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...

Within the last month, I have taken all three Microsoft Azure Certification Exams, two of them have been BETA tests. Read on and you can get you own code to take a FREE Azure BETA Exam (only 500 codes available – first come – first served) So, I post quite often about certification and...

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...

Yesterday Microsoft announced that Azure RemoteApp would be generally available from Thursday 11th December. Anyone who reads this blog will know that I rate this service very highly indeed. The ability to run Windows applications from any platform without having to run the infrastructure on your...

Vadym Fedorov is a Solutions Architect at SoftServe Inc. , a leading global software application development and consulting company, and has 12 years experience in enterprise application development, as well as 2 years’ experience in Cloud and operations optimization . Cloud computing and the...

Vadym Fedorov is a Solutions Architect at SoftServe Inc. , a leading global software application development and consulting company, and has 12 years experience in enterprise application development, as well as 2 years’ experience in Cloud and operations optimization . As today`s businesses...

Ed Jones works for Firebrand Training , a Microsoft Gold Learning Partner. He has worked in the IT training and certification industry for the past 3 years. He is a tech enthusiast with experience working with SharePoint, Windows Server and Windows desktop. Having been part of a team that has launched...

If you are at all interested in Enterprise Mobility then Wednesday 12th November at Excel in London is the place to be. This FREE event has lots going for it. Enterprise mobility is not all that is on offer. The morning is dedicated to some big-hitting keynote speakers. Including Professor Brian Cox...

Alan Richards has been working in IT for over 17 years and during that time has been at the forefront of using IT. He has led teams that have been among the first to roll out Windows, Exchange and SharePoint. Alan is currently Senior Consultant with Foundation SP, a SharePoint services and delivery company...

Colin Chaplin is a freelance Infrastructure Architect who helps large organisations transform Microsoft-based infrastructure. Tailspin Toys is a fictional medium enterprise. It has outsourced its IT function, completed a Windows 7 migration, virtualised its server estate and migrated to Exchange 2010...

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...

Having published a post on Azure RemoteApp recently, I have been absolutely inundated with requests (well three people have asked me) for information on how to use Azure RemoteApp with an application that is not published by default and that I DON’T want to run on my own premises. So here...

It comes as news to nobody that the IT industry is rocketing through a massive transformation, with every Marketing Exec and his dog bouncing around phrases like ‘Cloud Computing’, ‘Big Data’ and ‘Internet of Things’ as if they’re going out of fashion. However...

Despite my crossing the professional tracks from Full time MCT to Microsoft Full Time Employee as an evangelist, I am still keen to engage with anyone on a certification journey or those still teaching and training our hard-working IT pro community. As such I feel the need to react to the announcement...

The importance of ‘The Cloud’ in a world of connected devices. It doesn’t really matter if you are a consumer or an enterprise user. The number of devices you are likely to be using has increased from 0 or 1 to around 4 or 5 already. This is likely to increase as we consider the...

So imagine you are the CTO / CIO of a business (any size, it doesn’t matter from 10 people to 10,000) your clever team of developers have just implemented a top-notch line of business application (LOB) using the latest tools, on the Windows platform. The application becomes the de-facto tool for...

It’s a Brave new world, a mobile first, cloud first world of technology. In that world there are many new ways of consuming data, on many new devices. Data security is of paramount importance to any user, IT Pro, Small Business or Enterprise, it is a universal requirement of making that data available...

Surveillance systems, campaign trackers, sales tools, supply chain monitoring, manufacturing lines, it’s hard to think of an area of a modern business isn’t churning out reams of data. This abundance of information presents companies with one of their biggest challenges, and opportunities...

The Study of this exam content is causing me no end of difficulty. Because of this, I have adopted my usual policy of forcing the issue and have booked my exam for Wednesday 30th July at 1130 AM in Seattle. I will be attending the internal TechReady conference and will be sitting in on as many Office...

There are two certification examinations that make up the MCSA Office 365. The background, requirements and details are listed here and are partially shown in the graphic below. In short, to certify you need to pass 70-346 and 70-347 (the 70 simply identifies the retail examination, there are other...

A week or so ago I posted about Self-Training and I thought I would put my money where my mouth is. On December 23rd last year (I remember the date clearly), I sat two Microsoft Office 365 Beta examinations. Beta examinations differ from the normal ones in their numbering and more significantly they...

IPAM Part 3 focuses on the integration of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 R2 into the IPAM managed environment. What exactly does this mean? IPAM covers the entire Microsoft DHCP and DNS environment and monitors, manages and audits the deployment. Prior to Windows Server 2012...

You could be forgiven for thinking that the 8 th April 2014 is only really going to be remembered for the End of Support for Windows XP after almost 15 years of service. Time will tell, but I would venture that a large number of Virtualisation IT Pros are still rubbing their hands with glee at the release...

If we are to believe the marketing from any of the cloud services providers, we don’t really need any in house infrastructure to run a modern business, as our e-mail, collaboration and line of business systems can all be hosted for us. However in the UK there are several challenges not least the...

By Steve Plank , Microsoft Technical Evangelist “Although I was in an important planning meeting, I knew something was afoot when I saw my colleague, Dan Pilling’s, name pop up on my phone from an incoming call. He should have been boarding a plane to Seattle! A concerned voice from...