Why Outsourcing Might Be Smart

From a recent blog by Lewis Green
08.20.08



Why Outsourcing a Might Be Smart


This headline, sent to me by a colleague, appeared in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Should You Outsource Your Company Blog?" Like most questions addressed in communications, marketing and other similar fields, the answer is -- Maybe. It depends.

1. If the company doesn't have a communications or a marketing department, maybe you should.
2. If the company doesn't have an executive spokesperson with the time, maybe you should.
3. If the company's Legal and/or HR departments need to approve outgoing comments, maybe you should, but only if those departments get out of the way. Otherwise, don't do a blog.

Or maybe not. And here are the arguments, as I understand them, against outsourcing the company blog. The point of blogging is:

1. Having an authentic voice.
2. Giving customers a personal connection to the company.
3. Ghostwriters do neither.

Well, pardon me, but who do you think writes executive speeches, letters from the CEO, and all those personal words to shareholders one finds in the Annual Report, and web site content, and most of the pithy executive quotes found in newspapers? Guys and gals such as me. I also write and manage several company blogs, who are my clients. As the period on the sentence, none of those things are done without interviewing executives and employees, studying the company and its customers, and, finally, getting approval from the company spokesperson for everything I write.

Would it be better if someone from the company wrote the blog? Maybe, maybe not. When work is outsourced, the consultants often have more influence over the executives and more freedom from message management. And if we're fired, we haven't lost our jobs, just a job. We don't have the pressure of saying what we think the company wants to hear, at least many of us don't. More important, key inhouse staff are focusing on their other jobs and responsibilities, while gaining the outsider points of view and expertise, which are then translated into blog posts.

So, there you have it. One consultant's take on outsourcing blogging. Not right. Not wrong. It just depends.

Serious fault with PeopleSoft Performance Monitor fixed in PeopleTools 8.49.14

Monday, August 04, 2008

Serious fault with PeopleSoft Performance Monitor fixed in PeopleTools 8.49.14

In PeopleTools 8.49, PPM has a serious fault. It is very similar to scenario reported for PeopleTools 8.44 in GSC Solution 200769188: PerfMon: Too many httpd processes spawned/sockets opened when using PerfMon.

"When a 404 is returned from the monitor server the calling agent code only checks the HTTP return code but does not flush the input stream. This causes the connection to remain open until the GC finally closes the input steam which closes the open connection. This is easily detected by the increasing list of sockets in CLOSE_WAIT state [, as reported by netstat]. On NT there is no hard limit on file descriptors and therefore a crash is not noticed. On Unix platforms this can cause the process to run out of file descriptors before the JVM GC has a chance to run and free up the sockets."

Hence, when running the application server on Unix, you will reach a point where JSH processes cannot open new ports and PIA users can receive the 'Application Server is Down' message. So, this can cause the system to become unavailable until the application server is rebooted. To prevent this occurring, the PPM must be deconfigured. The Monitor URL should be set to 'NONE'.

According to PeopleSoft Global Support this problem will be resolved in PeopleTools 8.49 patch 14.

(Source: David Kurtz @ The Peoplsoft DBA Blog)