CPShared

So in my last post, I hinted at big things to come….

So here’s the first announcement. About 2 months ago, Check Point approached me asking for ideas about whether they could use the CPShared community to assist them. Specifically, the Technical Publications group was looking for ways to get more feedback about Technical Publications, both from an errata and corrections standpoint and also as another avenue for user/consumer feedback. This started a dialog about what we can do together to promote and improve communications about Technical Publications, and as a result a few of the senior members here have been working to consider the best way forward for this.

The result of this is a new forum area on CPShared, devoted to communication about CP Technical Documentation. This will be monitored by the CP Tech Pubs team, and any/all feedback received here will complement the existing feedback mechanisms within Check Point. This represents a great opportunity for all of us to communicate with Check Point, and get our feedback to them through an interactive dialog. CP’s technical documentation, IMHO, is already pretty good, but this allows us all essentially to become part of the QA process on these documents and help everybody to improve CP Products and Documents.

I’m really excited by this. Considering this project is only a few months old, to be getting this sort of opportunity to work with Check Point is a fantastic endorsement of what we’ve created here. I’d encourage all of you to dip into the docs and if you’re aware of anything that is not correct, inaccurate, outdated or needs a better explanation, use this chance to let the people who need to know about it. I hope this is the first of many collaborative exercises we can do with vendors to make this community shine.

Enjoy!

admin News

Been a while since I’ve written a blog post – for those that weren’t aware, I’ve recently returned from getting married and my honeymoon, so obviously this little project has been much, much lower on my priority list!

What was really great to see from my perspective was that CPShared basically ran itself while I was away – it was great to come back from several weeks of wedding prep chaos followed by some extreme relaxation and damn good Balinese food to see that the community happily carried on and brought all sorts of interesting stuff to the table. While we’re not on the same crazy growth spurt that this site and community started with, there’s still a constant trickle upwards in both membership and content, and more importantly a LOT of really strong feedback and return visits.

I can’t reveal as much as I’d like yet, but there’s three big things coming up soon that will be unique to Check Point communities that should pan out over the next few weeks/months. Suffice is to say that the growth in the community has been noticed by a number of interesting groups, and there’s some really exciting opportunities for collaboration coming up.

Keep the content coming, particularly the RFE ideas. Keep asking those questions you’ve never been sure about. Most importantly, keep the really positive spirit of collaboration and community that we’ve got going continuing. Perhaps it’s because we’re so locked into our “trust no-one” mindset; perhaps it’s also because most IT Security people work in small teams around people and a culture that don’t really understand the online world from our perspective, but it’s very easy to get insular in this profession. What’s exciting is seeing how much better we can all do our jobs when we find the right platform for trusted communication – I think that’s something we’ve managed to nail so far.

Enjoy!

admin News

Well…. CPShared has really taken off in the past two weeks. It’s a surprise to see how many new people have appeared, and really satisfying to see the great and interesting content that’s coming forward. People have been making the very obvious comparison to CPUG, but I think it has become clear that there is a very different tone and style of conversation developing here, which really was the goal of having an alternative place to discuss Check Point stuff. I hope to keep on encouraging that – while some elements of the setup of this site were related to the way that CPUG was going, the ultimate goal was really to create something that could complement the best parts of what Barry has achieved there, and ultimately provide more resources and avenues for communication to the Check Point community at large. My wildly optimistic view is that we’ve already gone a long way to achieving that.

What’s also good to report is that Barry has changed his stance on CPShared. I won’t go too far into the personal details, but the slightly disappointing stance on censorship taken by Barry at CPUG has now been lifted, and now we can start a useful cross-pollenation of information between the two sites. To date, Barry has not re-instated the censored posts, but at least moving forward this should not be an issue.

More new things that have been done :

• Post count is already hitting 1500 posts! Membership is also growing strongly, even with our destruction without prejudice of spammers. Something I really like is that our percentage of contributor to lurker is also very good. So people are coming here and wanting to contribute. I like that!
• The site now has an SSL certificate, so that https: access is working. This adds a layer of protection to the forum against nasty tools like FireSheep. So far, SSL is optional, so if you don’t want to use it, there’s no requirement.
• ForumRunner support is being added for mobile clients. The big thing about this is that it also supported SSL (unlike Tapatalk at this stage) but their SSL support is experimental.
• The Senior membership came together and created an Acceptable Use Policy for the forum. This is a slightly legalistic but important step to ensure that we’re clear on how to deal with controversy on the forum. While I strongly hope we never need to use it, it’s a good thing to know that collectively we have both a united front on what sort of culture we want to promote, as well as the governance processes to deal with anything difficult.
• Lots of really interesting discussion about the RSA Hack and SSL compromises of the last week. While this is a CP forum, it’s narrow minded to think that these things don’t affect us as Security Professionals.

There’s a couple of other big releases that we have in store, but I’m not quite ready to talk about these yet. Keep watching and posting, and as always if there’s something you’d like to see, let us all know.

admin News

Wow. So March 11th was the day we took the site a little more public. I must say, the uptake and the feedback from the site has been well beyond my expectations. I really started this thinking that there’d be a few people who would appreciate the approach suggested here, but with no real idea as to whether there was a real need, or even a real demand for another place to discuss Check Point issues.It seems that even with just a small amount of word of mouth, it’s grown significantly.

Already we’ve achieved a number of notable items :

• 500+ posts of content
• Set up a number of senior members, CP Partners and CP staff (both past and present) who have already become active contributors.
• Appointed a set of moderators to assist with killing spammers
• Found by spammers – it’s amazing how quickly that happens!
• Made an agreement with Tobias Lachmann to be a sister site to his excellent blog (see link on right), so that people can use this forum to comment on his blog posts
• Became the new official home of danjun’s excellent UTM-1 Edge FAQ – this is far anad away the best public resource on Safe@ and VPN-1 Edge devices.
• Made contact with the developer of SmartSPLAT, a cool new(ish) utility for SecurePlatform administration. We hope to do more in this space.
• Set up Live Chat functionality
• Set up Tapatalk integration
• Set up a Twitter feed
• Debated a lot about a logo – my kingdom for a graphic designer!

I owe a big debt of gratitude to a number of people. To lammbo, boldin and tobbela for offering to assist with moderation (lammbo’s axe is truly to be feared, although the antispam measures are actually working pretty well now!). To phoneboy and others who have placed mentions on their own social media and blogs. And to the senior membership who have guided me in making suggestions for forums and features, as well as seeding plenty of good and interesting things to read.

I hate to end on a slightly sad note, but there has been one negative through this. It seems that the largest CP User Community site out there, CPUG, has decided that this site is some kind of threat, and has actively censored any attempt to spread the word of what we’re doing here. I am saddened and disappointed that the owner of that site has chosen to compromise his own stated principles on forum management and administration, and chooses to see this site as some sort of “competitor”. My perspective is simply to provide a resource to the Check Point community that I’ve been actively involved in for many years now, and I think it is truly disappointing that his actions are motivated by self-interest rather than by being a part of the community he claims to represent. CPShared doesn’t sell anything here, and we’re happy to promote any and all resources that make using Check Point products and services better and easier, including CPUG itself.

So join in all – the Perfect Setup projects are just starting to get some momentum. Post an intro and tell us a little about yourself, and we’ll get this thing rolling.

Enjoy!

admin News

CPShared – Welcome to the new community for Check Point-related news, opinions, tips, tricks and ideas.

Why CPShared? For the techies, this means the SVN foundation that runs at the core of Check Point’s products. For the community, it is our hope that this will be a community of peers to enhance our knowledge and experience of Security, as well as a forum for us all to share our knowledge and experience.

So what’s new about CPShared? First, we’re working to get the vendor and partner community directly involved in what we’re setting up here. We expect and encourage the vendor and partner community to actively participate, and use this forum as another way to get their message out.To that end, we’ve set up areas for the Partners and Alumni of Check Point to communicate and keep in touch. These areas are private and restricted to that community. If you are a Check Point alumni or work for a CP Partner, please message the admins in the forum and we’ll upgrade your access.

Second, the focus here is on productive information you can use as reference and expert opinions. Our plan is to build the most comprehensive list of tips, tricks and how-to’s independently hosted, as well as build what will hopefully become the definitive repository of tools and applications developed indepedently of Check Point. If you have a tool, application or script that you have been working on, please contact us through the forum and we’ll set up a dedicated area for your project.

Third, we are hosting a public forum for users and partners to submit RFEs and feature requests for vendor products. Not only that, but we provide the ability for our users to vote on RFEs, so that everyone can comment and assess the popularity and desirability of enhancements to hosted products. We will be actively lobbying the vendor community to use this as a tool for their own product management, so hopefully we can shape the future of these products as well.

Fourth, we intend to collect blogs from experts in the user and partner community, as well as blogs from our vendors themselves. These blogs will be a blend of insightful technical content, commentary on Check Point product development, and independent comment (and hopefully feedback!) on Check Point events and news. The hope is to provide a closer and more informal place for vendors, partners and users to share opinions and occasionally be controversial!

This homepage will be regularly updated with a blog about notable additions to the forums. Recent posts and direct links to blogs are on the right. This is an evolving project, so if there’s anything you’d like us to add to enhance this site as a resource, PM robmitch through the forum.

Enjoy the forum….

R.

admin News