Proactive training and advisory sessions are an integral peice to maximising the value of your Microsoft Premier Support agreement. They allow you to take an preemptive approach to IT management by learning the latest features and advances with the technologies you use to help your organisation thrive. Premier Support in Ireland offers two primary types of proactive trainings:
Premier Support Ireland maintains an active catalogue of proactive training sessions which are scheduled based on feedback and requests from customers like you. Want to know what is currently on offer? Mark this blog link to your favourites, and click the catalogue link icon for 24/7 access to our proactive offerings (see the graphic below for help finding the icon on our homepage):
Don't see the course you want here? No problem. Get with your TAM or send an email to pssirl@microsoft.com and let us know what you are looking for. We have a wealth of solutions to keep you and your organisation ahead of the game!
Colin works with the business development agency for his city’s local government, and looks after process improvement for the organisation’s IT department. He recently oversaw the deployment of System Center Configuration Manager 2007 in their environment, and he’s under a tremendous amount of pressure to make sure this newly upgraded platform is delivered without a hitch. Colin is fairly experienced with SCCM and feels pretty confident that smooth sailing is in store—however Colin does have some concerns related to the discovery and patching they’ve recently implemented. He’s less experienced in these areas but his supervisor nevertheless expects that Colin can produce a successful delivery of the entire upgrade project.
Anxious, Colin starts referring to his Microsoft Premier Support agreement and starts thinking about how he can leverage these services to give him the reassurances he needs. He starts reading through the latest Proactive training catalogue online (on the Premier Support Ireland blog!) and sees a lot of great courses covering SCCM monitoring, client health, troubleshooting and more. Although this information would be great to cover at some point, Colin doesn’t have time to focus on all that now—he really needs to just cut to the chase and focus in on the discovery and patching they’ve just implemented; he has a report-out meeting with his supervisor in 2 weeks and needs to impress! He calls his TAM straight away and requests a customised Chalk ‘n Talk session covering just discovery patching, and learns straight away that this will take a few weeks to get scheduled. Colin doesn’t have a few weeks and he now starts to panic. What can he do?? !!!
"Don't stress!", the Technical Account Manager reassures Colin. "A feature of your Premier Support agreement is the ability to have Advisory Calls with Microsoft engineers who are experts to specific platforms supported by Microsoft. I've got an engineer who can address those specific patching and discovery concerns you are having and offer advice to help keep you moving along with your SCCM roll-out. Let me get with the engineer and set up a phone conference to get those questions answered." With that Colin leaves the call with renewed confidence. He now feels relaxed and reassured that the meeting with his supervisor in 2 weeks will be a smashing success.
If you find yourself in a situation similar to Colin, get with your TAM straight away and they will find an engineer to come to your rescue, too. Or shoot an email to pssirl@microsoft.com for more information.
As the IT world embraces more and more the idea of moving into cloud-based communication and collaboration, you probably find yourself wondering when you will finally make the leap into the future as well. That nagging little voice inside your head telling you “it’s time” is starting to get louder and louder as you see more and more of your competitors moving in that direction and increasing their work efficiency. But keeping up with the Jones’ is not your style—you need hard, compelling facts before getting your organisation to jump on board. Here they are:
Microsoft Online is the set of online services from Microsoft designed for businesses. With this Software-plus-Services approach, MS Online Services brings together the best of cloud-based services and the software that resides on a world of devices. Business Productivity Online Suite is the first of a growing portfolio of Microsoft Online Services.
Ok, so you’ve read the facts. It’s time to take the next step. Microsoft Services has created the BPOS Migrations Readiness Assessment to ensure an optimized performance and availability during an organisation’s migration to the Cloud with BPOS.
Get more info and schedule a BPOS Readiness Assessment by contacting your TAM or writing to us at pssirl@microsoft.com.
We see it every day. IT organizations tasked with having to deliver more with less. A person leaves, their position isn’t filled. The workload spreads, the pain increases and BANG! Systems go down, the shouting starts. But ask yourself something: does it have to be like this? Is the feeling of learned helplessness crushing your IT organization?
The term Learned Helplessness was coined by Martin Seligman in the mid-1960’s following work on animal behavior that went slightly wrong. It began with a routine conditioning experiment involving dogs and harmless – though painful – electric shocks (please bear with me). The dogs were exposed in the first phase of the experiment to a pair of stimuli in quick succession – a tone followed by the aforementioned shock. The purpose was to condition the animals to associate the tone with the rather nasty experience of being shocked. To ensure the dogs remained in situ for the experiment, they were restrained so that when the tone sounded, there was nowhere to go – so much for the fluffy 1960’s you might say.
Once suitably conditioned, Seligman moved on to the test phase of his experiment and it was here that things went wrong. For this part of the experiment, the dogs were no longer restrained and instead an escape route was provided. Thinking the results were going to be straightforward, Seligman predicted that once the dogs heard the tone, they would bolt for the escape route and avoid getting shocked. Seligman was wrong. So wrong in fact that a new chapter of psychology had to be written. The dogs stayed put. They remained where they were despite having the option of avoiding the painful experience by using the escape route. Instead, they simply sat and accepted their fate. The feeling of helplessness had over-ridden their reasoning so that even when a solution was available to them, they sat still. And so the term ‘learned helplessness’ was coined.
And here’s the rub: it’s not just for dogs. Humans are just as easily afflicted with learned helplessness as their best friends. Manipulate a person’s environment for long enough – swamp them with requests for assistance, push systems until the break, place them in situations where they feel they have no control – and this feeling of learned helplessness starts to override the brains logic circuits. To the point that even when a way out is available, it’s rejected out of hand.
But simple adjustments to how you do business can have a major impact on the feeling of learned helplessness. Getting technology to work for you, rather than the feeling of working against you, can go some way to reversing the feeling and handing control back to an organization, even with less resources. Smart performance monitoring tools such as System Centre Operations Manager can be optimized to let organizations know in advance that an issue exists in their environment. Short-circuiting the problem before it manifests itself in the user population can reduce the stress on limited resources and go a long way to reducing fire-fighting and that feeling of always being on the back foot.
Basic process improvements in how front-line personnel troubleshoot issues (take our Vital Signs Performance and Monitoring Workshop available through Premier Support, for example) and leveraging the tools that already exist in their environment for analyzing problems (tools that are surprisingly overlooked by many IT organizations), can expedite resolution times and improve service to your customer base. It also hands control back to your team.
But first, you as the customer have to realize there is a problem. Then you have to see the escape route. And finally you have to use it. Premier Support can provide myriad operational improvements and offers an escape route to the stress placed on your organization. We are your extra resource. Many of our customers take advantage of our Operations Strategic Review and/or our Proactive Services Maturity Review programmes to get a comprehensive grasp of their overall environment. Talk to your Technical Account Manager about what Premier Support can provide your organization through workshops, technology updates, optimization and tuning.
And by the way, no animals were hurt or injured in the development of our products. Which is always good to know.
Premier Support Ireland offers a special treat for all of our Windows fans who have 10 minutes to spare in their work day....The following video provides a nice little trip down memory lane for those of us who've been around to see the evolution of the OS. Take a moment to sit back and enjoy:
When you come back to reality, consider giving some thought to your own software upgrade processes within your organisation. Feel like you could use some help? Read our Proactive Operations Program for Software Update Management data sheet and let us know if you'd like more information.
You know it, but they just don't get it. You're on the front line on the IT team for your organisation, but the guys in suits at the shiny tables behind the glass doors don't see what you see on a daily basis.
You live, breathe, eat and dream technology and IT systems, and you know how critical these things are to efficient, smooth-running operations on the level of the entire organisation. But why doesn't your CEO understand, for example, that large amounts of white space on Exchange databases can create critical outages in email transmission, and can be remedied if you're given the time to run a simple defrag? And it drives you nuts when they don't seem to understand why it's such a big deal when cluster file resources go offline or when cluster nodes don't fail over properly.
Sometimes, you might just start to feel like you aren't taken seriously. But there is hope. You can speak their language and start to make them get it:
Read up on more great research available and make the impact you're looking for by showing how your work translates to bottom-line profit matters. Once your organisation leaders understand how critical IT systems are to the company's success, it will be an easy task to get their buy-in as you look to invest time and resources into optimising your IT platforms and infrastructure. Companies that do this right realise better business-IT alignment, enhanced agility, reduced IT costs, better profitability, reduced regulatory and security risks and improved satisfaction with IT overall.
Take our Optimisation Self-Assessment to find out where your organisation stands today, and to get started in driving the improvements you know your company needs. And then be sure to contact your TAM to have them help you along the way.
You already know how valuable an asset your Premier Support contract is to your organisation, but can you articulate this value to other key stakeholders? Thanks to our friends across the Irish Sea for putting together this handy little video, which helps put it all into perspective:
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