September, 2007

A while ago I "met" Marco Shaw, by met I mean exchanged emails on a frequent basis. I noticed over on the Canadian Developer Advisors blog a post by Marco about his blog on PowerShell. Marco has been hard at work in the PowerShell world and has now formed a Virtual user group for PowerShell users. “I am proud to announce a new PowerShell user group. This user group will have its meetings done via Live...

If you, like me, have been anxiously awaiting the release candidate build of Windows Server 2008 , the wait is over !! Windows Server 2008 RC0 can now be downloaded from the TechNet BetaCentral web site. From here, you enter your Windows Live ID and pick the edition of Windows Server 2008 RC0 you want to test - Datacenter, Enterprise, Standard, Web Edition, or Itanium. A brief comparison between the...

I usually don't post here on the Canadian IT Pro blog (my home is over on the Canadian IT Managers blog ), but when Don send me this guest posting, I thought it would be of particular interest to those of you who are the hands on, in the trenches, IT professionals who are responsible for executing on the project plan and making things work. Enjoy! Don Spencer (Waterloo, ON, IT Manager of Pano Cap...

Cat have sharp paws, computers have soft rubber wires. You do the math on that one. Dogs like to chew things. Computers don't like to be chewed on. Gerbils would be the most amazing IT Professionals. They just won't sit still for two seconds. Chickens can type, but all they ever type is "BUKAW" Monkeys just throw the computers across the room at other monkeys. We're not even going to...

Today we stop out and ask the simplest question. Why does ANYBODY guest Blog on Technet.com? Is is the money? The unlimited chicks? What about the fancy perks? Ok, yeah. There is that. That Check for 23.7 billion dollars cleared in the bank pretty nicely... ;) (No it DIDN'T!) Actually I'll offer this one up. Simply because. Sometimes you do something just for the joy of doing it...

The My TechNet Security tour is coming to Toronto in November. While we had booked the event for November 20th we found ourselves in a bit of a conflict and the four IT Pro Advisors were stretched a little to thin. Since we have yet to market any technology that would allow us to be in two places at the same time we had to make a hard decision. That decision was to move the date of the Toronto event...

Yep, the kiddies are back in school, and things are back to normal as everyone comes back from summer holidays. I am one of those kiddies back in school for a few weekends. After the great HPC learning experience back in July, I wanted more. Not having anything better to do on the weekend </sarcasm>, I signed up for a CISSP training course deliverd by Robert Beggs from Digital Defence . Now I...

If you have stayed with me this far a number of possibilities spring to mind: 1. You have been totally fascinated by my story and utterly mesmerized by my command of the English language (Nah! That’s called wishful thinking!) 2. You have masochistic tendencies and love to be punished by reading my epistles (possibly and I would recommend that you immediately seek treatment) 3. You stumbled on part...

Hey everyone, it is Rodney here filling in for Sean with this weeks Friday Funny. Sean sent a frantic message late last night, something to do with gerbils, a Lada, and a Krispy Kreme donut. As we are prepping for the MY TechNet tour coming through in the October/November time frame, Damir and I held a review session with a few internal and external people to determine if we are on the right path....

Rodney talked about his vacation and fishing in Winnipeg in a previous blog post . Now, not all IT Pro Advisors go fishing. In fact some of us actually continue to be geeks even while on vacation!! That's not to say that geekiness is all that my vacation was about. I did things like take the kids to the movies, the Toronto Zoo, the CN Tower and stuff like that. ( Strange that I have lived in the GTA...

If you are any bit of a virtualization nut like I am (ok - passionate, not NUT), you have probably heard about how our hypervisor implementation of virtualization is called Windows Server Virtualization (formerly known as Viridian - shot form known as WSV). You also know that we've been talking about it for a while - possibly showing it to you a couple of times here or there, but it's never been available...

Graham Jones (Surrey, British Columbia, IT Pro) Having decided that I wanted to work in the IT industry on a full time basis I went back to school at the tender age of 54! If I was going to have a chance I had to get some sort of qualification. I decided to do a “very” intensive 9 month diploma program (a typical 2 year program crammed into 9 months). Boy was that a shock! I hadn’t been in formal...

The other day, Sean experienced a hiccup with a beta mail client he is testing. The result? 555 messages in the inboxes of Rick, Damir and myself. Now to get 555 emails from Sean in a day is not odd in itself, what made this odd was that all 555 messages were identical! This lead Sean to write another song, and I am taking this opportunity to unveil the semi-official Sean Kearney Friday Funny logo...

Mark Carriere is a Management Architect with Manitoba Hydro in Winnipeg where he spends much of his time designing and enhancing the corporate SMS and Terminal Server environments. He is also the President of the Canadian SMS User Group, and administers their virtual user group at SMSUG.ca. Quite often he'll be found in MyITForum and the Microsoft newsgroups, answering as many questions as possible...

A few weeks ago we announced the My TechNet Tour and opened up voting. We had narrowed the list down to three things on the minds on IT Pros, Security, Collaboration and Disaster Recovery, and let you decide which theme you wanted us to talk about on the tour. Voting has now ended and we have a winner! After over 1300 votes the winner is..... (drum roll please) Security! The vote was close with...

Graham Jones (Surrey, British Columbia, IT Pro) Finding myself unemployed in my early 50’s I now had to decide what I wanted to do at a difficult time in life. My preferred choices were to continue in IT Management or go into IT PM. As it turned out I discovered that I could do neither. All of my years of computer experience and successful PM wasn’t going to get me what I wanted! Lacking formal qualifications...