Re: [seul-edu] doc standard instead of Software standard?

[Ramin Miraftabi <ramin@cs.joensuu.fi>]

* Bill Tihen -- TECHNOLOGY (bill@mail.tasis.ch) [991212]:%y33Sat, Dec 11, 1999 at 08:51:17PM +0100]:
> Thanks for the ideas.  
> 
> One hard part is convincing the admin that it is a 
> security risk they need to be concerned with.  How did 
> you folks learn -- the hardway I suppose?

Not the hard way, our bosses just threatened enough with the baseball
bat. 
> 
> How did you handle training everyone to save using the 
> other formats?  As many times as I show people, they 
> just seem to have a hardtime doing something that isn't 
> default.  (That's one reason I am in favor of requiring 
> a non-proprietary default save -- the other is we have 
> some problems with incompatible versions -- that can't 

We are talking about a software company here, I'd be very worried if
my fellow employee's wouldn't know how to save to a different
format. The best way to teach folks is to show them all how to do it
once, create a small doc with pictures on it which explains it
all. Then your bosses just say that they will not open anything that
isn't in the format. The people will learn very quickly.

Convincing the admin folks on the security risk is easy, just tell
them that the last email virus that came along forced Nokia to
shutdown their entire network for almost a day... My university has
implemented a policy that all messages that go through the mail server
and have viruses are automatically deleted, no questions asked. There
are enough examples of people taking it seriously that your admins
should understand it.

> I kind of like the HTML idea, it allows pictures and 
> many other features including tables and soon equations 
> -- however, it is an evolving standard -- can you think 
> of any tags that aren't backwardly compatible?

HTML 3.2 is a good baseline. How often to the folks in your school
really need formulas etc? How often does this stuff need to be edited
by others? Think of your realistic needs and weigh them against
security issues, I'm willing to help, as probably are most on the
list. Even though Helen (Sweetheart of the Internet) takes her
powers as sysadmin a bit too far at times, there are times when you
have to tell the admin folks that something just won't work. Give them
nice horror stories and things will start happening (if a virus can
delete .c etc. files, how long will it take for someone to make a
virus that would wreack havoc on database files?).

ramin
-- 
Ramin Miraftabi                         Student of Computer Science
email: ramin@cs.joensuu.fi              University of Joensuu
WWW: http://dawn.joensuu.fi/~ramin/     Joensuu, Finland

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