”?

In a word — NO!

We’ve already learned that the majority of traffic comes from the major search engines. Submitting to the important international or minor engines through a software program like WebPosition Gold 3 (http://www.webposition.com/gold.htm) is a consideration. But submitting to thousands of search engines, many of which are “free for all” Web sites (pure junk), won’t benefit your site at all.

Save your money!

5. All of this is fine and good, but what if the site is brand new with no inbound links?

Get your site listed in a directory such as Yahoo! Directory (http://www.yahoo.com/) or the Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org). Then, spend some time finding a few sites that will agree to put links on their sites to yours.

Are there any vertical search engines and directories in your topic area? Visit Search Engine Guide and search through their topical search engine directory: http://www.searchengineguide.com/searchengines.html

So, take the stress-free approach with search engine submissions and . . .

1) Link to all of your important pages from another page on your site.

2) Get inbound links from another site pointing to your site.

2) Let the major engines find your pages on their own.

3) Monitor your progress. If a search engine hasn’t indexed one of your pages, make sure to place additional links to that page in the pathway of the spiders.

Important Note: You may be using an SEO company to handle the optimization of your Web pages, including your search engine submissions. Does this mean you’re paying too much for those SEO services? No. SEO work is extremely complex and time consuming, and a good search engine optimizer is helping to make your online business a success. The purpose of this article is to educate you on search engine submissions in general, since so many people wrongly believe that the acting of submitting pages will get those pages to the top of the search engine rankings.

In Conclusion . . .

So many Web site owners and SEOs make search engine submissions much harder than they have to be. Take a deep breath, direct the spiders through your Web site to make sure they are able to find your Web pages, and relax. Let the search engines do what they do best . . . spider the Web!

About The Author

Robin Nobles is the Co-Director of Training of Search Engine Workshops, where they teach “hands on” search engine marketing workshops (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com) in locations across the globe. They also offer Ultra Advanced SEO Symposiums (http://www.ultraadvancedsymposium.com) for advanced search engine marketers who want to take their learning to a new level. They have opened the first networking community for SEOs called The World Resource Center for Search Engine Marketers (http://www.sew-wrc.com) and have expanded their workshops to Europe with Search Engine Workshops UK.

robin@searchengineworkshops.com

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