Browse by Tags

This post was contributed by Rhoderick Milne , everyone’s favourite Canadian-Scottish Premier Field Engineer. Microsoft Exchange Server is the leading messaging platform in the world today, and can be found in SMBs, large enterprises and also behind cloud services of unimaginable scale. Exchange has...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. A service catalog (or catalogue), as defined in Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)   Service Design , is a list of services that an organization provides, often to its employees or customers. Each service within...

Written by Rod Fournier , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. When discussing the meaning of Microsoft Support terminology with my customers, there are several terms that come up almost daily in conversations. Here are some hopefully helpful definitions for you that I use:     Supported – When...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. You have all seen it a million times on the silver screen, our hero is caught, trapped and/or facing impossible odds, and all of a sudden they make a miraculous escape.  It seems the whole entire time while I would have been saying...

Written by Kip Ng , Principal Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Operating an IT system nowadays is a no doubt daunting task. As a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer (PFE), I have the honor of working with different customers of different sizes in different industries. I fully understand how overwhelming...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. BusinessDictionary.com defines Managed Risk as the following: Identified probability of loss, or exposure to a danger, that has been minimized to an acceptable level through careful planning and implementation of effective countermeasures...

Written by Kip Ng , Principal Premier Field Engineer. Most companies today have some form of monitoring mechanism implemented to monitor different components of their IT system. There are various monitoring solutions out there. Some are more sophisticated than others, and, in general, there are different...

Written by Dan Erelis , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. As a Premier Field Engineer for Microsoft, I find myself in many different customer environments in just about every major industry sector in Canada. Although every customer is different, the same recurring challenge to implementing Microsoft...

Written by Kip Ng, Principal Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. O ne of the key factors for successful operations is monitoring. The most common questions I get when helping customers plan their monitoring needs are: "How do I know what to monitor?" and "How do I know my system is healthy?" Yes...

Written by Kip Ng , Principal Microsoft Premier Field Engineer As a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer (PFE), one of our primarily roles is to perform risk assessments on client IT environments. Of course, we always have very well defined scope as in which Microsoft product that we are reviewing. One of...

  Written by guest blogger Suzanne Battiston, Principal Microsoft Technical Account Manager If you’re in IT operations, you’ve most likely experienced the following situation: a large scale integration project with several developers, business analysts, testers, UAT leads, project managers, program...

Written by Kip Ng , Principal Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Most people in IT have a strong tendency to resolve a problem with technology or introducing more technologies into a solution. I‘m guilty on this count too. Well, you know what? Technology is not always the answer. 3 key elements to successful...

Written by Kip Ng , Principal Microsoft Premier Field Engineer In today’s world, we are brought up in a society where we are taught to be first, to be different and to be competitive. We are frequently being urged to be unique in order to stand out among the crowd. There is no doubt that an element of...

Written by Kip Ng, Principal Microsoft Premier Field Engineer, based in Canada. 6:05 p.m.: I was called and informed that the system had gone down. I rushed back to the office. 7:10 p.m.: I arrived and found that the drive containing the database had failed. How could it be? It was running on RAID-5...

Written by Adis Tucakovic, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Most IT organizations realize that yesterday’s potential issues are today’s actual problems; in turn, management and operations teams are constantly consumed fighting problems today because they did not avert yesterday’s issues and are...

Written by Kip Ng, Principal Premier Field Engineer This is one of those topics (like “ Do you have a well-tested Disaster Recovery plan? ”) that many of you may look at it and say “yes, yes, I know we need it”.   Let me give you some of the answers I got from some of my customers when I asked...

Written by Kip Ng, Principal Premier Field Engineer Everyone knows that your shoes should conform to the shape of your feet. Likewise, in IT, the design and architecture of a system should be dictated by a well-defined set of business requirements. As a Microsoft Certified Architect and Master...

Written by Manny Sandhu, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Outages are something that we never want to have happen, but they do, and when they occur how ready are you to deal with the repercussions? In most cases, it isn’t the technical skill of personnel which determines the success...