3 new heroes in next generation IT Departments

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Simon

I’ve already highlighted how IT departments are going to change over the next few years a few times and what some people in those departments are going to be doing as their roles inevitably change but there are going to be some new roles that appear too.  These roles will start to shape how the IT department works for the next few years and, just like all IT jobs are, they’re a response to the changes going on in the business and in the market.  As the industry chases the promised befits of cloud like reduced cost and increased agility these roles are going to be the new linchpins (as Seth would say) able to cross boundaries and pull leavers.

They won’t be the only people in the team, they will be new people or people who’ve stepped over from another discipline.

Cloud integration engineer

Linking everything together is going to be critical in the future.  I wouldn’t say we’re at cloud version 1.0 yet – we’re probably closer to 0.7 where people are working out how to do cool things, there’s lots of experimentation going on.  As we as an industry marches forward we’re turning over more rocks and identifying new bugs that need squashing.  Who is doing the squashing though depends upon the type of bug but it’s clear that, as with anything new, we’ve got technology blazing a trail and lawmakers and regulators playing catch up.  Add to that mix the fear of vendor lock in that some people have, the fear of giving up “control” and the worries that accompany anything new and you’ve got a mix complex mix of problems to overcome.

That’s where hero number one, the Cloud Integration Engineer comes to the rescue with his super power – connectivity.  Cloud integration engineers will be adept at connecting public clouds and private clouds to create the now much touted hybrid cloud, part in your sphere of granular control, part in the sphere of vendor management.  These guys will know the technology involved in Windows Azure to a deep enough level to understand how to connect an Azure and an on premises application together (hint they’ll be using Windows Azure Connect).  These guys will also know how to throw up an EC2 instance and have it pull data from a SQL Azure database and they’ll know how to connect Exchange 2010 to Office 365 in a coexistence scenario so that the 2000 guys in a field in Devon get fast internal email over their 256k internet connection whilst the field guys get rapid connections where ever they are around the world.

Some will be experts in plumbing finished services (SaaS) together using APIs and code to do magic, others will be PowerShell gurus that can provision 100 mailboxes with a single command, others still will make ninja like use of the tooling.  These guys will likely be capable of code but will understand the plumbing of enterprises well enough to make things seamless.  They’ll have a better understanding of security than most developers and IT pros but they’ll be connected to the business so they’ll work as guides to security not gate keepers to access.

Cloud operations manager

Operations in the cloud is far simpler than it is with traditional infrastructures, primarily because you don’t need to manage everything at the most granular level.  Managing IT Operations in the Data Centre is about managing servers, making sure they’re up, making sure the hardware is working, making sure they have enough memory and CPU for their highest load ( + 15% or so) , for some this will be the old days, but for most it’s today – even if they’re virtualised.  Virtual doesn’t make resource management go away – it just changes the economics.

With the cloud you still need to manage resource and ensure availability to some extent – but it is an easier job.  You don’t need to make sure that servers have enough memory any more, you need to make a choice about scaling up or out on demand.  Scaling up is adding more servers, scaling out is about adding more powerful servers.  It takes intelligence to make that call, it takes understanding of the business value of scaling, both the process of scaling and the decision can be automated though.  To crystallise that lets take the ever-so-much over used tap metaphor of cloud.

In the tap metaphor we equate supply to a tap, when you turn it on the tap runs and you get the resource you want – cool.  However you pay for what you use, so what happens if you’re not doing anything useful with your water, if it’s just running down the drain?  If you equate the tap to a cloud service and the water to compute resource you get the picture – especially when you consider that taps get broken, develop leaks or occasionally a rogue plumber installs them.  You need to ensure that the capacity you use is being used for business – that’s where the Cloud Operations Manager comes to the rescue with their power of insight.

These guys will be able to use their close business relationship to determine when it’s right to allow the tap to run free, and when it’s time to turn it down.  When you’re being DDOS attacked and when you’re seeing a sales boom, when you’re internal users are hammering your SharePoint because the company just announced pay rises or because Bob from accounts accidentally posted his personal photos to the whole company he looks funny.

Cloud Operations Managers will also be watching what’s happening to ensure it’s sensible and complies with policy (which is obviously boring and stifles innovation / agility) but who else is going to make sure that when Bob in accounts leaves he doesn’t take his Docs account with him and oh the company looses all that information – that knowledge, the business intelligence, the competitive edge – just because the employ left taking their personal documents with them in cloud storage.  They have the super-power of understanding.

IT Marketing and Communications Officer

Communication is why businesses succeed and fail, you can have a great plan, sound strategy, superb revenue streams but if your team can’t communicate they can’t succeed.  When IT is one of the resources in the mix that allows your organisation to get things done communication about it’s benefits is essential.  If you’re going to guide your organisation to make the most informed choices and to make the most of what they’ve paid for you need someone to be evangelising the options.

We’ve tried this as an industry before, numerous times over but a skill set that allows your IT department to market it’s wares it’s what’s needed.  You need your people to know that they will benefit from using cloud storage because it’s pervasive and lets them access their information anywhere.  Previously we as IT guys would probably have said that in terms of “to reduce the load on the file server so that we can save 2gb of storage” – terms that don’t matter to the end user.  Marketers are adept at making things relevant to the their market, internally this means translating, explaining and engaging a user community.  I’ve seen this done a few times, often under different banners with differing levels of success – however it’s worked best when a marketeer got involved.  Essentially these folks will breed cooperation.

Summary

So there we have it, three new roles, superpowers of connectivity, understanding and cooperation, which when you think of it don’t sound that super do they?  By the way all of these roles are available on job sites today.  Whilst researching I found a role paying £120k per anum doing Windows Azure integration with existing systems, Operations Manager roles that commonly reference SaaS/IaaS/PaaS and private cloud and for the IT Marketing roles are hidden away in specialist recruitment circles – which is always a good sign.

If you think that these new roles will add cost to IT then, sorry, you’re wrong and for two reasons.  The first being that they will possibly not be part of IT itself, IT will virtualise these roles into other areas of the organisation to provide deep integration with the day to day reality of what the organisation does.  Secondly they’ll be saving money or making it, IT Marketing Officer will be extracting every last penny from the move to cloud based email like Exchange Online, the Cloud Operations Manager will be ensuring things stay on track and costs don’t scale out of control and the Cloud Integration Engineer will be helping make money by doing new innovative stuff – day in, day out – creating competitive advantage.

As an IT Pro how do you get there?  Learn.  Learn about virtualisation, learn about cloud.  We have webcasts, jumpstarts, downloads, resources and you probably have free training hours if you have Software Assurance or an Enterprise Agreement.  Us it.

3 new heroes in next generation IT Departments

Posted in Cloud, Consumerisation, My TechNet Blog | 2 Comments

5 Imperatives for modern IT departments

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Simon

Last week I posted about how the cloud is going to affect IT departments in the future, thinking about how some roles are affected and the like, but this time I’m setting out a mini-manifesto for IT departments.  This mini-manifesto isn’t for the IT departments that want to continue doing what they’re doing, it’s for those IT, IS, MI, ICT, (whatever TLA) departments that want to survive and add real value to their business.  To be harsh it’s the for ones that want to get on the train of change not be run down by it.

Lets add some context.  There are mega trends at work that are changing what IT is asked to do and by whom.  Cloud computing is changing the tasks business IT people need to perform, a move from box patching to capability improvement, from break-fix to make-better; Consumerisation is changing who drives decision making, that sexy looking new PC vs. big grey box – the decision came from the user (who works in marketing and likes shiny shiny).  To evolve I’ve created the following 5 imperatives that I think could drive modernised IT:

Be a guide not a gate keeper
It’s a big scary world out there and whilst user interfaces and workflows have been improved there are still things in technology that go bump in the night.  It’s now easy for anyone to go and buy some servers on their personal credit card, buy a web site, bolt in some database stuff and create themselves a business critical ecommerce system – no IT involved.  It’s now easy to decide that you don’t like the clunky corporate email system that hasn’t seen investment since 1999, set a rule to forward everything to your favourite web based email of choice (or worse chain them together to circumnavigate policy) and use that wonderful web mail; use it on your PC; your phone; your laptop; your mums-friends-aunts-sons PC.  Love sales? Don’t like your cumbersome CRM system?  Easy give all your data to someone who appears trustworthy and get selling!

They all sound pretty poor to seasoned IT Professionals and I’ve probably just given all the security people a fit but it’s happening every day.  The reason is that it’s become easier to work around IT than with them.  That has to stop.

Being the guide is about knowing what the best options for your business are and directing the business accordingly.  Lets take email as an example.  Everyone uses email (give or take) but the top pain points are all addressed by cloud based email services: storage, availability and ease of use.  No one likes having to clear down their email, no one likes it when they can’t access their email (also people don’t like it when they can’t get their email on their device of choice now), no one likes not being able to find things through search.  Web based email takes care of all this but not all are created equal.  Add in some of the other stuff that people like to have – one single corporate address book that updates automatically, single sign on (so they don’t forget passwords that someone has to keep resetting at £5 per helpdesk call)…you get the picture.

The role here is to guide the business to make a better choice, guide them to fully featured enterprise capable cloud email and not to a consumer focused solution that will eventually cause them and you pain through outage or even worse data leakage.

 

Make information available in appropriate ways
One of the facts of life today is that people need information to do their jobs (yes everyone – as I write this I’m watching a team of builders throw up a block of flats, they keep waking me at 7am on weekends – any way they have an iPad that has their job details on, including the plans they’re building to, I just hope they have the scale right).  As a result I believe we have a personal connection with data, we see it as our right.

Unfortunately not everyone spends their time thinking about the consequences of access to data but it’s something that IT professionals know is part of our job – it’s so ingrained it’s a cultural norm for us.  Typically though we’ve controlled information by saying – No Bob you don’t need to see the CEOs Payroll details and we did this by preventing Bob’s access, physically stopping him from being able to access the information.  With consumerisation and cloud though our data gets more mobility.  Let’s say that Bob is actually the HR director and therefore he’s in a position to know our CEOs salary so he has the right to access the information; does his “right” to access the information extend to when he’s on a train, surrounded by people reading over his shoulder?  Does that “right” extend to being able to download the information to a device without encryption and leave it on a park bench?

The logical answer is probably not but the people who make that choice are the business and they need to understand the risks and rewards of new ways of working.  There are solutions that the new IT department will be required to put in place that will help secure information availability, not just access – luckily the toolbox is full of familiar kit.  Need to secure emails so that sensitive info isn’t available on devices with weak encryption (but so that email still flows how your users want) – Rights Management in Exchange 2010 is your friend.  Need to provide a secure desktop environement to use the HR system on a variety of devices – RDS, Citrix and Quest have solutions.  Need to prevent Bob accessing the CEOs payroll data from his PC that faces an external window at street level (seriously what’s up with Bob!!) – Quest have a solution.

This imperative is about knowing what the right mechanism is to put in place to enable access to information, how the user wants it, with the security that’s just what the business requires.  Not too little not too much it’s enabling access not preventing it

Promote inclusion, Prevent exclusion
Can your users bring their own device to work? Are your users brining their own devices to work?  If you said no then you probably work in a very secure part of the government where mobile phones are removed from people’s pockets when they walk in and placed into individual faraday cages.  There’s an inevitability here – the horse has already bolted, sorry, move on.  It’s not about stopping people using their devices – that will just p**s them off – use the above imperatives.  Guide them to make a good decision about the devices they should buy for personal use, then ensure that they can access most of the information they need for their day to day work life on that device but be sure that the sensitive stuff is protected.  Research shows they’ll be more productive (I won’t quote it – they’d charge me) but they’ll probably pay for their own mobile phone handset too because it’s such a personal thing – a part of them.

It’s not just about phones, it’s about any device.  It could run Windows, Android, OSX, iOS, Chrome – in the future you won’t care, all you’ll care about is making sure that the person can do their work.  That will mean securing their device, securing your network (which means moving to a model of not trusting your own network), securing your information and ensuring it all ticks along.

It is also not just about devices.  Your users will be buying corporate resources on their credit cards because it’s easier to source a cloud service than it is through IT.  So make sure you know the cloud.  Make sure your curate the available cloud resources for your people, make it easier to take your recommendation by making your recommendation worth something.  They want to setup forwarding of emails to xyz cloud email solution – just make sure they can’t forward the sensitive ones (see above “Control information availability”).  They want to build their own e-commerce system, help them out by recommending one that secures passwords in an encrypted format not plain text – whatever your security standards are.

What’s the alternative.  You buy the hardware, you mandate the decisions, you become viewed as the hard route.

 

Care about the business and the people in it
You need to know what the business is doing – it’s not sexy, there are now spinning disks, no flashing lights, no cables – but you need to be as involved in where the business is going as Finance, HR and Marketing are.  This one is obvious so we won’t spend much time here, but if you know your business as well as they know themselves and know technology better than they do then you’re onto a winner.

 

Let your IT people have play time (measure it)
This should be very popular for the operational IT Professionals among you and slightly less popular within the operational IT managers.  You need time to invest in the new things you want to be able to allow you business to do, your IT team will need to be focused on exactly what your users are – new shiny things that help us make money or feel good.  As an IT Professional I believe you should be spending at least 10% of your time exploring technology, we work in the single most exciting field in the world – go play.  If you think your job is about making Windows XP work really well for Bob then you’re in the wrong place or at least you will be soon – eventually your business will move on and without your skills being current you’ll be…lets not think about it.  If you don’t know Windows 7 as a well as you know Windows XP by now then you should be panicking, downloading evaluations of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008R2, Hyper-V, System Center, Office 365, Windows Intune and anything else you can lay your hands on to get yourself up to speed.

If you’re an IT manager and you’ve not got a team that wants to upskill constantly then how are you ever going to move to a model of guidance, inclusion and information availability that makes your business love you?

 

Summary

The world is changing rapidly and IT needs to change to stay ahead so start with a step change in your organisation, kick off “project new dawn” (sounds very Tom Clancy) and centre on these key themes:

  • Be a guide not a gate keeper
  • Make information available in appropriate ways
  • Promote inclusion, Prevent exclusion
  • Care about the business and the people in it
  • Let your IT people have play time  (measure it)

2538.Simon 2D00 May 2D00 2 5F00 thumb 5F00 697F3BAD 5 Imperatives for modern IT departmentsSimon is an IT Pro Evangelist specialising in Client and Cloud technology and doing lots of thinking about the future of the IT Profession. His TechNet blog contains his thoughts on much the same.

5 Imperatives for modern IT departments

Posted in Client, Cloud, Consumerisation, UK TechNet | Comments Off

How the public cloud affects your IT Department

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Simon

No one can fail to see how much impact the ideas of cloud are having on our organisations and as IT Professionals the most direct impact we feel is on us, on those we work with, on our IT Department.  It doesn’t matter whether your “IT”, “IS”, “ICT”, “Information Management”, “IM” or whatever 2 or 3 letter abbreviations you have the cloud is starting to have an impact.  Is it bad?  Is it good?  Two questions that only only time will reveal the answers to but there are changes afoot.  It doesn’t matter whether your company has started to embrace cloud yet – eventually it will – in this article I’m focusing on how it’s going to change some of those specific roles in your IT Department.

Before we do that though lets just add some cloud clarity so that we know where we are.  The cloud is any technology that enables on-demand rapid provision and release of resources that are highly available and shared between a group of users.  For the purpose of this article we’re talking about resources shared between people who do not necessarily belong to the same organisation a.k.a the public cloud.  Public cloud is arguably one of the top two technology trends affecting your IT Department today with the second being consumerisation – all those “unmanaged” devices that are popping up and you’re now being required to support.

You are now probably seeing demand for some of the following types of services:

  • Web based email
  • Web based file sharing
  • Web based CRM
  • Web based line of business software
  • Web based support software
  • Cloud based hosting

And in addition you’ve probably started to notice that you’re being excluded from conversations.  A macro level trend is going on around you, your users have started to be tech savvy enough to make IT decisions without you (or at least they think they have – you’ll obviously have to come to the rescue!)  One of the interesting key words just before that bullet is demand the trend of consumerisation has had an impact here and your users are now demanding that you provide them with IT Services on their terms. 

If this hasn’t happened to you yet it, will, it probably but someone forgot to tell IT.  This trend is most apparent when information starts leaking from your organisation through people emailing stuff home to work on because they have better tools. 

Think of a train hurtling down the tracks, if you���re in front of that train the futures not so bright…if you’re on it then it’s a better place.  That analogy is very close to home for some IT departments – I say it’s time to get on the train rather than trying to stop the thing with your bare hands.  So what does it mean for the life of some of our favourite IT Department people:

The helpdesker (a.k.a. Frontline support analyst)

As the first point of contact in the IT Department the helpdesk staff have always been a linchpin of the team, taking calls, taking flack.  It’s part of the job.  Most people start out here and learn one of the key skills that’s always seen them through the career they made: customer service.  And you know what, this is a growth area with public cloud.  Very few public cloud operators will provide end user support, they normally provide level 2 support (which tends to materialise in IT depts as level 3) meaning that they won’t answer user queries such as “how do I do x”, “I’ve deleted this email, how do I get it back”.  These folks provide a 2nd key skill too – business knowledge – even if you’ve outsourced your helpdesk you’ll find that the best operators know your business better than the worst.  I personally am starting to see a trend of “insourcing” where the helpdesk is being brought home.

The desktop technician (a.k.a. 2nd level support, a.k.a “Dave in IT”)

Desktop technicians are still seen as the face of IT by most end users, even if they don’t see them that often.  Most avoid giving out their direct line for fear of being stalked by Sally in accounts who just cannot use Excel – I know I’ve been there for many (joyous) years.  Again these folks know the people they help, they provide deep business knowledge and have early warning radar  and they combine a level of technical skill that makes most users think of them as heroes but interestingly they don’t get many calls from the younger people in the organisation but they do spend time with them exchanging stories around the coffee/tea/water/cigarette machine/shed.  And they’re friends with them on Facebook.

The desktop guys aren’t going anywhere though because the cloud doesn’t take the desktop away, you still need a machine to access it….well not so much.  In the future the desktop guys will spend more time working on other peoples kit than the companies.  They’ll spend more time ensuring people can work safely for the company with their own kit and less fixing problems as the end users naturally become more adept at fixing problems.

The server huggers

These guys have been the centre of the world for a good few years, they have the hard job – running the infrastructure – occasionally harbouring a small god complex (I am very much guilty).  The folks need to make the biggest change to their world, if you are one you need to be learning new skills day after day to keep up.  You need to know about virtualisation, what it is and what it isn’t (a magic bullet), you need to know about management technology, you need to know about public cloud platforms and infrastructures and the differences.  You also need to start to understand cost models (yuck) and you need to know how to connect both public cloud and private cloud resources.  You might not see this right now but people are going outside of your team to get hold of servers to do their job.

There are possibly people within your organisation using a personal credit card to setup a business critical ecommerce system, or store some data in the public cloud…without your governance.  It will become impossible to do anything about it because it will be too business critical so you’ll need to focus on connecting and managing it and ultimately on governing it.

The IT Manager

You’re probably going to meetings and being asked for more by the business (or they might have stopped inviting you).  Before it’s too late though you need to switch up what your team is doing, get them out from in front of the train and bear their whole weight down on making public cloud work for your business.  Why?  Because public cloud WON’T work for your business.  Not in isolation, you’ve got to couple it to what you do already, those servers and services your IT department is already running at 99.999999% uptime (+ added LOVE).  You’re role will be to become the leader of a group of trusted advisors to your business, a group of cloud savvy people who deeply understand the technology and who deeply understand the business.

Every aspect of the business is different the accountants want different things to HR who want different things to marketing and the security guy on the front desk.  You can give the accountants systems that don’t require downtime and manual upgrades each year while TAX changes are made – the software provider will do that for you.  You can give HR a web based payroll system whereby a huge data send isn’t required every month at pay run time (whilst everyone holds their breath).  You can give the security guy secure cloud storage and offload the constant video encoding of security camera footage from his PC to the cloud.

Summary

There are countless more roles and countless better examples but the idea here is to show you that the world is changing.  You don’t however need to be under the train since we’re at the right point to get in front and help our businesses make better decisions.  There’s no need to loose the technical skills we hold so dear, they just evolve and theirs no need to learn new skills in business analysis or some other discipline it’s just about applying what you know already.

Really the public cloud is a case of learning about the technology and helping your business apply it…that’s the secret sauce.  Try Windows Azure, Try Office365 and try what other people offer (then come back 7127.wlEmoticon 2D00 smile 5F00 0EAC937D How the public cloud affects your IT Department)

How the public cloud affects your IT Department

Posted in Cloud, My TechNet Blog | 2 Comments

Resources for my Azure for IT Pro #uktechdays talk

Posted on May 24, 2011 by Simon

Just another short post to provide the signposts to some of the resources I talked about in my Windows Azure for IT Professionals session.  First up is access to the free Windows Azure trial I mentioned and next is the training course that will take you through using learning how to use PowerShell with Windows Azure (actually it’s blog post that’s part of a series).

 

You’ll be in need of some tools too, so grab the Azure MMC here or just the PowerShell cmdlets but to use either you’ll need the AzureSDK.  You’ll also need some code to deploy so I’d suggest getting yourself along to Planky’s labs on Friday (there are two sessions, Friday morning and Friday afternoon, scroll to the bottom to reg) and you only need to do one!

Posted in Azure | Leave a comment

Resources from my #uktechdays “Better Together” session

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Simon

Hopefully for lots of you reading this you’ll be looking for some resources off the back of the turn I’ve just done about DirectAccess and BranchCache.  Bellow are some places with some really useful information.

Here’s a video by Kevin Remde that shows setting up BranchCache in hosted cache mode…

…and here’s a second video by Kevin that shows BranchCache running in distributed mode.

And a few months ago I did another demo showing the effect of BranchCache which you’ll find if you view the recording here. In this demo I use performance counters to highlight what’s going on.  Here’s a video finally of the config of DirectAccess.

Posted in Windows 7 | 1 Comment

Resources from my Modern Desktop Presentation

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Simon

You might have just seen my UK TechDays 2011 presentation which will be available online after the show, however if you didn’t get time to make a note of the resources, here you go:

•Springboard: http://bit.ly/W7SB

•Download Windows 7 Eval: http://bit.ly/smw7trial

•Office 365: http://office365.com

•Windows Collection PCs: http://bit.ly/wincoll

Posted in Office 2010, Office 365, Windows 7, Windows Phone 7 | Leave a comment

Licensing and VDI

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Simon

We were just doing a TechDays online webcast with Sarah Mannion and some questions about licensing just came up…in my back pocket I had some informative videos on just that so I thought I’d pop up a quick post with some pointers:

Virtualisation: Windows Server Licensing


installSL Licensing and VDI

Virtualisation: Applications Server Licensing


installSL Licensing and VDI

Virtualisation: VDI Desktop Licensing


installSL Licensing and VDI

Posted in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure | Leave a comment

Why you need to get off Windows XP and move to Windows 7

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Simon

Windows XP is cutting edge empowering a new wave of personal computing. The year is 2001 and Donnie Darko, The Fast and the Furious, A beautiful mind and Black hawk down are topping the movie charts…a short time later these will all be some of the first movies released on DVD. Since that medium wasn’t available to everyone we released the training materials for Windows XP on VHS cassette (this is of course 4 years before YouTube). It is time to move on because we all know this technology is no longer good enough for your business.

clip image002 thumb Why you need to get off Windows XP and move to Windows 7

Why isn’t XP good enough? There are many reasons but we are going to concentrate on the ones that actually matter to you . No not your mum, dad, kids, pets and other animals but your users. In 2001 the term “Wi-Fi” did not exist as an accepted term, the Wi-Fi alliance hadn’t created the term and was still the WECA (Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance) so there were no real standard standards for wireless Ethernet and so support in XP is limited. Now you might be thinking that Windows XP got a couple of service packs, the last of which was SP3 released in 2008 and you might well be asking why that uplift doesn’t make Windows XP good enough for today’s world?

Without a doubt Windows XP requires Service Pack 3 to be considered anything like a modern OS but even then it’s a bit like a new coat of paint rather than a new roof or foundations. The big features of XPSP3? Network Access protection, Black hole router detection, CredSSP, additional descriptive text (it’s in the release notes), enhanced security protection, cryptography and activation changes. All essential, none of which matter to your mother, your CEO or Jane in marketing. What does matter to these folks?

Well being able to connect seamlessly from home makes Jane in marketing far happier, that’s where DirectAccess using Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008R2 comes in. She just connects to her home wireless (buy pressing a button on her router for one click WiFi Protected Setup) and DirectAccess connects her to her corporate resources. She didn’t need to mess around with complex WiFi passwords and encryption settings, no checking she has connectivity and initiating a VPN connection.

Dan in IT has life easy with this setup too. Jane’s PC gets anti-malware and patch updates whenever he releases them to the WSUS server because, although Jane’s rarely in the office DirectAccess keeps her connected to the office whenever her computer detects and Internet connection. Dan gets other fringe benefits from having Windows 7 deployed in his organization too, if a user gets stuck with something or encounters a problem all they have to do is type record steps into the Start menu search. Within a few minutes Dan has a recording of the steps required to reproduce the problem so he can trouble shoot it with the built in Problem Steps Recorder.

clip image003 thumb Why you need to get off Windows XP and move to Windows 7

For me one the biggest additions that we did get with Windows XP SP3 was the addition of Network Access Protection (NAP). If you aren’t familiar with it NAP allows you to protect your network by isolating computers that aren’t up to an acceptable level of updates or malware protection until such time as they can be brought up to scratch automatically or remediated. It’s a technology that it’s easy to see can help reduce firefighting for malware outbreaks.

Obviously those are just a couple of the useful technologies built into Windows 7 but technology like BranchCache helps to streamline operations for branch networks by securely caching frequently accessed data in branches. Windows 7 is however far more about working in a much more modern way; the workflows that your users experience throughout are far easier and built for a modern world. Need to find a document: hit search; need to find a program: hit search; can’t remember the name of a setting you need to change: hit search. I normally explain this by encouraging people to work out how to change mouse buttons over (type mouse or button into search and you’ll have the job done in seconds).

From the point of view of the modern IT Professional it’s useful in two ways, firstly you don’t need to know the name of every setting and secondly your users won’t need to call you for every little thing, they just do what they expect to do today, search for it. With the emerging and accelerating trend of the consumerization of IT where people expect to be able to access everything they need and more on their own terms, including brining their own PCs in you start to see that you need a modern environment. In a consumerized environment you’ll want NAP protecting your network by the way, and you’ll want simple ways to recreate problems on nonstandard kit and you’ll want other things too.

However you might not be in a consumerised environment yet and you might be looking at other smart ways of doing things. So how about Application Virtualisation a feature available with MDOP that allows you to take an application and sequence it so that it can be delivered to any machine, without installation. Sounds good but pop central control onto the top and you’ve got a way of rapidly delivering applications to your computers – heck they don’t even have to have fully downloaded to the computer before the user can start using them. Say what? App-V sequences applications around the way that people use the application, so if it’s not needed immediately it becomes an on demand component that downloads only when needed.

MDOP’s a great addition to Windows 7 because it adds so much functionality for IT Professionals not only can you virtualize applications with App-V but Med-V allows you to virtualize applications that have compatibility issues with Windows 7 (IE6 is a prime example) so that you can provide support to help you over deployment hurdles. Your favorite feature though may well be the Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT) which extends the troubleshooting functionality available natively in Windows 7 to enable even cooler stuff. Need to reset local machine passwords: DaRT is your friend! Need to pull a hotfix off the machine that’s made things go a bit hinky: DaRT it is. The raft of things it can help with is immense.

So we’ve discussed some new features, some awesome troubleshooting tools and things to make your life as an IT Pro easier how about we do the same with deployment. Microsoft Deployment Toolkit makes your life hear easy and I’m sure you all know how much Stephen loves MDT so I won’t go there but that functionality can be embedded into System Center for a big company.

Windows Intune, which is new to the party adds some excellent options (although not application and operating system deployment) for those running smaller enterprises. The remote assistance on Windows 7 is superlative as is the management of the Windows Firewall, Windows Update and the inclusion of brilliant anti-malware in the subscription price. The big ticket item for me though is that you get a Windows 7 Enterprise license included for each computer with an Intune subscription (and MDOP for pennies more).

clip image005 thumb Why you need to get off Windows XP and move to Windows 7

I digress though; this is about why you should move away from XP and onto Windows 7. Let’s sum up and get back on track. Windows XP wasn’t built for today’s world, it was built when WiFi wasn’t around, before hardware was cheap and 64-bit wasn’t the norm, before people expected to be able to do at work what they can at home with their PC, before search engines were how you found something out.

No one wants to have to take a document home to make it look cool using spark lines; they want to make it look cool at work. They want to be able to use applications that don’t take hours to install, they want to be able to find things on their PC with search, they want to be able to work where and when they want.

For you though it means more. It means being able to add more value and enable business processes that enable cost saving or revenue generation, you can’t do that scrabbling to support things that are out dated. You don’t want the nasty surprise of someone brining their malware infected home PC in and it infecting the rest of the office, if they bring that machine in you wants it to be secure still. If they’re mobile you don’t want them on the road picking up a virus here, some spyware there and other stuff. Also you owe it to yourself and your career to stay up to date. The business benefits of Windows 7 are abound in countless case studies, but hopefully this made things more real for you of course you’ll find more on Springboard.

clip image007 thumb Why you need to get off Windows XP and move to Windows 7This article was originally written for Springboard.  Simon May is an IT Professional Evangelist in the UK for Microsoft; he writes, blogs, tweets and presents about Windows and Microsoft cloud technologies but most of all loves a good chat about tech especially if you can work in Windows Media Center. Follow him on Twitter or the UK TechNet blog.

Posted in Windows 7 | 1 Comment

“I don’t get the private cloud”, “We’re already virtual so we have a cloud”

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Simon

The title of this article is two made up quotes attributable to no one but that are common reactions I get when I talk to IT Professionals about cloud.  Sometimes I think them a strange reaction from technology professionals but really they are both based around a simple misunderstanding; what a cloud and specifically what a private cloud is.  The answer though is actually pretty clear cut if you look for a definition, we prefer the NIST definition, since it was independently created.

A cloud is:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

A private cloud is:

The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.

So lets take a look at the second of the two statements in the title given the context of these two definitions (if this seems a bit academic that’s going to go away quickly).  Virtualisation is a stepping stone on the path to the cloud because the cloud needs us to have a level of abstraction of separation from the workload or service we provide to the *stuff* that’s providing it.  I intentionally use the term stuff because it’s vague and non-committal.  The stuff can be hardware, that’s the virtualisation scenario that we’re most used to – taking a server running an application and virtualising the server and application together because it’s a pretty simple thing to do.  Virtualisation in the sense of a the cloud though can be at a higher level, taking the application or the workload that’s being done and virtualising that removing the specific requirements of the operating system underneath.  If you’re familiar with the terms of IaaS and PaaS then you’re probably seeing some parallels, but wait.

All we’ve done is virtualise something, it’s not at this point doing anything to take advantage of other parts of the above definition.  Sure it’s using a shared pool of resource but can you rapidly provision and release that virtual server or application?  Probably not if the infrastructure hasn’t been built to automatically know about other servers popping up and if it’s not aware of those other servers popping up how do we make them work perfectly together?  Manual intervention?  It’s not sounding like “minimal management effort”.

The essential next thing required around a virtualised infrastructure to enable it to become a cloud is management software that provides intelligence.  It’s time to introduce some new vocabulary to this conversation: fabric.  The virtualised *stuff* is the fabric.  It’s all the processors, disks, memory, SANs, Switches, racks, power blocks all the stuff that the OS and the application run on.  The management software becomes the fabric controller, making decisions about where resource is needed.  This fabric controller or management software isn’t the final step though, it’s not easy enough yet to be “minimal management”.

The final step comes from adding a mechanism that allows the end consumers of the services to utilise them without having any appreciation for the stuff that the fabric is managing.  We call this a self service portal, pretty self explanatory you’d think.  What that self service portal does is abstract the complexity for the consumer of the service but there’s still complexity there and someone, someone with understanding, needs to set things up in a way that they can be consumed.  In the case of Windows Azure, Office 365 or Windows Intune that someone is a clever kid inside Microsoft, in the case of the private cloud it’s the IT Professional.

Oh but we’ve not talked about private cloud yet.  What’s a Private cloud?  Well from the second definition it’s one that’s operated and may be managed by the organisation that uses it and that definition is not mutually exclusive from the above.  A private cloud must be highly virtualised, self managing, consumer servicing – if it’s not you have either a highly virtualised infrastructure or a highly virtualised and well managed infrastructure but not a cloud.  And no cloud is not just a term to put on something, there’s meaning behind it.

From Microsoft this means having Hyper-V, System Center and a Self Service Portal such as Self Service Portal 2.0

Get your questions answered on Twitter If you’re still confused by it all then I have a recommendation, tweet @ASKTechNetUK with a question and the hash tag #cloudpro and on Friday 15th April at 2pm we’ll answer your question along with lots of others we’ve already received.  We, of course, are real people, @simonster, @deepfat and Steve “Planky” Plank.

Get your questions answered by text and blog However if you don’t like the twitter thing, you can text your question to 80809 followed by “cloudpro” and we’ll answer it and you’ll be able to see the answers on this blog after Friday 15th.

Get your questions answered in person Finally, if you prefer the in person stuff we still have capacity (but not much) for TechDays 2011 and we’ll be talking about both the public and private cloud.

“I don’t get the private cloud”, “We’re already virtual so we have a cloud”

Posted in UK TechNet | Comments Off

How to turn your SharePoint site into a native app with 5 lines of code

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Simon

The web has changed and things have moved on, not really a shock, but the evolution of the latest web browsers is changing things.  In particular Internet Explorer 9 allows you to take any site you see on the web and turn it into a native application by simply dragging a tab down to the task bar.  If you think that pinning a site isn’t overly useful consider some of the stats that the process drives, Huffington post drove views by users visiting their site through pinning up by 11%…now translate that to your SharePoint site, your intranet.  Your users could be finding more stuff through the intranet, saving them some time.  The cost? a few lines of simple code.

What you need to do

Rather obviously I’m only going to describe the steps for SharePoint 2010, you can probably work them out for other versions just fine.

Open your SharePoint site using SharePoint designer (you’ll need to get SharePoint designer from here if you don’t already have it) and open your site.  Then you’ll need to:

  1. Select Master Pages from the left Site Object pane
  2. Select the v4.master document and check it out to change it
  3. Select the code view
  4. Enter the code, which you’ll see listed below the picture.

2870.HTML pinning 5F00 thumb How to turn your SharePoint site into a native app with 5 lines of code

So this is the code you need to enter and it needs to go within the <head> and </head> tags, I’d suggest placing this code towards the end of the HTML header. 

  1. <meta name="application-name" content="Fourth Coffee Intranet" />
  2. <meta name="msapplication-tooltip" content="All the latest info @ 4th" />
  3. <meta name="msapplication-window" content="width=1200;height=600" />
  4. <meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Main Page;action-uri=http://sharepoint;icon-uri=http://sharepoint/SiteAssets/SitePages/Home/4th.ico"" /
  5. <meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=FAST Search;action-uri=http://sharepoint/fast;icon-uri=http://sharepoint/SiteAssets/SitePages/Home/4th.ico"" />
  6. <meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=My Site;action-uri=http://sharepoint/my;icon-uri=http://sharepoint/SiteAssets/SitePages/Home/4th.ico" />

Now that you know where it goes, lets walk through the code, line by line to understand what it does.

  1. We provide a name for the application, all Windows apps need something to identify them after all
  2. We configure a tool tip that will appear when hovering over the pinned icon before it’s launched
  3. We setup the size of the window when it initially opens
  4. Now for the meat, lines 1 to 3 are enough to be able to pin the app, but it’s time to do something more…  Jump lists! that increased page usage involves having fast access to pages from jump lists, so in lines 4-6 we configure the Jump lists.  Lets break down the line:
  • meta name="msapplication-task" tells IE that we’re defining a jump list item.
  • content="name=Main Page;  tells IE what to name the jump list item, the user sees this.
  • action-uri=http://sharepoint; tells IE what address the jump list points to.
  • icon-uri=http://sharepoint/SiteAssets/SitePages/Home/4th.ico tells IE what icon to use for the jump list item….ahh we’re into favicons…

You will also need to create a favicon, I use icoFX which is free and can take a normal image and turn it into an ico file.  You’ll also want to do the same thing to create a nice custom icon for the SharePoint site, so simply do that and ensure you save it with a 256×256 pixel size.  Finally to make this icon the favicon for your site you’ll need to edit one more line…

<SharePoint:SPShortcutIcon runat=”server” IconUrl=”xxxx”>

Here you need to change the IconUrl value to be the location of the new favicon on your SharePoint server, this will be the same icon that is used on the toolbar and in the top left of the browser window.

Going further

In a future post I’ll show you how to take this simple code and do more with it, isolate it from browsers that don’t support it and create overlays of the icon on the task bar to show you there new things.

How to turn your SharePoint site into a native app with 5 lines of code

Posted in IE9, My TechNet Blog, SharePoint | Leave a comment