Brush up that CV! MSemploy have sent us their top job picks for this week – anything take your fancy? You can find out more about the folks from MSemploy on their website.
Greenlight Computers
IT Technical Support and Field Service Engineer
North West - Manchester
£Competitive
Silver Partner
Softcat
First Line Technical Support Assistant
South East – Buckinghamshire
Gold Partner
Concentra
Service Desk Analyst
London – City
There are now 14 SBS 2011 Hands-On-Labs now available for you to use 24 hours a day at your leisure, along with a stack of other technical resources. You can find them all here on the SBS team blog.
The most recent Tech.Days online webcast covered the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. If you missed it you can view the recording here.
Coming up next we have Office 365 for the IT Professional. Office 365 provides a way to rent rather than buy some or all of the Microsoft Office product suite. In this session we'll look at the role of the IT pro in planning, migration and management in a mixed environment. Sign up here.
You can see what else is coming up in the TechDays online series here.
Microsoft Office 365 for IT Professionals Jump Start Class - Microsoft Productivity, Email, & Collaboration in the Cloud
Microsoft Office 365 brings together cloud versions of our most trusted email, communication and collaboration software – Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online – with our familiar Office Professional Plus desktop suite. This fast-paced, demo-rich online course features the best experts teaching the technical aspects of Office 365 for IT pros. This three-day Jump Start class is specially tailored for IT pros looking for real-world proof of how cloud-based Office 365 enables you to solve more problems from more places.
What’s a “Jump Start” Course? Training specifically designed for experienced technologists and IT leaders whose jobs demand they know how to best leverage new, emerging Microsoft technologies. These advanced courses assume a certain level of expertise and domain knowledge, so they move quickly and cover topics in a fashion that enables teams to effectively map new skills to real-world situations.
Duration: 6 hours per session
Day One — “Office 365 Platform” May 24, 2011 | 10am-4pm PDT | Live online training – we’ll post on demand links following the event, should you prefer not to rise and shine at 2am
• Microsoft Office 365 Overview for IT Pros •Deploying Clients for Office 365 •Administration & Automation using PowerShell •Identity and Access Solutions •Directory Synchronization
Day Two — “Exchange Online” May 25, 2011 | 10am-4pm PDT | Live online training
• Exchange Online Overview for IT Pros • Exchange Online Administration • Staged Exchange Online Migration • Hybrid Options with Exchange Server & Exchange Online • Exchange Online Archiving & Compliance
Day Three — “Lync & SharePoint Online” May 26, 2011 | 10am-4pm PDT | Live online training
• Lync Online Overview & Configuration for IT Pros • SharePoint Online Overview • SharePoint Online Administration • SharePoint Online Extensibility & Customization • Office 365 Deployment Overview
Register for the class here. You’ll also be able to access this course in the Microsoft Virtual Academy in June.
The WIndows 7 Power Users Guide, by Microsoft MVP Mike Halsey, shows you to how to get the very best out of Windows 7. It’s suitable for users of every ability, from complete novices to tech pros, and includes step-by-step guides, illustrations and diagrams on every page and quick tips throughout. Download your copy here.
Windows Azure Platform Training Kit includes a comprehensive set of technical content to help you learn how to use Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and the Windows Azure AppFabric.
The April 2011 update of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit has been updated for Windows Azure SDK 1.4, Visual Studio 2010 SP1, includes three new HOLs, and updated HOLs and demos for the new Windows Azure AppFabric portal. Some of the specific changes with the April update of the training kit includes:
MSemploy exclusively supplies Certified IT Professionals and Developers to the Microsoft Partner Network. Find out more here.
Well, that was a long short week! Before you knock off for the weekend, have a look at this week’s blog round up.
See you next week.
Jonathan (right), with colleague John Donaldson, about to leave the NUMed campus in the middle of a heavy storm
A typical working day for me starts with kissing goodbye to the family, followed by a podcast/audiobook then email triage and some Kindle reading on my walk-Metro-walk commute from North Tyneside into Newcastle city centre. I suppose technically I've been heading in to the same job at Newcastle University for the last dozen years, although it has transformed, keeping pace with technology, so that every couple of years it bears little resemblance to the years before. It's that constant evolution that's kept me interested, and most times when I look back to how things were done not that long ago it's slightly cringe-inducing, like going from working on Server 2008 R2 back to Server 2003!
Today isn't a typical day though. I woke up in a hotel in Johor Bahru, on the southern end of the Malaysian peninsular, with quite an impressive view over the water to Singapore, then had a taxi ride to a handful of practically finished buildings in the middle of a huge building site in Nusajaya, the home of our new branch campus. The demand for places in our Medical School from South East Asia is sufficiently great that we've decided it's worth us going to them and we're opening Newcastle University Medicine (NUMed) Malaysia.
I arrived here for the final week of a three week on-site project to build the IT infrastructure for the campus ahead of the hand-over from the developers and the arrival of our permanent staff. Much of the heavy lifting had already been done by other members of "The J Team" (because we accidentally all had names starting with J - Jason, John, James, Jeff, Jonathan - although honorary membership has to be extended to Stuart who did a lot to pave the way with the networking, and lots of others have been involved in the pre-staging), so a lot of what I'm doing is dotting i's, crossing t's and testing, testing, testing. Things like making sure that we can build PCs with WDS, adding all the necessary software for the teaching and admin functions via GPO, making sure that devices connected to the WiFi can get mail via EAS, and a bunch of more serious stuff, like what happens if we lose power to a building.
It's an interesting project for a lot of reasons, not least because it's the single biggest project I've been involved in since implementing Active Directory with the launch of Windows 2000. Being on the other side of the planet, we've had to make sure that the site has lots of resilience built-in, so that it can happily exist with the loss of the link to Newcastle and one of the two data centres. Being a green-field site, it's also given us the opportunity to implement some new things, like Windows 7 on the desktops, and Exchange 2010, which we'll only be able to upgrade to at home when our 3rd party archiving software catches up. In actual fact, because of all the newer technology and redundancy that we're building in here, I wouldn't be surprised if we could practically run our much larger home campus off this infrastructure.
Of course a job like this is not without its challenges. I actually thought that my first obstacle might crop up before I arrived, but the airport security in Newcastle and Dubai didn't seem to think there was anything at all unusual about my suitcase being half-full of 250m of Cat 6 cable or the dozen SAS disks in my hand luggage (because we haven't got round to sourcing such supplies in-country yet) - I can tell you, patch leads start to get heavy when it becomes sensible to talk about them as a fraction of a kilometre! While we've been getting things setup, the time difference has been a barrier to collaboration with colleagues back home - the working days only overlap by a couple of hours, and since we're about the only folks working inside these building the air con is timed to switch off at 5 - if we work too long into the evening it gets uncomfortably hot pretty quickly.
We're going to have a full-time local member of staff to do the day-to-day things here like swapping out failed hard drives and dealing with user support, but the majority of the systems management is going to be done remotely from the UK. We're happy that the link is good enough to use remote desktops, or connect via ILO, although personally I favour using remote PowerShell, and it works well on this fairly high-latency line. The nice thing about that is that it offers a consistent experience for managing pretty much everything that we've got out here - both the Microsoft server products and VMware.
I wouldn't mind coming out here from time to time - the weather is pretty good between the electrical storms, not that we've spent much time outside - but mostly I'll be happy to manage it remotely, so that I can go home to my family at the end of the day as normal, and so that I won't have to be missing the North East Bytes user group meetings, like I am tonight, or recording the NEBytes Bytecast (podcast), that I'm involved with back in the good old North East where (it's already been pointed out by some colleagues from Southampton University, who are looking to teach Engineering next-door here) a lot of women wear far, far less despite it being far, far colder!
Jonathan Noble
Infrastructure Systems Administrator
Newcastle University
jonoble.com
Johan Arwidmark and Mikael Nystrom, both Microsoft deployment MVPs, are running a full-day workshop in London on 12 May on the deployment of Windows 7 and Office 2010.
The workshop is on a 300 level and aimed towards IT professionals anywhere in the deployment and rollout process. Johan and Mikael will share their wealth of experience and deep technical knowledge in this field in their typical humorous way. They cover the entire deployment process, from decision and which tools to use, with emphasis on MDT 2010 and ConfigMgr 2007SP2, to putting it all to work. Directly after this workshop Johan and Mikael are both leaving for TechEd in Atlanta to run pre-conference in deployment as well as several other sessions during the week. This is a great opportunity to hear from the masters in deployment. You will find several of their previous TechEd sessions online – here’s one from last year at TechEd Berlin.
Register for the workshop at www.deploymentroadshow.com and find more of Johan and Mikael’s training at www.truesec.com.