I like to think SolarWinds has a pretty solid corporate sense of humor, especially surrounding that little four-letter word: GDPR. From the placard on the door of my boss's office reading "GDPR Readiness Valedictorian" to the various satirical Game of Thrones "GDPR is Coming" knockoff stickers you can find in various cubes, it's hard to miss the ominous feeling.   Don't feel dread, get read...y. Get ready. GDPR doesn't have to be painful, but it's also safe to say it can't be a one-size-fits-all solution. What you need to do is get yourself a plan. Plans solve problems, prevent breakdowns in communication, and (most importantly) cover you, your community, and your company's **bleep** in the scenario that you do eventually come across a request to be forgotten, or a request for data portability.   Oh, yeah, those. If you're catching up on the Geedz (pronounced "jeedz" - it's something only I call GDPR, but feel free to help it catch on), the General Data Protection Regulation entitles European Union citizens to certain rights with their data. Of which, thinks like the right to be forgotten and the right to data portability are covered.   Now, in the words of any good Texan, "I ain't got no legal expertise, so y'all will want to consult yer company legal teams on this."   To me, there are a couple of steps you can go through to make this easier than starting from scratch:   Meet with your company's legal team. They're busy people, but they'll appreciate you being proactive about this. As with all laws, GDPR is up to interpretation. Some companies will opt to read the law in its strictest form, some may be a little lax. Your legal team will be able to give you guidance as to how your company will comply. Complete a discovery and write everything down. What systems are you using? What private information do those systems capture and store? Educate yourself on how Lithium is helping us prepare in their ongoing development of the Lithium JX product. Here's a thread with some details. Make a plan. Given how your company wants to comply with GDPR, what systems you're using, and what information those systems have, how are you going to comply with the various facets of GDPR? If you want an example of a plan, I posted mine here for you. I guess you can party, at this point.   I know this isn't migration-related, but I hate seeing y'all suffer. Welcome to 'compliance'! Ben Garves THWACK Community SolarWinds ... View more

  I'll be honest, Lithy, I missed you last week. Things went a little crazy on our creative side, so I found myself working on some cool deployment projects instead of writing for my favorite blog.   What's new? I'm glad you've asked! You'll notice the next entry of this blog has changed to a new name, #MigrationMondays. That being said, this week I'm making this much less about migration and figured I'd share one of my favorite initiatives we run each year on the THWACK community.   March is coming, and we all know what that means. March Madness!   A few years ago, some genius at SolarWinds (not taking credit, I wasn't event here at the time) decided it would be cool to let the community participate in a Bracket Battle of it's own. They picked a category, set up a bracket of people in that theme, put up polls for each matchup, and launched. Since then, we've done a number of battles, from Sci-Fi to Villains, Captains to Sidekicks. We're all super excited for this year, but our category is still hush-hush for a few more weeks.   Want to see who won each category? You can peek using the links below. Spoiler alert: our community is a bunch of geeks. We use that term lovingly.   2014: Sci-Fi 2015: Villains 2016: Oh Captain, My Captain 2017: Sidekicks   Conceptually, setting these up is super simple in Lithium JX. You have a graphics-savvy employee build a bracket image and deploy vote buttons, which lead to specific polls where users can vote on each matchup. Once you close a specific round of voting (polls can be scheduled to close and open at specific times), you post vote links to the next round of polls, where users vote on only the winners of the previous round. On, and on, until you users have once again made sure yet another Star Wars character wins. Four years in a row.   Whatever we do, we'll make sure no Star Wars characters are in the brackets this year. *evil laugh*   This year I've worked hard in moving our static image to HTML and CSS, so we can have a responsive bracket that looks good 100% of the time. Warning: Not for the faint of heart or the faint of code.   To be honest, we haven't conceptualized what this will look like in Lithium when we migrate next year, but I'm looking forward to the challenge.   By the way, Lithy, I'm out next week for some snow time in Eastern Washington State. I wish you the best, and can't wait to write another post when I'm back. Behave yourselves out there! Ben Garves THWACK Community SolarWinds ... View more