It has provided a framework to recognise the risks that we face as an engineering company, assess them, prioritise them and manage them so that the business recovers from just about any event. There is plenty of work still to be done, but now I know where it is all headed.

And I have found one of the authors, Afsar Syed, to be very approachable via the Sentryx website.

A necessary part of business continuity is essential data protection. The more I thought about how to ensure this, the more secure offsite data storage became an essential element of a backup regime. The service provided by Connected is fantastic. The client is light, the data transfers are incredibly efficient, and depending on what your data is worth to your business (priceless!), the pricing is very reasonable. The Connected DataProtector looked good and now that I use it, I have to say it is better than I imagined.

As we have two main work sites, we can now very easily use the Maxtor drives in rotation every week or so and maintain up to date offsite backups. This was already happening to some extent, but Retrospect offers much better management of the backup media and backup sets than the previous software. And buying the bundled product with an external hard drive provides an inexpensive upgrade path to a business class product.

On the IT side, I see that Autodesk have released 2006 versions. The life of 2005 versions was disappointingly (ridiculously, even) short, and I really wonder why they expect everyone to upgrade annually. Moving to 2005 versions has worked well for us, but we frequently run into compatibility issues with our business associates, and I don't see any compelling reason to make matters worse too soon. My own IT efforts are at present focussed on integrating InfoPath into our workflow.

I ordered a power supply for my Dimension 4600 on 19 January. No complaints about the price or order process. But two weeks later I called to find out what was happening. First I was told there was a payment problem, then transferred to spare parts and told it was not a payment problem, it was just that Dell have none and expect some to arrive at their warehouse on 11 February for delivery soon after. I wonder what would have happened if I had opted for the '3 year next business day on site warranty'; would their techs have access to the part?? I cannot help but think that I am being penalised for having the capacity to do the repair myself...

A comparison of the MS offering against some other spyware apps can be found here. While it hold its own, it may not be the only thing that you would want to rely on.

The bigger surprise was going home to my Dimension 4600 and finding that it also had died (18 months old). Turning it on makes the fan run and the power light flash, and that is all. This appears to be a power supply problem, although the ultimate cause is still to be determined. Having had several reliable Dell systems over 10 years, it was disappointing to have the two latest systems fail suddenly. Here's hoping the customer service lives up to expectations.

Scenario: http://server/subsite1 holds a master list of projects, and a document library of documents for each project. http://server/subsite2 is to provide a subset of the project list, and when an item is selected, provide a list of the documents for that project. (Ideally it would provide links to the actual documents and enable them to be downloaded, but that issue is yet to be overcome - it turns up in plenty of sharepoint blogs.)

Approach: the above is accomplished relatively easily with data view web parts and FrontPage 2003. The only tricky bit that I found was setting the connection parameters to retrieve the correct view. (Note that the web part only retrieves the first page of the view on the other site, so if the list is very long you may need to create a unique view with a large item limit to ensure that all of the data is returned. And you will need to find the GUID of the view to use as a parameter in the connection.)

References: the following articles provide a good basis to understand what is going on:

Building XML data-driven websites with FrontPage 2003 provides a good overview of the data view web parts and using the data source catalog in FrontPage;

Web Services Description Language (WSDL) explained is an older article, but I found it very informative when looking at the code behind the cross-site queries.

Result:

This is a screenshot of subsite2. The web part at the top of this screenshot retrieves a subset of list data from subsite 1. Selecting an item in the list provides an input parameter to the second web part, which filters the items in a document library on subsite 1 accordingly, and presents the results. (The two sites concerned are both at the same level in the site hierarchy, not parent-child sites.)

Now onto how to accomplish the connections.

In my case, I wanted DVWP#1, which provides a list of projects, to influence DVWP#2, which is providing a list of drawings. First, use the directions in the above blog post to make a age containing teh two web parts, and get both web parts to retrieve the information that you are after. The data in DVWP#1 can be filtered as desired by going to Data View Properties... and setting the Filters as required. DVWP#2 will not doing any filtering until after a web part connection is established, so the data you see in FrontPage will not necessarily look like the final view that you are after.

Open the page you want to work on in FrontPage, right-click the second web part and select Web Part Connections... This opens the Web Part Connection Wizard. The web part you have selected will be the source, then select an action, in my case Modify using parameters from... Click next, and select the target web part (which is the other web part on the page) that will provide the filter criteria. The 'target action' is Provide data values to... Click next. This brings you to this screen:

Select the column in target web part that you want to use as the input parameter. (In my case this is a project number.) Click next. If you want the first web part to highlight which item is selected, tick the box Indicate current selection using... And you are done.

Now set the filter criteria on the second web part. Right-click the web part and pick Data View Properties..., data view details appear in the task pane. Click on Filter, and set the criteria that you want. Note that the input paremeter passed in the web part connection is available as a value to use in the filter criteria:

Save the page, and that's it! Now you have two web parts retrieving items from another site, and the first one providing filter values to the second.

Some related notes 1) if you pick the first web part when setting up the web part connection, the process is much the same but the source and target are reversed and consequently the actions are reversed as well, giving the same end result; 2) if your cross-site connection requires a login, consider setting up a separate account just for this purpose with minimal rights (i.e. 'Reader').

And finally, I would love to know how to retrieve files from a document library across sites. By adding the document library to the data source catalog with Manage catalog..., I have successfully set up a web part that links to the relevant documents with a full absolute URL. And as I have the correct permissions, I can use this web part to retrieve the documents from the other site. But the data sources added with 'Manage catalog' reside with the Frontpage installation, not the sharepoint installation, so this web part will not work for other users of the site. So a web part is needed as a go-between to provide the correct login for the source site. This works OK for attachments to list items, but at this stage does not appear to be available for documents in document libraries. Ughh!!

If you find this post has been helpful, please leave some feedback.

My main gripe is the length of time that the scanner drivers take to load, and the impossibility of tweaking the scanner settings and getting it to remember them. I used to scan a lot of pencil sketches into Acrobat. Since the HP insists on resetting the black/white threshold to whatever it feels like, I have been forced to give up the pencil and draw in ink or end up with blank pages. While a scan profile with a custom B/W threshold setting can be created and set as the default, it refuses to use that one when Acrobat opens the scanner dialog.

And in the time that the scanner driver takes to load, I could boot my computer, scan and email a document with my Canon all-in-one.

One other thing - since I updated the flash rom to the latest HP release, the fax functions think that Letter sized paper is the only size in existence. I can set the paper size to A4 in as many dialogs as I like (both on the machine and in the printer, scan and fax options in the software), but as soon as it goes into standby mode, it resets to Letter. This is very annoying for incoming faxes, as every page received prints across two pages.

So, if you are considering a HP all-in-one for SOHO use, don't do it. Buy a Canon.

In my case, I have http://server/subsite_1 which is private and contains a master list of data, and http://server/subsite_2 which is for a different user base but needs to display a subset of the master list data.

I had tried some very long URL's to retrieve the XML of the right information; this worked within Frontpage but failed on the server. The above post uses the data view web part to retrieve information on the other site. I see no reason why it would not work just the same with sites on another server.

Update 29 November: It occurred to me that the login credentials need nothing more than Reader privileges to retrieve information, so I created a new user solely for use in cross-site data view web part connections.

I don't have all the answers, but I do have one proven idea. I attended a seminar on risk at which an insurance broker spoke about the need to set your company apart from the others as being aware of the risks and proactively managing it.

The result was a whitepaper that I wrote for our company. In it, I identified the various risks that we face as a consulting firm, and then described the actions that we take internally to counter each risk. For example, a design flaw is a potential risk. We counter it by employing experienced engineers and peforming independent checks in house. Gratuitous advice given to a contractor is also a potential risk; we don't do it. The process is simple and beneficial, as it creates an awareness of the risks that we face every day.

The benefits? Well, by passing this document to our broker at renewal time, we obtained a 10% discount on our premium. Three hours work went a long way towards paying my salary for the month! And the document will definitely be revised further for next year.

What they are likely to overlook is that the recommended speed is simply the recommended speed, based solely on limiting the g-forces experienced by the passengers to acceptable comfort levels. The design speed for the track was more than likely well in excess of two times the recommended speed for the curve. If it is ultimately shown that the tilt train, with an operating top speed around 160 km/h, was definitely going to be derail if it entered a corner 52 km/h above the recommended speed, then it is a very sad day indeed for the designers.

The governing engineering principle is simply that failures should not happen suddenly or without warning. If the train really was travelling dangerously fast, then the passengers and crew should have been experiencing obvious discomfort a long time before the incident. Time will tell.