Well that was a fun week for me, you might not have realised it but I wasn’t in the office I was enjoying the sun on the isle of Evissa.

However before I went I blogged up with all this goodness…

• The best way to enjoy Facebook chat Windows Live Messenger, the Beta Refresh and Facebook
• The best way to enjoy email Why Google is not a business platform
• The best way to help your operators with SCOM Thoughts on OpsMgr: SCOM Operators Basics SuperFlow
• The best ways to virtualise IE6 Excellent paper on IE6 compatibility with Windows 7
• The best album cover for a while Hurley by Weezer
• The best way to Attend meetings in your cowboy hat
• The best way to enjoy the future Breaking: IT Pros have a future with the cloud
• The best of the best of the best The book that stuns everyone in the office
• The best wishes It’s my birthday soon, please can I have this
• The best features Little things in Windows 7 still make me smile
• The best Geek poetry
• The best not very new thing Another not-very-revolutionary feature: Gmail does “undo send”
• The best way to get started with the best Microsoft Online Services Setup Accelerator

I can’t say it was the best week, but it wasn’t far off.

Danny Burlage of BPOS Rocks wrote this fantastic article on why Google is not fit for business – it’s something we know all to well, people who’ve gone Google tell us.  Danny’s article is very good so I’m not going to paraphrase it much but I love this quote:

Google's Business Model is based on advertising, not on creating business applications.

BPOS Rocks: Why Google is not a business platform

Last week this popped up in my twitter feed and I really think it’s worth of some link love, so that’s just what I’m doing. 

Thoughts on OpsMgr: SCOM Operators Basics SuperFlow

It’s on Maarten Goet’s blog, he’s a SCOM MVP and knows far too much about System Center Operations Manager.  The superflow tool he’s talking about here is your perfect resource for training your operators.

I was just browsing around our internal sites and found this excellent white paper on Solutions for Virtualising Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), what amazed me was that it was externally available.

If you’ve got some applications that rely on IE6 (like the British government) and you need to go Windows 7 (EVERYONE NEEDS to go Windows 7! ) and IE6 compatibility is slowing you down or bloating your deployment project costs, or if it’s a show stopper, then this papers got great advice.  It covers solutions like:

• MED-V which is part of MDOP
• XP mode (which no longer needs a processor capable of virtualisation)
• Terminal Servcies

And it weighs up the pros and cons of each, the licensing considerations, system requirements and just about anything you can think of.  I’m currently building a list of essential reading and learning for desktop deployment and this just made the list.

If you can think of any other creative ways of doing it, let me know.

Get the whitepaper: Solutions for Virtualising Internet Explorer

Ok it might not be breaking news but it sometimes feels like it.  The cloud is here to stay and yet I know it scares some people.  It’s kinda like moving from DOS to Windows, some people back then thought that all these GUIs would make it easier for people to use PCs and they wouldn’t need the techies so much.  That didn’t turn out to be true and it won’t for the cloud.  Sure it meant some skills transition but That’s a good thing good IT Pros know how to keep their skills up to date.

We’ve just released a micro site with some nice info to get you started in this brave new world through TechNet and the above image is of some of the stuff there.  Time to put the cloud to work.

So not only that but in the UK you’ve got myself and @deepfat showing you where there’s ground to be broken.  How can we help more?