I used to travel a lot for work and I found that the plane time was a great opportunity for reading and catching up on journals and trade pubs. Today, I spend more time at home and find that I am reading a lot less than I once did. I find that it is hard...

Ever buy life insurance? Couple of years ago, I bought a new term insurance plan and noticed that the underwriter wanted answers to about 30 questions and a physicial exam. Based on these questions, and leverging a huge actuarial base, they were able...

I am now putting together Birds of a Feather sessions for my team at TechEd. If you could have us set up and support any session topic around IT Professional issues - what topics would you like to see covered? What teams would you like to be able to sit...

Which of the following do you rate the highest in priority for you? RFID Storage -- SAN, NAS Virtualization Regulatory Compliance Disaster Recovery Interested in your thoughts because we are doing some planning on what to build guidance...

Our team builds what I like to think of as guidance and automation, but we have really struggled around what to call this stuff -- so we have used terms like "prescriptive guidance", "solutions", "Solution Accelerators", "Guides". Each is close but not...

I really like what Lee Lefever is doing at Common Craft -- http://www.commoncraft.com -- he has some great insights on what makes for a healthy online community. I encourage you to go check it out. Lee and I first met back in the late 90's when he...

We have been talking a lot internally about how to get feedback on what we spend our time building. We wonder a lot about whether we are building the right guidance, at the right level, at the right time. We struggle with are we being too verbose or not...

I spent much of the fall out observing customers do their work and seeing how you all solve problems. Here is what I found -- books are a good resource when you are first taking on a new role or job, but after that they are really social wallpaper --...

After a long development period we recently shipped our IPsec guidance -- check it out -- http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/topics/architectureanddesign/ipsec/default.mspx Let me know what you think. This work grew out of a issue we were looking...

I am doing some work around communities and have found some data that IT Professionals are not a loyal bunch. They tend to use communities -- blogs, newsgroups, forums -- for finding information quickly but they seldom come back to the same community...

I have been thinking about whether management -- you know, whether your systems are up and running, healthy, patched -- and security are really different or are they really different views on the same problem -- Reliability. Is reliability really the...

Welcome to IT Prose -- this blog is going to focus on the team called Core Infrastructure Solutions or CIS. We are a team of about 70 people, most of whom have been or still consider themselves to be IT professionals. Our team sits in the Server and Tools...