Life of an IT Pro Advisor @ Microsoft Canada : Speaking Events

EnergizeIT snapshot of "Future Geek" T-Shirts

rclaus — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 04:40:00 GMT

The Kids needed some clean shirts after playing around outside this afternoon, so I pulled out the “Future Geek” T-Shirts from the EnergizeIT event my team put on this past weekend.

Thirty bucks went to the Kids Miracle Network for these shirts. Not Bad – even Kelli (my wife) approves of them. Normally my event T-Shirts end up as night shirts or painting clothes after a while.

I also dug up my caricature I took the time to have done. Not bad, eh? Am I really that bald?

And for those of you who wanted to see what it looks like from the podium…

Not all the chairs were in place yet (due to light rigging hydraulic cherry picker machine still needing access) so it looks a little empty still. If you look REAL close – you can just make out the MacBook pro that was installed with Vista using BootCamp (hint – it’s under the Lenovo).

Get your Windows Vista Beta 2...

rclaus — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 16:56:00 GMT

I just posted on the Canadian IT Pro blog the process to get yourself started on either downloading or ordering a copy of Windows Vista Beta 2 (32 or 64 bit).

Here's the link to the post with the details.

Demo Bot Hardware Specifications

rclaus — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 08:55:56 GMT

I just posted the detailed hardware specifications of our “DemoBot” system on the blogs.technet.com/canitpro team blog site. I thought I would direct you there in case you are a bit of a hardware geek and wanted to know what sort of horsepower runs the events we run.

Check it out!

Attended the OWSUG meeting last night - were you there?

rclaus — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 20:07:17 GMT

I attended the Ottawa Windows Server User Group meeting last night to hear Rory McGraw talk about Monitoring AD Security with MOM 2005. I have a more detailed post on how the meeting went and the content over on the Canadian IT Pro blog (http://blogs.technet.com/canitpro/archive/2006/02/24/420468.aspx)

I wanted to know if you attended or not and what you thought? The numbers are starting to climb for user group attendance and I am happy to see this trend going in an upward fashion. I am also glad that someone ELSE was presenting instead of me (hee hee) since I believe the user group community has to take charge of their destiny and direction of the group. Keep It Up and keep on providing Garth Jones the feedback!

I have to run – I just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss out on the post event details. I believe the www.owsug.ca website will have an updated copy of the presentation and other reference material up soon. If you haven’t visited the site yet – go to it and register to receive updates.

Next Canadian TechNet Tour: “TNX - TechNet Exchange”

rclaus — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 22:57:00 GMT

In case you didn't know, the Canadian IT Pro team and TechNet Canada are significantly underway with the planning and logistics of the first tour of the new year. I am the Primary content lead and I'm having a BLAST pulling these collaborative technologies together into one action packed day of enabling technology. I will be joined by my colleague Damir Bersinic (of SQL 2005 Launch tour fame) on stage for almost all of the cities we'll be touching down in.

Speaking of cities - here's the list to date:
Vancouver - January 24th
Calgary - January 26th
Ottawa - January 26th
Toronto - January 31st
Montreal - February 2nd

What will we be talking about? In depth sessions on Exchange 2003 SP2, Live Communications Server SP1, Sharepoint Portal Server and Sharepoint Services all tied into a nice collaboration and communications package. Take those technologies and add a little (no, actually A LOT) mobility with laptops/tablets and Mobile 5 based CANADIAN smartphones and PocketPCs and you got a fantastic Mobile solution.

I can't wait. I am really excited for this tour and being able to show you all what's possible when you combine collaboration with mobility. I have created a new category just for the tour so you can dial into the current information. I will encourage Damir to do the same.

Do you have anything you'd LOVE to see included or specific Collaboration or Mobility questions you would like to have answered? Drop me a comment here on this post or any of the TNX - TechNet Exchange posts and I will try my best to include it!

New Blog from a colleague - "No Spin Architecture"

rclaus — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 18:36:00 GMT

For those developers that happen to read my blog (I know you are out there…) you might be interested in a newly hired colleague of mine on the developer side of the house – Mohammad Akif. He’s an Architect that came to us from SUN and is VERY well versed in J2EE and our .NET platform. He sits on the Microsoft Architecture Editorial Board for the new Architecture certifications and has written a number of publications and technical documents.

His new blog is called “No Spin Architecture” and can be found here. (http://blogs.msdn.com/mohammadakif)
As an infrastructure guy, I mainly look after putting up the servers and services required to support these architectures, but once in a while I need to understand a bit more about the dev platform in order to get the job done. Mohammad is one of the guys I can talk to and understand what he’s talking about.

As an aside, we’re both presenting to the Canadian Federal Strategic Architect Forum here in Ottawa tomorrow. He’s covering off the developer side of the house whereas I will be talking about “Core Server futures with R2 and beyond”. I love presenting to this group as they are a lively bunch that enjoys some active round table discussion.

Exchange Performance Tuning and the IBM Storage tour

rclaus — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 22:39:00 GMT

I just wrapped up the eastern half of a partner event with IBM Canada storage group. I was asked to speak about Optimizing Exchange Performance at their 1/2 day information session on SAN storage solutions based on their DS4000 series SAN architecture. It was really nice to see the business partners and the customers come out to such an event and listen to how to tune an Exchange server on IBM hardware attached to an IBM SAN.

I was asked a lot about disk tweaking, partition block allocation size and IOs per second and what that all meant to the performance on the Exchange server. Ironically enough as you can see from my previous post - we just released a tool that does a lot of what I was talking about for you automatically and reports on how to tweak it.

I wanted to thank the IBM Canada storage team members Ken Halbert (National Channel Manager) and Chris Mak (IT Specialist with the storage group) for asking me and my team to participate.

For those who attended the session or for those who are interested in seeing the short deck I used, here's the link for the content now posted online.

By the way - if you are interested in joining my colleague Bruce Cowper on his west coast stops of the tour I believe there is still time to register. The IBM guys say their events registration should be up by Monday (http://www.ibm.com/news/ca/events/).
November 15th - Vancouver
November 16th - Calgary
November 22nd - Toronto

Ottawa TechNet Monthly (October 2005) Resource Page

rclaus — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 17:21:00 GMT

The first Ottawa TechNet monthly session on Advanced Active Directory Design was well received by the crowd that made it in on the 25^th… I am glad to see the interest is still there (and growing) to continue to have these sessions within the timeslot (12 to 1:30) that seems to work best for everyone. As discussed, Registration/Lunch will be from 11:30 until 12:00 (I will be in the room eating with you) with content starting sharply at 12:00 ending at 1:30 with a ½ hr “Tear Down and Q&A” for spill over conversations. It is my commitment to stick to this schedule and be there as a resource for you.

Speaking of resources, I decided to be a bit more proactive with my follow up after events I delver with regards to resources available online. This one is an easy one – for the Advanced Active Directory Design session there is only a couple of links I wanted to share with you..

The first link is for a copy of the slide deck… Here it is…

The second link is for my “in place migration methodology” that I have used on 30 or so of my past NT4 migrations to Active Directory. This article can be found here…

So there you go – I hope that you find the content useful.

Oh yeah – one more thing… I mentioned that I am trying something that was well received last year with regards to “series” concepts. The next Ottawa TechNet monthly will be the first in a series of 3 session targeted towards Group Policy… Each session will build off the previous session and will hopefully be as interactive as the crowd happens to be. So bring your questions, scenarios and GPO experiences and let’s share them with the group. Register today - here's the link to the events page!

As always - if you have something to say or want to leave a comment - click on the comment link to share it with the world.

TechNet Innovations Tour Wrap Up post (Ottawa and Toronto)

rclaus — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 15:07:00 GMT

I am going to cheat and have a double post for both Ottawa and Toronto so I can be completely caught up and wrap up the tour and carry on with some other posts in my drafts folder.

First off - Ottawa. I always like presenting in Ottawa - maybe it's because it's where I live and I'm not technically "on the road" when I deliver. Maybe I'm better rested or the fact that I'm not coming off a plane. Last weeks session just seemed to work really well. Despite some conflicts of having an event the same day as the Government Technology conference in the capital of Canada, we still had a large number of people attend the event. Don't worry - I won't share the attendance data with the Feds in case you skipped out on G-Tech to see the event instead.

Like the other sessions, the audience was engaging and they had lots of questions. I did have to work the demos to get some additional audience participation, but the general feedback was that once expectations were set - it was the right level of technical content. There is only so much depth you can have in a 1 hr session around Vista and a 45 minute session around the mobility platform.

One thing that I did want to mention was a thanks to some of the other "blue shirts" from the Ottawa office that came out to help with some Q and A… A good friend of mine - Pierre Roman (a Technical Account Manager) bravely stood up and helped field some "spill over" questions while I was busy answering the ones from the crowd around me.

Onwards to Toronto. We wrapped up the tour in Toronto with a double header. We had two theatres running with myself in one and our "new guy" Damir in the other. It was a little different in format, since we normally have a venue that can accommodate the whole crowd into one theatre. My crowd was a little more reserved and quiet then others in the previous cities. Once the technical content was underway and we progressed through some of the demos, things livened up. I did notice that there were substantially more questions around mobility and the new Mobile 5 enabled devices.

I'll leave you with a great big thanks for a great wrapping up of the TechNet Innovations tour and a kickoff to the touring season.

As previously posted to the blog:
Here is the link to the post event landing page with resources, links, documentation and downloads as they related to the sessions.
Here is the link to participate in the Discover TechNet quiz (Chance to win an original xBox)
Here is the link to nominate an IT Professional for the "TechNet Canada Innovation Award". (Chance to win a Media Centre PC, $500 cash and $500 charitable donation to the Children's Miracle Network in your local community).

As always - please feel free to post a comment to let us know how we're doing and what you'd like to see in the future. I'm off to develop some great content for the Communications and Collaboration tour in the January timeframe.

The TechNet Innovations Tour - Montréal stop

rclaus — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 00:03:00 GMT

I love the city, I love the people. I don't know what else to say.

I had a great time delivering the TechNet Innovations Tour stop in Montreal last Thursday. I had an opportunity to meet a number of you and I wanted to thank you for the kind comments and encouragement. Nothing beats a crowd that is responsive and interactive. It also helps when all the demos work as planned and I am able to show off the power of the new Vista platform combined with some of the Mobile 5 technology coming down the pipe.

One of the challenges my team has with these TechNet events is how far in advance we take technology to the public. We normally focus our efforts with readily accessible and deployed Microsoft technology that you already have or are thinking of having in your environment. We usually dive down deeper and provide you with solutions to issues you might need addressing in your workplace. For this event - a kick off to the touring season of sorts - we decided to respond to the request we've gotten a number of times - "Give Us More Advanced Notice on New Technologies!!!". That is how we decided on what to include this time around.

We knew that Vista was on the minds of a lot of people and we also knew that mobility is a hot topic. Based on the Ooohs and Aaaaahhs along with the applause, I know we have some very satisfied people who liked the content selection. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we weren't able to go into very deep technical discussion, but it does give you enough to know where we are headed with each platform and also what is just around the corner.

Don't let me forget the information sharing about the TechNet program, Canadian online website and an overview of the Canadian TechNet team. There are a lot of valuable resources out there and it doesn't hurt to be reminded of what they are. Then you throw in some recognition with the TechNet Canada Innovations Award (have you nominated an IT pro yet?) and some community involvement with user group awareness - everyone wins!

Are you looking for all the links, online resources and slide deck from the show? Check out the Post Event Page for the TechNet Innovations Tour…

Montréal was great - I had a lot of fun. Thanks for being a great city. Any comments on the show, content or demos? Click on the comments link below to have your say and be heard.

The Montréal IT Professionals User Group meeting….

rclaus — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 06:18:00 GMT

Still playing catch-up from last week - but I wanted to highlight the Montreal IT Pro UserGroup meeting (September the 28^th) where I delivered a session on ISA server 2004. For those of you that didn’t know, Mitch asked me rather last minute to step up and present something. While he was completing the housekeeping of events and logistics, I was literally pulling together the deck from various other sessions I had previously delivered on ISA.

I love talking to this user group – they have it figured out! They are engaging, respectful and inquisitive to the topic and to the presenter. As per usual - I can say that you definitely LOVE to interact! Thanks for being such a great user group to present to – you have my promise that when I’m in town and a meeting is close at hand, I will be dropping in and possibly stepping up again if you are short on presenter content.

I also wanted to highlight some of the great community work they are engaged with. As part of “membership dues” the executive of the group as asked that members bring in a couple of non perishable food items or a cash donation to local charities and food banks. This is a great way of feeling connected to the community at a whole different level. I think this is a great idea and hope that it continues.

Lastly, Mitch was mentioning that there is an effort underway by the group to fund the translation of some English only technical works and documents on internet security and low level forensic TCP-IP protocol stuff. The goal is to provide these resources to law enforcement agencies and to other francophone IT Professionals to enable them to help track down and combat perpetrators of child exploitation and stalking online. I don’t have a link with additional information at this time, but their website (www.mitpro.ca) should have more information posted shortly.

Keep it up Montréal!

Un « recap » pour mes visites en Québec la semaine passée

rclaus — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 04:42:00 GMT

Mon dieu, que temps se passe très vite. C’était juste une semaine que j’ai complétée mon présentation à Québec (Ste. Foy). J’ai déjà écrit au sujet du group d’usager en Québec et mes expériences avec les participants avec Small Business Server. Je veux partager quelque chose avec les participants qui étaient présent à la séance.

Je ne sais pas pourquoi quand je présente en Québec – je suis toujours malade. Je vais essayer encor un fois d’être un peu plus en forme pour la prochaine fois.
J’ai reçu beaucoup de commentaire de « bon job » et « merci pour la présentation en français ». Je vais continuer de m’improuver et vous rendre service dans la langue de votre choix. Je vais aussi essayer de vous fournir d’information et d’autre ressources en français, quand je les trouve.
J’ai déjà eu l’opportunité de répondre d’une question que j’ai reçu dans mon « e-mail ». C’était une question au sujet de licences et « software assurance ». Cette personne ma demander comment se connecter avec un francophone pour lui expliquer tous ces options. Je ne savais pas la réponse, mais je l’ai trouvé avec mes contactes Microsoft et je l’ai répondu avant que la journée est terminer.

Pour terminer cette post – j’ai un lien à partager. Tous le monde me demande pour un copie des diapositives - On peu les trouvez ici. http://www.microsoft.com/canada/technet/archive/technetinnovationtour2005/

S-V-P – laisser un commentaire si tu veux. Cliquer le lien de « comment » à la fin de cette post. Merci Québec – je t’aime beaucoup!

Academic Session on Virtual Server Scripting at Dalhousie University

rclaus — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 23:51:00 GMT

(A little late on writing this one, but travel is tough for finding time to post, yet alone write.)

And now for something completely different...

I had the opportunity to be the first on the Canadian IT Pro team to present to an academic audience in cities that coincided with various tour stops for the TechNet Innovations tour currently underway. This is our first attempt at providing content and an event around infrastructure specifically tailored to the Academic Community (professors and in-house IT shops who support university staff and computing centres). Because it was our first time - we had some challenges raising awareness of the event and getting people to come out.

The content that we chose to present was developed by Bruce Cowper around some content he had previously created for an MSDN academic session held at the Microsoft Mississauga office last spring/summer. It revolved around Virtual Server 2005 and its scripting and automation capabilities. This was further enhanced around the conversation of Deploying a Classroom environment and how automation can be used for various virtual server tasks. As is common with content we refine/repurpose/create – relevancy of the conversation and real world experience make the session with a minimal emphasis on slides. This was definitely the case with this compact 25 slide deck and real world scripting demos!! If you are looking for the demo scripts that were used - please refer to his recent blog post on a similar event he delivered to a user group meeting out west.

This session was delivered on the Dalhousie campus and there were representatives from Nova Scotia Community College, Saint Mary's and Dalhousie. There was a mix of individuals who had used virtual PC before and one who has been exploring Virtual Server 2005 for a couple of weeks / months. It was interesting to note that they all used some kind of virtualization in their classroom and had come up with a number of challenges ranging from Machine integrity and sharing/distribution to student as well as basic infrastructure of IP address allocation and “live” student VMs running on non managed student laptops. Imagine your IP address requirements tripling in a matter of minutes of class starting...

There was great participation by all involved and a lot of discussion around how to better leverage virtualization for deploying labs and classrooms back in their environment. They are all faced with challenges that virtualization solves with technologies such as undo-disks, ease of transportability of images, isolated networks, physical to virtual migration and the core of the presentation - management of virtual hosts / guests using automation. All the participants felt that this was very valuable session and timely in delivery.

I'd love to have the opportunity to reach more individuals in the Academic community across Canada. Is this something that the Academic community is interested in pursuing? A couple of individuals expressed interest in trying to get together as a community and share experiences and best practices with each other. It would be great to have the ability and the forum to share such information in the future. I am going to be bringing this concept up at the next event I have scheduled for Montréal on Friday and I am also going to be asking my other teammates to inquire at their events as well.

Are you part of the Academic Community here in Canada? What do you have to say - are you interested in infrastructure content as well as establishing some kind of forum for discussion? Sound off by posting a comment!

Halifax Stop of TechNet Innovations Tour

rclaus — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 04:33:00 GMT

The dual city launch of the TechNet Innovations tour has come and gone with great success. I wrote this on the plane ride back, but just now getting around to posting it after spending a great weekend with the family. My goal is to post these closer to the event itself so that you have something to comment against.

Bruce Cowper was out west covering Victoria, I was down east in Halifax kicking off the tour to a large and diverse crowd of IT Professionals. This tour is unlike anything we've done before. How's that you say? It's two things really - we're wrapping together an information session about all the benefits, features and resources available to Canadian IT professionals under the TechNet program as well as giving you some early glimpses at some awesome technology in the form of Windows Vista and Window Mobile.

From my perspective - It's a very fun event to deliver. Why? I usually spend my time talking about existing technology and how you can leverage your investments in what you have already deployed or are planning to deploy in the near future. Delivering this kind of content is challenging because it's in either beta or pre-release form. Talk about living on the edge. I'm up there working with beta software builds and finicky hardware that could have some quirks that rear their ugly head while trying to complete some of the demonstrations. But judging form the reactions and follow up Q and A in the crowd from the Halifax show - it didn't matter, it was worth it.

A couple of points I wanted to raise after finishing the first tour stop:

Feedback: Your feedback is extremely important to us, the TechnNet program and to Microsoft as a whole. What you write on an eval when you attend an in person event, what you post as comments to my blog and what you tell me or any other "blue shirted' TechNet person while at an event is how we gauge what you want to see, what we can do to improve and what you need as resources to get your job done.
Community: It is your lifeline to helping you solve problems and enrich your professional and personal life. Without community, we'd be in a very bad state of affairs. But don't forget - community is a two way street and is dependant on individuals contributing back into the community in the form of support, knowledge and best practices sharing. What have you done to contribute back into your local community?

So - what did you think? Did you like this new format to kick off the tour season? Did you find value in the TechNet overview? How about the sessions that looked ahead into Windows Vista and Mobile 5?

Leave me some feedback - I'll make sure it gets into the right peoples hands… :)