John Dwyer

100gb Firelite Portable HDD

A good friend of mine just introduced me to these.  For about US$180 you can have a 100GB harddrive in yourr pocket - no power cords required as it's powered through the USB cable.  Check them out at http://www.smartdisk.com/eWeb/smartdiskus/www/staticpages/fireliteporthdd.asp 

Having just lost about 10 years worth of old docs and email recently (a very cleansing experience) the realization that I had about 4,000 digital photos going back years that weren't well protected when I'm on the road. 

I now have DVD backups in storage as well as a full copy on this cute little device.     When I'm on the road I take daily backups from my laptop to this device in case the laptop drive crashes.

I'm sleeping much better now. 

Live Release Velocity ROCKS

Despite being in a completely different division and also being primarily a consumer of our web offerings this post has the risk of sounding like a marketing blast, so let me ask for forgiveness right up front. 

With that out of the way I've got to say I'm blown away with the number of very cool releases and updates coming out of our Live (MSN) team right now.  In particular I installed the lastest update of the Windows Live Toolbar the other day and was really pleased with the progress they've made on integrating the other Live offerings in.   Web/Desktop Search, Live Favorites, Mail, Spaces, RSS Feeds, Form Fill, Messenger, Phishing and Popup Filters, and the newly acquired Onfolio aggregator/reader are all readily accessible from one neat little toolbar. 

With all that stuff you'd expect a lot of clutter but I'm finding it really has very little impact on screen real estate and thanks to the exposure I'm making more use of these tools than I have before. 

If you're a heavy user of RSS and web content and you've not played with Onfolio yet I'd highly recommend you install the toolbar update just to for this feature.  It comes with huge list of pre-identified feeds grouped by category, and it's a snack to add new feeds, URLs, and static pages while your surfing for reading later on.

Anyway enough ramble, check out the new stuff at http://ideas.live.com and let me know what you think.

jd

Protecting Our Kids

I'm just back from TechEd 2005 in Orlando FL and I'm still buzzing from the opportunity of mingling and chatting with masses of our customers and partners (about 13,000 attended) as well as drinking from the firehose of technical content from our server and desktop technology teams.   There were so many great sessions but I have to tell you that the one session that impacted me more than any other was a complete surprise - not about technology but focused on the preditors that are attempting to reach our kids online.

I had no idea just how many of these people are out there or how creative and tenacious they are in their persuits, or the tools the web provides them for their black art.  It's staggering to me that a study completed five years ago showed that one in five kids online between  the ages of 11 and 14 will be contacted by a predator online, and that there are networks of these people out there who share ideas, names, and in the worst cases, children they have abducted for their horrible pleasures.

Laura Chappell, an extremely talented network specialist (packet level) and a very committed crusader against these animals, presented an excellent session on the topic of Internet Safety for Kids.   The session provided an insight into the activities that make our kids vulnerable, the profiles of typical online predators, the tools and techniques they use, and tools and information parents can use to detect that bad things may be happening.

Laura has built a kit for parents as well as a presentation kit for folks who have the time and inclination to present her experiences to their local community, and these are available from her site - http://www.packet-level.com/kids.  It's totally free and highly recommended content for anyone who is interested in the topic or who would like to help spread the word.

jd

Security Guidance Blog is Live

Great news!   Our Security Guidance team (MSS) have just launched their blog on TechNet - http://blogs.technet.com/secguide/default.aspx

This team have been specializing in providing security solutions for enterprises for the last few years (see http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security) and their blog will make it much easier to discuss security issues real time, and let them know what's on your mind and what guidance you need.

Check it out

Information Junkies - HELP

I get news and information on the TV, on my PCs, on my SmartPhone, on my SmartWatch.   It's delivered as WebPages, Email, RSS Feeds, RDS Messages and CableTV.  I love the fact that my watch told me a new Pope had been elected before the TV did and that I can know about changing weather and traffic conditions by just checking the phone on my hip.   It so cool that I can skip watching TV or listening to the radio for weeks and still know what's going on around the world.  Blogs and RSS feeds have made it so easy for me to stay in touch with friends and family back in Australia by proactively telling me every time they post something new.  My wife can even send an Instant Message directly to my Watch or Phone - yes "bread and milk" again.  I'm literally drowning in information being pushed to me at a rate that I realistically can't consume, but...

There's so much repetition and nobody's brokering this stuff so it's organized, deduplicated and delivered to the right device at the right time.  I dream of a day when I can train a single information broker to manage the flow of content to me.    All the ingredients we need to make it happen appear to be out there, and I'm sure (ok hoping) someone out there is working on making it real, but "bring it on" I say.  PLEASE!

Best Web Experiences

One of the topics that we focus on regularly is how we can most effectively share information in a compelling and highly discoverable way.   Redesigning the IT Solutions page on TechNet was one of my first major projects when I joined this team and while I'm happier with the new site layout and our stats show increased activity, there's no evidence that the approach was optimal.  

There are a few sites that I prefer for different reasons, such as http://www.windowsitpro.com, http://www.windowsnetworking.com, http://techrepublic.com.com, & http://www.cert.org.  The recently launched Desktop Deployment TechCenter on TechNet has does a respectible job of organizing the content based on specific scenarios and tasks, which improves the overall experience and makes the content more discoverable.

But... I'm not convinced I've stumbled across the best web experience for technical content yet, and I'm also suspicous that with the dramatic evolution of Search and Syndication we may be be investing time and money on a great navigation experience when our customers just want to be able to find what they need when they need it through a smart, context sensitive search UI.

Over to you.   What sites provide the content and experience that most effectively address your needs?  What is it about these sites that make the real difference?  What would be your nirvana experience for discovering and consuming technical guidance on the web?

WSSRA EXPOSED

I've mentioned the Windows Server System Reference Architecture (WSSRA) a couple of times and we've just launched a new format to make this extensive content more accessible, particularly for folks who are specifically concerned about a specific IT service in their organization.

You'll find the interactive map of the WSSRA at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/wssra/raguide/default.mspx and I'd really appreciate any feedback you have on the presentation of the content, as well as how relevant it is to you and your role.   How could we make this a better experience for you?

jd

News and Entertainment On The Go

I've just discovered a very cool feature of the Plus! Digital Media Edition - Plus Sync & Go.

This very cool little tool allows you to regularly download news & entertainment broadcasts from MSNBC, The Today Show, NPR and others to your PocketPC or SmartPhone so you can view them when you have a moment (between meetings in my case).  You can also include content from Windows Media Player playlists including music, video, recorded TV etc. With the Sync & Go client installed on your PC, updated content is downloaded to your device every time you dock.

If you're like me and you're on the move a lot this is very convenient and it's amazingly easy to configure & manage.  On my Audiovox SMT 5600 the playback quality is really good.

I've had Plus! DME installed for ages but only just discovered this one.  I guess I need to pay more attention to what I install in future.

jd

Provisioning an Enterprise Datacenter in 1 Day – Part 1

Can you build a comprehensive and functional enterprise datacenter in a day?  "Are you NUTS?" is the immediate reponse that came to my mind, but I'm coming around now.

I described briefly in my first post that we (CIS) develop and publish guidance and automation for customers that address real IT and business scenarios.   We are constantly provisioning, reprovisioning and amending the underlying infrastructure these solutions are built on, and this is a very costly element of our operation.  For most of our solutions we need three versions of the infrastructure - Development, Test and Production.  Anything we can do to optimize the provisioning of these environments increases our agility and reduces the cost of providing the lab service.

The most comprehensive and complex infrastructure environment we use today is based on the Windows Server System Reference Architecture (WSSRA - was MSA).  This is an environment of around 100 servers hosting the common workloads found in any Windows based enterprise datacenter.

With the arrival and evolution of our Virtual Server product, we've been able to virtualize the Development & Test implementations of the core components of the WSSRA environment on just 9 physical servers per implementation.   This is a major milestone for the dramatic optimization of our build process, and has made it possible for us to build and stabilize the enterprise datacenter in 10 days (very cool but well short of our 1 day deployment goal).  Some of the lessons we learned as we adopted Virtual Server can be found in the Solution for Consolidating and Migrating LOB Applications.

In my next post on this topic I'll share the approach we took to optimize this 10 day build process down to 4 days, as well as steps we are taking now to hit our ultimate goal of 1 day.

Is rapid deployment of Dev/Test environments a priority for you?  What approach are you taking?  What breakthroughs and/or blockers have you found?  

jd

G'day

This is my first posting on my brand new TechNet blog, and it's probably best to kick this off with at least a little bit of "who I am" and "why am I here?"   

I joined the IT industry in 1983 after 8 years of manufacturing leather and canvas goods.  Just how do you migrate from saddlemaking to PC software???  It's a long story that I'll be very happy to share with anyone who wants to hear about it, but will be astounded if anyone asks.  Let's just say that in '83 there was lot's of opportunity for PC hobbiests down under and the financial opportunities and working conditions were definately better than factory work.

After a mixed bag of PC related roles in reseller and distributor land I joined Microsoft and have been here for over 13 years now.  I joined the Australian sub in 1991 as a business unit manager "bum" in the product support services group and then  moved across to the internal IT group. Ultimately I had the good fortune to land the role of IT director for South Pacific and led a wonderful team of smart and committed IT specialists for nearly a decade.  Sensing that I could more effectively stir the pot at head office I transfered to the Redmond (Seattle) campus in 2002.

Just over a year ago I left our IT group and assumed a role where I believe I can apply my experiences in IT to driving a better experience for our customers.   Today I'm a group program manager in a team called the Core Infrastructure Solutions (CIS) group.  This team builds guidance and automation to assist customers and partners to design, build and operate IT infrastructure using Microsoft and 3rd party products and technologies to support common scenarios.   You'll find our content at two locations - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/default.mspx and http://www.microsoft.com/security/guidance

In this role I have two primary responsibilities:

• Product Planning - the planning role provides the processes and infrastructure that help the solution teams ensure we build the right content to meet the most importand needs of our customers.  I'll talk more about this in future posts, because I'm looking for lots of input and feedback
• The CIS Lab - to build our solutions we need to be able to replicate the environments of our customers and my team maintain an infrastructure of over 500 servers, 16tb of storage, 2,000 VLANs, and a plethora of typical datacentre hardware and software.   My lab team and I are planning to share more information about how we run our lab infrastructure in the future, so watch this space, and by all means if you have specific lab or datacentre topics you'd like to hear more about, let me know.

Well that's me in a nutshell and I'll end this post now before I lose your interest.   If you got this far, please say g'day and tell me a little bit about you and what your interests are.

Cheers

jd