Since Robert Scoble announced that he was leaving Microsoft, I have done a lot of reading and thinking about his philosophy on blogging. Scoble states that you should blog about your passion and what drove you to create the blog in the first place. After looking through a number of posts I realized that I haven’t done a good job of communicating my passion.

Well the reason that I have created this blog and consequently the reason that I joined Microsoft is that I have a passion for management technologies and automation. I did a series of posts on myITforum last year entitled “The Lazy Administrator.” My first post outlined why I believe in automation. Here is brief recap:

“It really seems that in IT, we have gotten so caught up in keeping our servers running and performing our day to day mundane tasks that we've really missed the point of computers. It seems we've swapped one mundane task for another. I mean accountants don't hand write out the numbers in books anymore. There are countless accounting applications that do all of that for you. So instead the mundane tasks have switched over to the IT world. Why should we as IT administrators do all of the mundane tasks while we have computer systems that will do it for us?!?

 I realize that there are a lot of misconceptions out there about automation. Some people actually fear it! They think automation will put them out of a job. While I am sure many horse and buggy operators feared the automobile, I'm confident they weren't complaining all that much when they realized they didn't have to pick up horse crap any longer. “

As I stated, managing IT today is way too complex. Computer Systems are a tool that should be used to drive business value. Time and money spent on managing computer systems take time and money away from creating the business value that Computer Systems are supposed to provide.

As a Microsoft Consultant, it is my job to make sure that my customers are using our tools in the most effective manner. To me there is nothing more exciting than showing a customer a cool script or rule inside of MOM that can save them many hours of work. I often hear, “I never knew you could do that.”

Well the point of this blog is to alleviate the “I never knew you could do that.” I hope in the years to come that I can work with our product teams to produce computer systems that are self managing, self updating, and notify you only when things are not working as expected. Until that day, I plan on using this blog to fill the gaps, show tools and technologies that will make your jobs easier and allow you to realize the value of your Windows environment.