IT Project work can generally be split into two categories, user facing and behind the scenes stuff. With either type it is important to properly plan everything that you need to do along the way.
Both Lewis and Andy are visually impaired engineers who have mastered the use of Windows Server 2012 R2 using voice synthesizers and a Braille Display to work quicker and smarter...
The conundrum which is the Internet of Things and the many innovations coming from its emergence. How does SharePoint fit in? Does it fit?
Rick Delgado feels blessed to have had a successful career in the tech industry and has recently taken a step back to pursue his passion of writing. He's started doing freelance writing where he occasionally works with tech companies like Dell Computers. He enjoys writing about new technologies and how it can help us and our planet.
It’s amazing how many people are infatuated with the need to have the latest and greatest; they’ll do almost anything to get it. They act like Juan Ponce de León searching for the Fountain of Youth. Despite recent technologies, Smartphones and tablets like the Surface Pro 2 have become integral tools in so many cultures. We feel naked and exposed if we don’t have our favourite device with us.
What’s interesting is how these devices, originally made for personal uses, have made their way into the workplace. Their ability to access information on the spot and communicate instantaneously has increased productivity. They’ve become valuable tools in the day-to-day operations of many organisations. But dealing with the rapid influx of all these devices hasn’t been easy. Employees are looking to bring their own devices to work, as opposed to using what their employers provide. To a degree, it makes sense. People are more productive and comfortable using their own machines and no one wants to carry around two phones or laptops.
While many companies are adopting BYOD policies, some remain hesitant due to legitimate concerns around standardisation and data security. Whatever their reasons, they find themselves among the minority fighting a current moving swiftly against them. The widespread usage of these devices, coupled with a very tech savvy younger generation, means the BYOD trend isn’t going to disappear. New college grads and incoming young hires are gadget friendly, and picky when it comes to their devices of choice. Believe it or not, young job seekers even use BYOD in their decision making when picking potential employers. They avoid businesses that don’t allow personal laptops or phones at work. Instead, these young professionals are looking for more progressive, forward-thinking companies, of which BYOD is an indicator.
Today’s companies point to a number of BYOD problems keeping them from change. For example, a lack of standardisation makes system solutions very complicated. It’s difficult to build custom solutions for so many different types of operating systems. In order to compromise, many companies are adding the magic ‘but’ to their BYOD policies. As in, “yes you can bring in your own devices, BUT it has to be on the approved list.”
The other often cited reason for not wanting to get into the BYOD arena is the additional security issues that threaten the business. IT departments can create solutions for their systems and devices, but how can they track every device being brought into the office? Even further, they don’t know how employees are using these devices. Sure they may be following correct security protocol at work, but what happens when they go home? Home usage and less secure browsing habits could seriously jeopardise important company data stored on these devices. Attackers aren’t going to say, oh wait, this isn’t fair. We can’t touch work data while he or she is at home searching for YouTube videos. Or what happens if a device is lost? A lot of companies use remote-wipe capabilities, but how does that work with devices that also contain personal information? And with today’s tech oriented criminals, will a remote wipe really protect the information?
Developers are reacting to the bumps in the road and creating devices more attractive to employers. New Windows based phones are looking to build more enterprise features in their operating systems in order to make their devices a corporate standard. The reality is, BYOD is here. It’s a thing. Companies might resist, but in the end, they’ll eventually bend to the times. They’d be better off innovating now and finding ways to overcome the challenges and offer employees the freedom and flexibility that is so sought after.
It’s not great being a turkey, pheasant or grouse at Christmas, but my Christmas sketch this year isn’t too worried as he’s a protected and valued Capercaillie. In the same same way the cloud first world might not seem like a great time to be an IT Professional but there are certain species who are similarly valued and for whom 2015 is pretty exciting.
So as we all take time out to enjoy time with our friends and families, don’t panic about 2015. Infrastructure guys are still needed and many of the skills we have acquired are still valued too like VPN’s , certificates, Active Directory, and of course PowerShell and I for one won’t be retiring to do art full time just yet.
Happy Christmas and hopefully we’ll meet up at an IT Camp , Future decoded, or user group somewhere next year
@DeepFat
The following article is contributed by Geoff Evelyn, SharePoint MVP and owner of SharePointGeoff.com
This article is part of a five part series.
Options for SharePoint on-premise
In SharePoint 2003, there was no workflow platform. This changed when SharePoint 2007 came onto the horizon, with the addition of the Windows Workflow Foundation platform. This is a development platform that allows the provisioned workflow templates in SharePoint to be extended and customized. When SharePoint 2010 arrived, so did improvements to the workflow system. This included improvements to workflow design with the arrival of Microsoft Visual Studio including 'workflow projects' so that developers could directly create workflows for deployment. SharePoint Designer 2010 came on steam around the same time providing a workflow design, and the ability to edit SharePoint 2010 workflows. SharePoint 2013 workflow architecture was redesigned to meet performance, availability and flexibility of workflows on the platform. This workflow architecture, now known as Windows Workflow Foundation 4, is available with SharePoint Server 2013.
SharePoint carries workflow features that are generally based around specific documents or list items, however, they can represent larger human-based processes and actions through customization and development. Specifically:
The following section describes the objectives the available workflow templates and options in building workflows.
Templates
The following describes a list of templates available in SharePoint on-premise.
- Collect Feedback
- Collect Signatures
- Approval
- Transition Management
- Disposition Approval
- Three State
Custom Workflows using SharePoint Designer and Microsoft Visual Studio using SharePoint Designer and Microsoft Visual Studio
Workflows can be created and edited in SharePoint Designer 2013. Additionally, if there are legacy SharePoint 2010 workflows that are needed to be reused in SharePoint 2013, the SharePoint Workflow Interop functionality can be utilized. This enables SharePoint 2010 workflows to work with the SharePoint 2013 workflow engine based on Windows Workflow Foundation 4.
Platform Type Options
Articles within Series
Great insight into the Workflow in SharePoint. Keep your eyes out for part 3 which will talk about Options for SharePoint Dedicated Online through Office365, Options for Hybrid and Options for Third Parties.
TechDays Online is back for it's fourth year! This three day conference is geared towards IT Pros and developers who want to get the scoop on Microsoft’s cloud-first, mobile-first products and platforms. It kicks off on the 3rd February, so be sure to add it to your calendar.
Special Guests
Last year Steve Ballmer made an appearance, and in 2015 Microsoft is promising another great year of keynote speakers.
We can reveal we will have Mary Jo Foley keynoting! Mary Jo has covered the tech industry for more than 30 years for a variety of publications and Web sites, and is a frequent guest on radio, TV and podcasts, speaking about all things Microsoft related, and on ZDNet, she blogs at allaboutmicrosoft.com.
Here’s a top-level view on the agenda for this year:
Day 1: Devices and Managing a Mobile-First World
An exploration of Windows 10, as well as how the latest hardware releases and innovations in Microsoft Azure to help you manage your device estate.
An evening with Office 365: The evening sessions will uncover how you get started with configuring Office 365.
Day 2: The Journey to the Cloud-first World
We made some significant announcements in recent months, this day is designed to help IT Pros understand these. We’ll be taking a look into the Windows Azure Pack for those wanting to create their own clouds as well as looking at non-traditional topics such as open source, Docker and Containers. We will also be joined (virtually) by the father of Powershell and our old friend, Technical Fellow Jeffrey Snover.
Day 3: Multi-device, Cross-platform Development
Designed for developers seeking practical guidance on modern cross-platform development, plus the latest news on Windows 10.
Check out the full agenda here.
Stay tuned as we reveal more guests by following the Microsoft team via @TechNetUK and @MSDevUK…
If this sounds interesting to you, you can go ahead and register.
Everyone that registers, and attends at least one of the days, will be entered into a draw to win a Surface Pro 3. Go here to get started.
Will you be tuning in for TechDays online? Which day are you most interested in? Let us know in the comments section of via @TechNetUK.
Life during my first year at Microsoft has been almost exactly as I imagined it might be, but as I always do at Christmas I reflected on the year past and particularly this year on my first 9 months as a Microsoft Employee. Whilst doing so I remembered exactly what prompted me to sign up to this fun ride.
Back in 2012 I attended a number of Tech Days which later became re-branded and reworked into IT Camps. The format of these really did excite me enough to take a full day out of my busy self-employed contractor type schedule. A rare thing since a day ‘off’ is actually money lost and often since my engagements were a week long, it was often a week of income lost.
So what is so good about an IT Camp that it’s worth the time trouble and sometimes lost income to come and join in the fun?
Firstly an IT Camp is a FREE day of detailed technical education with a very heavy hands-on approach. There are IT camps for all sorts of subjects but the one I lead is the Enterprise Mobility Camp. This covers all aspects of Microsoft’s people-centric IT solutions, from advances in the Windows Client operating system to deep-dives into Hybrid Identity solutions using Active Directory in both Azure and on-premises with Windows Server 2012 R2.
The unique aspect of our UK IT Camps is that we always allow the participants to build their own agenda. This adds a much greater level of relevance to the audience and requires a much deeper level of preparation by the Technical Evangelists leading the camp.
And I am pleased to say it is even more fun to deliver the camp than to present one.
The IT Camp content is created by the Technical Evangelists working for Microsoft at our HQ in Redmond (such as @simonster). For the Enterprise mobility camp there are over 500 PowerPoint slides in the material to cater for just about any part of the people-centric story.
Call me old-fashioned but I do love the superb PowerPoint application, BUT even I wouldn’t sit through a day of 500 plus slides. No thanks.
In a typical day for an IT Camp we may use 20 of those we prefer to use live demonstrations and explanations to get out point across, oh and of course PowerShell too.
So what can you expect if you sign up to one of our Enterprise Mobility Camps between now and June 2015.
As I already said, we don’t fix an agenda in advance there are only three givens in the day.
It starts – you get lunch – it finishes. The bits in between will be filled with a mixture of discussion, presentations, demonstrations and lots and lots of hands-on lab work by you the important person in the room.
For this reason it is essential that you bring along a device that can use a browser and connect to the internet (we provide the internet connection) and any lab environments you may need. For those who have been before, if you don’t like working in pairs, then either bring two devices or a large screen (as the manuals are online as well and it can be tiring switching between them all day).
As an example, during the camps this year so far, we have covered Microsoft Intune in cloud and hybrid modes when connected to Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager for Mobile Device Management. We have demonstrated Azure RemoteApp in both Cloud and Hybrid configurations. Both Workplace Join and Work Folders have also figured heavily as has Azure Active Directory Premium. Office 365 integration and Single Sign on / multifactor authentication were also prominent. The identity piece of the puzzle is a critical one to understand so many questions have been posed and answered.
The new 2015 Camps have also been updated to include Windows 10 content and most of our demo machines also run Windows 10.
We also get to demonstrate most of these through the use of iOS devices, Windows Phones projecting their screens through Miracast and even the odd Android device too.
A large number of IT Pros prefer to learn by a mixture of listening watching and hands-on – the UK IT Camp experience provides all of these in abundance.
Why not visit http://aka.ms/ukitcamp and register to come along and find out what @Deepfat and I (@edbaker1965) get up to and how you can begin to understand how the people-centric IT vision can be applied within your own work environment?
There are other added bonuses too. Since everyone present if focusing on the same topics, you get to meet fellow IT Pros interested in similar areas, who may well turn out to be great future contacts.
Finally we also hand out odds and ends as prizes for asking that difficult (or seemingly easy question) that others are just too shy to ask.
The post UK IT Camps – Enterprise Mobility – Sign up now. appeared first on Blogg(Ed).
In theory, the logic behind cloud computing seems undeniable: lots of data-center servers providing lots of computing power and storage to lots of customers. It’s the beauty of scale: Everybody wins—right?
In practice, as you might guess, things get a bit more complicated. Separate parties jostle for the same resources at the same time. Confusion ensues. Things become unpredictable, and scale needs predictability.
Soon, though, a collaboration between Microsoft researchers and members of Microsoft product teams will deliver that much needed predictability. Researcher Eno Thereska (@enothereska) explains.
“We started to investigate a puzzling behavior of most cloud systems today,” he says. “Their performance is great when a few customers are running at a time, but as soon as the number of customers increases, performance usually suffers. Sometimes it suffers a lot—a client’s job that used to take a few minutes to complete could suddenly take hours.
“The bottom line is that performance is unpredictable. This is a serious problem, because we expect thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of customers to make use of cloud systems simultaneously, and each customer expects predictable performance. Our research attempts to get to the root cause of performance unpredictability.”
That research—and its embrace by Microsoft’s Windows Server, Hyper-V, and System Center teams—has resulted in End-to-End Storage QoS (quality of service), technology that on Oct. 28, in Barcelona, Spain, was announced during TechEd Europe 2014 as a key feature in the Windows Server Technical Preview.
The technology enables the shaping of storage traffic in private cloud deployments. The End-to-End Storage QoS work enforces the minimum and maximum numbers of input/output operations per second for virtual machines (VMs) or groups of virtual machines. Those who host data on the cloud thus can increase their VM deployment while not starving others of storage performance.
The vision for this approach, something the researchers refer to as “software-defined storage architecture,” is for storage QoS to be used as a mechanism to enforce tenant service-level agreements (SLAs). Microsoft’s software-defined storage vision is delivered using the SMB3 protocol and highly available scale-out file servers, and research findings help to deliver consistent end-to-end performance. The technology enables per-tenant aggregate SLAs, specified across a set of VMs and multiple storage servers.
“The key contribution was to re-architect key components of the system, namely the network and storage resources, to provide performance isolation,” Thereska says. “It turned out that the root cause of the problem was uncontrolled performance interference: A customer’s workload would interfere with another’s at shared resources, such as the network and disks.
“Performance isolation is about reducing that interference to the point where a customer gets the same performance from a shared system that they’d get from a dedicated system.”
The work is explored in detail on the Predictable Data Centers (PDC) webpage and in the paper IOFlow: A Software-Defined Storage Architecture, written by Thereska and fellow researchers Hitesh Ballani, Greg O’Shea,Thomas Karagiannis, Antony Rowstron, Richard Black and Timothy Zhu, along with Tom Talpey, a Windows Server architect.
The collaboration began before 2012, when the researchers began developing the networking QoS concepts.
“When we started doing the networking aspects of the PDC project,” Rowstron says, “there was no request from a product group. We just did it because we felt it was the right thing to do. We then got good feedback from the Windows Server team, and the opportunity opened for expanding the approach to storage.”
For much of 2012 and 2013, the collaborating teams worked together to develop and incubate a new storage-layer QoS architecture. In fall 2013, the teams developed an IO rate limiter that was shipped in the server-message-block (SMB) stack in Windows Server 2012 R2. Meanwhile, the collaboration broadened to include the Hyper-V and System Center teams to build a policy manager to orchestrate the behavior of rate limiters in a distributed system.
Program managers Jose Barreto and Patrick Lang took the lead in delivering the feature to the Windows Server Technical Preview.
“This contribution,” Ballani says, “is relevant to several different groups in Microsoft. As such, the solution needed to meet a high bar and satisfy several diverse requirements. For example, it was a goal for the solution to be immediately deployable without requiring customers to change their applications or how they deploy them. That led to a design decision to place part of the solution, the rate limiters, in the hypervisor.
“It was also highly desirable to move steps ahead of the competition and provide customers with a richer set of SLAs than what’s currently out there. That led to design decisions to provide aggregate SLAs and manage a set of VMs as a whole.”
It wasn’t easy, but it worked.
“Something on this scale,” Rowstron observes, “takes a lot of skilled people across all of Microsoft.”
Talpey can only agree—and look forward to more of the same.
“This has been an incredibly productive engagement from the Windows Server side,” he says. “I foresee significant additional engagement on this technology. We have only scratched the surface of its potential.”
This article was originally written for Inside Microsoft Research.
Susan Smith, IT Pro Technical Evangelist at Microsoft
Everyone knows that Mobile Technology is making everyone’s lives easier. But have you ever considered how it can make or break Xmas – especially for Children and Santa Clause.
In the spirit of the Twelve Days of Xmas, here are twelve ways in which Mobile Technology makes Xmas better and Santa much more efficient
1. Discourage hand-written Xmas lists to Santa. They are so last-century and not so environmentally-friendly. Instead, encourage your children to create a shared OneNote Notebook (hosted in the Cloud of course), granting access to each of your children and giving your parents Admin rights. A deadline will be enforced – and this Notebook will become read-only at that time so children please be aware of the timescales. Don’t worry – the parents will grant access rights to Santa after the list is locked for Data Processing. Remember Kids - Santa much prefers that you include accurate web links to individual items (with secondary links if the primary source becomes unavailable). This will help with your Performance Review specified in Item Number 3
2. For those items which are difficult to source, and where there is limited supply, Children must place reminders for each scarce item in each parent’s calendar. All Parents share their Calendar with Santa so he can collate all this information from One Application and have an efficient Schedule. This will ensure that Santa is not left red-faced on the day through lack of planning.
3.To help Santa scale more effectively, Parents will create a shared OneNote Notebook containing the Performance Review of their children’s behaviour, using this year’s Performance Template. Santa will have access to this & this will help him to determine whether the children have been ‘naughty or nice’ this year. He will use Data Science to analyse this information and determine where the children are on the Bell Curve of Naughty or Nice
4.In the spirit of competition, Kids can review their ranking in the NaughtyorNice App and the App can suggest Actions to improve their rankings, similar to LinkedIn rankings as illustrated below:
5.Data Science proves once again invaluable to Santa when determining the appropriate gifts for a given child, using an algorithm which cross references their Annual Performance Review Outcome and their gift list. A draft list is created when the Xmas list is initially locked, but the Annual Performance Review Data is not locked until Xmas Eve so the list will fluctuate depending on the child’s behaviour
6.Everyone knows that Santa won’t stop at a house until a child is asleep. This has impacted on his delivery SLAs in the past. However, now Santa uses The Internet of Things to gather data from wearables which check whether each child is indeed asleep when Santa is visiting. If the child is awake, Santa is aware without stopping his sleigh, and using IoT we can feed this info into his GPS to re-route him to his next stop. Using Data Science & IoT will maximise efficiency on his route to ensure no child is left without a parcel and no Xmas rules are broken.
7.As well as using GPS to map an efficient route around the globe, Santa can also take advantage of local ‘Click & Collect’ services offered by websites. This will ensure his sleigh is not overloaded and he doesn’t carry a heavy load very far.
8.Santa is becoming health-conscious and although he doesn’t want to disappoint the children who leave a mince pie out for him, he must cut down on his fat intake. To combat this, Santa has again used Data Science to analyse where he can realistically get his calories at different points around the globe. Those children in that particular area with the highest ranking in the NaughtyorNice App will have the honour of leaving him a mince pie. Also with strict drink driving laws, Santa can only have one shot of Brandy on the very first and the very last delivery.
9. Santa may prefer a bit of mood-lighting when he drops off the presents, so IoT allows anyone on twitter to control the colour of the Xmas tree lights in Your Front Room – so Santa can change the colour of the lights via a tweet.
10. Kids can use NORAD’s Santa Tracker to see where he is on his Xmas Eve Journey and make sure they get to bed on time.
11. On Xmas Day, any dissatisfied children will appeal via the NaughtyorNice App on their final ranking and their final gift list. All appeal judgements however, will be carried over to Next Year’s Annual Performance Review.
12. Merry Xmas
These days we usually treat Boxing Day as “Christmas Part 2” – you eat some leftovers, watch some telly and maybe play with that new techy toy you got for Christmas.
But once upon a time, Boxing Day had an identity all its own. Boxing Day was a day for giving back. It was a day when the wealthy would give to the poor using special alms boxes.
It was also a day when the master of the house would give boxes of goodies to his staff, as a way of recognising all the extra work that went into delivering a perfect holiday season.
This year, we want to return Boxing Day to its rightful place as a day to give back to those around you.
How? Simple: Think about that developer or IT pro in your workplace that really makes a difference. Somebody who's making a real positive impact on whatever project you're involved with - somebody who doesn't usually get the credit they deserve.
Think about that person who's always there to help whenever there's a technology crisis. That person who stays late to make sure you hit deadlines and produce high-quality work. Think about the person you and your workplace can't do without - your Technology Christmas Star.
Wouldn’t it be nice to do a little something special for them this holiday season?
Tell us why your Christmas Star is special and they’ll be entered into a drawing to win your choice of one of several exciting prizes, which includes an Xbox One, Lumia 925, Visual Studio Premium with MSDN subscription and Surface Pro 3. Big or small, every reason counts.
Maybe they helped you learn a new skill.
Maybe they came up with an innovative solution to an old problem.
Maybe they keep everyone smiling when the pressure is on.
Maybe they just worked that little bit extra at a key moment in a project.
Whatever your reason, we want to help you recognise your Technology Christmas Star – and maybe help them win a little something special in the process.
Visit our Christmas Star page to leave your nomination. We’ll need your Christmas Star’s e-mail address to let them know if they’ve won, but we promise we won’t spam them with a bunch of ads.
You can nominate as many people as you like – maybe your workplace has a few more stars than most. But you can’t nominate anyone more than once and you can’t nominate yourself (that would hardly be in the Boxing Day spirit).
You can do a little extra good this holiday season, just by recognizing your Christmas Star.
What are you waiting for? Nominate your Tech Christmas Star now!
Will you be nominating someone? Is there someone that springs to mind? Let us know in the comments section below or via @TechNetUK
The following article is contributed by Geoff Evelyn, SharePoint MVP and owner of SharePointGeoff.com.
Merry Christmas Everyone!
As the seasonal period quickly approaches, the discussions concerning what happens to supporting SharePoint over the holiday either approaches, or has been covered, or even assumed.
The Christmas period is of course where your SharePoint sponsors are more likely to show a little more concern than normal about how their SharePoint platforms are going to be monitored over the period.
So then, let’s remind ourselves of the holiday period in question - basically, the days that will relate to anyone, is the week of Christmas starting from the 23rd through to the 28th. There are two days pretty much important to us guys in the UK over the seasonal period, especially in Scotland - Christmas Day and New Years day. Then there is Boxing Day when it’s likely that you would be relaxing in front of the telly, or sledging, or skiing - using that day to wind down after the Christmas day madness. Then there's the two days after Boxing Day, the 26th and the 27th, where relaxation, relief and playing with the various presents, and getting stuck in to food :)
So that means that over the period you are most likely to do, probably a combination of one or more of the following: not be in the Office, switch off the mobile, inform people you are not available?
So chances are, that on the days in question, you will be chilling out, and possibly even like me having a choice Mince pie, a Glass of port (or more - like Rum)...
But this is not about what you will be doing over those periods away from the office. It is about how you are going to support SharePoint, isn't it?
First, let’s consider the available types of support:
Throwing caution to the wind
My dad once said to me when I was a lot younger that in order for Santa Claus to know what present I would like, that I should write a letter, and throw it into the wind when it was blowing north, so that the letter would reach the north pole.
Of course, by doing that I eventually realized that the letter would not get there, unless my dad without me seeing ran like the clappers to retrieve the letter once I threw it out of the window.
Clearly, I was throwing caution to the wind, assuming things would happen - luckily for me, most of the times when I did throw that letter, things would work out - but only because there was a contingency - my dad, running like the clappers.
This relates in a way to the lack of responsibility those charged with SharePoint management judge the level of the support needed to ensure the availability of SharePoint services over an important period, like Christmas! There is not enough preparation carried out preceding the Christmas period by some organizations, to ensure that there is adequate coverage of SharePoint support. In some organizations, instead, there is a laissez faire approach, by simply throwing caution to the wind. Or, worse still, their IT support departments will not think to include SharePoint as system that should be monitored, and instead not including those with basic knowledge of SharePoint on the support desk.
Take this real scenario which happened a while back. Fictional company used though, however, if their now SharePoint support individuals are reading this article, they will definitely remember this event!
Five days leading up to Christmas day. Fabrikam has an IT Support department, and a number of individuals who are tasked solely with looking after SharePoint, called 'SharePoint Admins'. These SharePoint Admins look after the platform solely, there are no monitoring systems in place except for the server monitoring systems (alarm bells ringing already - no pun intended). A member of IT Support asks what the SharePoint Administrators will be doing on Christmas day.
"We won't be around, that's for sure..." ... "SharePoint looks after it’self" - pipped the SharePoint Administrators. "We will just take a peek at midday to make sure all is well".
IT Support reports this discussion to the IT Support Manager. The IT Support Manager waves his arm saying 'that's not a problem, we have IT Support people on the desk who know a little of SharePoint, nothing can really go wrong'.
Over the next 4 days, no more is mentioned as the company 'winds down'. On the 23rd of December, the CEO puts a Christmas message to the communication team who then puts the message in an announcement list on the Fabrikam SharePoint Extranet.
Christmas Day. At 9.30am that day, the CEO of the company, with his family in the Seychelles, decides to show a friend the message that was put on the SharePoint Portal on the 23rd. When attempting to display the announcement, the web page displays an error. Concerned, he raises a call into IT Support. IT Support try to get hold of the SharePoint Administrator, who has switched off his mobile because he is at the top of the hill where he lives, sledging. The CEO asks whether there is anyone else who can help, but IT Support have no knowledge of anyone and neither do they have any other contact number for the SharePoint Administrator.
The SharePoint Administrator calls in at midday to find chaos. The CEO is fuming because he has no idea whether anyone saw the announcement, and even if they tried saw the error which was embarrassing. IT Support have stated to the CEO that they do not know how to fix the problem, which is embarrassing. And, guess what, the SharePoint Administrator, who fixes the issue in minutes finds that the rest of his day is spent building confidence with the CEO and IT Support - he is embarrassed.
That SharePoint Admin threw caution to the wind. And in doing so, assumed the following:
Preparing for Christmas
You must prepare your SharePoint environment to be supported over the Christmas period. This is just like preparing for Christmas it’self. Doing things like putting up a Christmas tree, carefully putting up decorations without falling off ladders, writing Christmas cards, posting them, wrapping presents (carefully) without getting the sellotape stuck on the wrong part of the wrapping paper and making a mess. You put effort into doing all of that because you want to make others comfortable and yourself prepared. Therefore, there is no difference when it comes to SharePoint support.
There are a nine things you could put in place, so that you can ensure that SharePoint is supported over the Christmas period:
On-Premise and Off-Premise Support
At a very basic level, the provision of support for SharePoint over a Christmas could be divided two segments - the SharePoint 'supporter' - the associated services 'supporter'.
For on-premise SharePoint, the levels of support is:
The interesting aspect of Off-Premise (e.g. Office 365) Support is that there is in effect, also two levels:
Both of these, on-premise and Office 365 have monitoring tools. Both have the priorities and service delivery of support defined to SLAs, which is communicated to the person responsible for managing the products provided. This information is then cascaded in an understandable form to the client.
There is a huge amount of monitoring tools available to on-premise SharePoint support (default and third party provisioned), which I will not go into (and there are a huge number of articles that describe them). However, SharePoint Online does not, by default have the same capabilities available for those managing them to configure monitoring easily. However, Office 365 is starting to catch up though. For example, the Office 365 Admin app for the Windows Phone 8 is available which allows those responsible for supporting Office 365 to connect to their organization’s Office 365 service status on the go. The app enables them to view service health information and maintenance status updates from their mobile device. You can also filter information by service subscriptions and configure app data refresh intervals.
To get the app for Windows Phone 8, please visit here.
Office 365 also has the Office Message Centre. The Message Centre is located in the Microsoft Online Portal. The Message Centre is the central hub for communicating with you about Office 365. And in there you will find the topics including those in the Admin Task Newsletter, messages on new feature releases, and other important information. More information about the Office Message Centre is here.
Conclusion
I hope by reading this article you have understood the importance of providing adequate and understandable SharePoint support over the Christmas period. The ability for you as a SharePoint 'supporter' to be forewarned of issues so that at the very least clients can be informed is vital. For on-premise, the ability to be contacted, or the ability provided to IT support to be able to deal with common issues, provides a service which in the eyes of the SharePoint sponsor is 'good'. So I do hope that you are able to take points from this article and apply them to your SharePoint support cover proposals....
I'd like to finish up by wishing you and yours a wonderful holiday season!
Since I wrote this series we have taken on two computer science graduates in the evangelism team in the UK, Amy Nicholson and Bianca Furtuna. Both studied machine learning as part of their courses so I introduced them to this series on Azure ML to get them up to speed. They have taken this series apart and put it back together again as a full day training course which we have been testing at several events recently. They also spotted some improvements and so I thought I would share these.
Amount of Training Data:
In the part of the experiment when I split the data into training and test data, I split out 20% of the data for training. However what I should have done is used 80% of the data training instead as usually for continuous variable type machine leaning scenarios the majority of data is given to train the model and then 20% is used to validate the model, this allows the model to really refine the patterns it understands in the data and predict with more accuracy. It’s also important to have a good balance of data as well and this case we need a mix of flights that are late and on time.
Excluding Month and DayofMonth:
I removed the time related columns used for the joining the Flight and Weather Data, Amy wondered if the time of year was significant and ran some tests with the Boosted Decision Tree algorithm:
Keep Month, DayofMonth
Remove Month, DayofMonth
Accuracy
0.935
0.933
However to be fair to me there isn’t enough data in the sample to really test this as there’s less than a years worth of data. However Tine of day might be important as well. The point is here is to experiment and test to iterate to a good result, and knowledge of the business data and maths combined with some scientific rigour is needed for that.
Quantize Module Use:
I explained and used quantization in my experiment the process of putting a continuous variable like temperature into several buckets of ranges as this is in the Azure ML sample experiment on Flight Delay. Amy decided to test whether this was improving the accuracy of the model by removing it..
Keep Month, DayofMonth + No Quantize Module
Remove Month, DayofMonth + Quantize Module
0.930
so it turns out it’s better not to do that for this scenario. Amy then wondered whether other two class algorithms in ML worked better with quantised data..
Without Quantize Module
With Quantize Module
Boosted Decision Tree
Logistic Regression
0.927
0.916
Support Vector Machine
0.924
So it’s not helping here at all. Amy did see a slight reduction in processing time using quantisation and you might argue that a small drop in accuracy might be acceptable to really speed up processing but the improvement
I learnt three things from this feedback as well as the specific errors above:
1. Expertise. It is worth talking to and learning from a real data scientist and sharing your work with them. Azure ML makes this easy by allowing me to invite others into my workspace.
2. Do good science. Don’t slavishly follow other peoples work, be curious but sceptical by testing your experiments rigorously
3. Document your work. If you want to share your work you'll need to explain your hypothesis and working like any good scientist. While Azure ML does allow comments but doesn’t have a way of storing other metadata about an experiment the way a solution in Visual Studio does.