"Ignorance is bliss"- as the saying goes, and it can be expensive when you are talking to snake-oil salesmen of computer systems. The rule is, caveat emptor ("let the buyer beware").
Whenever you plug your laptop or thumb drive into a client's knowledge systems, you may need to be able to share knowledge, which is often in the form of documentation. You need to have common, up-to-date and preferably "open" standards for this. Some organisations have really good knowledge-sharing or workgroup systems. Others do not and just use email to spray copies of documents around. This is a small case-study of one of the latter.
Last year I was working on an assignment for a client whose IT operation was running a moribund, unsupported version of Novell GroupWise (v6.5.6, from 2006), on an IT infrastructure that was based on an archaic operating system (Windows 2000). I was pretty surprised by this as, though the business processes in the organisation were pretty high up the CMM (Capability Maturity Model) - being at Level 3 or higher in some cases - they were using archaic systems to support these processes that I had thought no-one used any more.
I was further surprised when I subsequently learned that there were some areas of the organisation that were running a trial/POC (Proof-of-concept) of a couple of different modern-day workgroup systems that were unrelated to Novell's GroupWise.
