I have to fess up - I've been rather busy working around travel schedules, family and other issues for the last while. As a result - by blog posts have been less then frequent and less then spectacular.  Because of this - I've taken the time to reflect a bit more on how I see this blog continuing to grow and give some real value to the community I am trying to reach - the Canadian IT Professional community. 

Besides pondering my blog - what have I been doing? Trying to reach out to the IT Pro community via industry events, marketing initiatives, partner events and customer focused events - things that are not normally associated with "TechNet" and TechNet audiences.  Some real interesting stuff I've been working on has been delivering workshops on Exchange, Migration and the whole collaboration story from a Microsoft perspective at a number of events recently. It's been a lot of fun sharing my excitement about Exchange 2003's mobility and collaboration stories. All of the customers were surprised how far the platform as evolved since the early 5.0 days and were impressed with the built in functionality they didn't know existed. I love creating this type of excitement and connections to IT Professionals. It has given me some valuable insight in what part I can do in order to grow the excitement in the IT Pro community...

What can I do on this blog to help out? Focus on some quality and consistency with my posts.  Some things I plan to try out:

  • Generate some excitement.  This applies to new products as well as existing feature information that I find cool and relevant to helping you out.  I'll be focusing on products I have a particular passion for - but I'll dabble in other areas as well.  Don't forget - this is for both CURRENT and NEW products coming out. 
  • Share conversations I've had with other IT Professionals across Canada.  I'll try to complement the product info sharing with relevant conversations I've had with other IT Professionals across Canada and how they are using technology to make their job easier.
  • The occasional Link post or two.  I'm not a fan of link blogging - but once in a while I come across articles that pique my interest and I want to share. Instead of them piling up in my RSS reader - I'll post them up with some additional information.
  • Series posts around specific topics. I tried this one with the NT4 to AD in place migration series.  I've got both some follow up as well as new content planned for these types of posts.  I can see from the statistics that this series of article posts have been popular with both Web referrals and RSS news feed subscription - but not so much on the comment side.

That being said... I know you are reading this post somehow - do you like what I have planned? If so - leave me a comment - share your suggestions - I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you are interested in hearing about!

If you don't comment, how can I tell if I am doing a good job?