Well week 1 came and went really fast and all in all was fun, frustrating and challenging. Starting any new job is daunting; adding to that a move across the world and only having 2 days to get over the 7 hour time change may not have been the best combination in retrospect...but that is the way I role.

Day 1 and I arrive to shuttles into a little room with 30 other new hires for the introductory training on Microsoft Ireland and Microsoft in general. 20+ of the new hires are recent college graduates. This is an 8 hour session on everything from putting a lid on you coffee to make sure you don’t get a burn to the IT Security policies. The session on the makeup of the Ireland office, with European Operations Team, Localization Development Teams and Ireland Sales Team is interesting as is the actual IT stuff. The rest is HR fluff that I could do without; I have had a job before!

I did get my picture taken for my blue badge, should have it within a week or so.

Tuesday really is my first day on the job. I got an email Monday night from my manager Donna asking me if I wanted to dive in and attend a 2 hour Partner strategy meeting with one of the 16 Microsoft Partners I am responsible for. Why not! I arrive onsite at 9:00 to prep before my 10:00 meeting. I get through security and sent up to the 8^th floor where I walk around for 15 minutes looking lost and decide to sit at the open staff area hoping to find someone to ask where to go. 15 more minutes with no human interaction and I start walking the floor lost again. Finally someone tells me I look lost and offers to find me my manager. Voila, I am about to start my day.

A quick hello, get handed my temporary laptop, sign on to the network, get some mail and off to the meeting. It is in this meeting that I find out that I am the Partner Technology Specialist responsible for server technologies (PG1 for the Microsofties). This means I need to be an expert in W2K8, virtualization, System Centre, DPM, and of course SBS/EBS. I have to backfill and support the IW stack (SharePoint, Office, Project Server, UC, etc). Nothing like finding out your job in the first meeting with a Partner!

Keeping with the get your feet in the fire, I was then send off to 2 more Partner meetings, taking up the entire day. There you go day 1 and I have been to 3 meetings with Partners.

You would think that working at Microsoft, a technology based company technology would be readily available. The short answer for this is YES and No. It is a very large organization, with over 150 000 people working in all the offices so there is a little bit of bureaucracy and rigor to all processes. Lets take getting a phone. I need to get a desk phone and extension. The Dublin office is primarily using Unified Communications and older IP phones. I of course want to use UC so I can use a soft phone from home as well as integrate to my mobile (that is coming next). To get UC I need to have an IP phone and then get upgraded...OK, that seems logical. A bunch of SharePoint based forms later, and a phone call to the local IT manager and I have someone setting up my IP phone on Friday; then some more online forms to make the change to UC for sometime next week.

This all seems OK, but I am new to Ireland and I need a phone to be able to call and get registered with the tax department, with immigration, etc. So I then wanted to get a mobile so I can make some calls in the wait for a desk phone. Wait, we are in the middle of a product refresh and there will be no new mobiles for 2 weeks or more while the Treo 850 is delivered and longer if you want one of the Sony phones.

Great, I happen across an older Windows Mobile phone from a hand me down on Thursday, but still need a SIM to get it functioning. A bunch of emails to various people...no go.

Friday night there is a team diner and drinks for some people who are leaving the team. This is a great way to meet everyone and really get to know them. We stop at one of Dublin’s oldest pubs before diner for a pint of Guinness and then off to a very upscale restaurant. Over a number of drinks I find someone with a spare SIM and by Monday I will have a working phone on my desk and a mobile I can use until the new phones arrive.

 Partner meeting location....golf course half way to Belfast....I like this job already :>)

 That is week 1 on the job

This where all the fun for the week really is. We decided to make a short trip out of Dublin on Saturday and see the coast. It is Sarah’s birthday today and we needed to do something fun for her and going up to the ocean is a great start for prairie people. We travel south of Dublin to Greystones. A tiny village with a very beautiful and rugged coast line about 30 km south of where we are staying. It is very windy, gusts up to 70km/h and it one of the best experiences of our life as the salty air slaps you across the face at the same time as the tide pounds the coast line. We have a nice Irish breakfast after or time on the shoreline and then drive back to Dublin. On the way home we discover that Emily seems to have developed a car sickness issue in Ireland.

On Sunday we take the LUAS commuter train to downtown Dublin to take in St. Stephen’s Green, an old gated park in the centre of town with a huge duck pond and beautiful gardens. After a picnic in the park we walk the Grafton Street area with all the shops in buildings from the early 1700 & 1800’s. This is a fantastic family day and maybe our best day in Ireland so far.

We then head home for supper and we can watch the rider game on TSN.ca when it is completed and posted. Go Green!

Rodney from Microsoft Canada forwarded me this, to get it pushed out to as many people as possible. 

In case you have been living under a rock for the past month you have most likely heard about the DNS cache exploit recently discovered by Dan Kaminsky.  This might be one of the most severe flaws discovered as it was cross platform affecting everything from Windows to Linux, UNIX, Cisco IOS etc....  It was so big in fact that all the major vendors worked together to get the patch issued on the same day.  The flaw would allow an attacker to insert a malicious DNS record into the cache.  As an end user you type in www.technet.com and rather than get the proper IP address the cache delivers the malicious IP address sending you to ????  You can find out more on the details of the flaw at Dan's blog.

You should also make sure that you are patched.  Make sure that your upstream ISP DNS servers are patched by calling them or using Dan's DNS Checker at the top of his website.

So why all of a sudden a rush to ensure you are patched?  Well the patches issued by the vendors have been reverse engineered and exploit code has been published!  Dan has said many times that this is an extremely easy to launch exploit that could be implemented in seconds.

MS08-037 - Vulnerabilities in DNS Could Allow Spoofing (953230)

KB953230 - Vulnerabilities in DNS could allow spoofing

Go. Read. Patch. Now.

And when you are done, copy and paste this blog post to your blog, email it to your IT Pro buddies, get the word out!

If you have links to the patches from other vendors, please leave a comment with the URL!

Friday was Bill Gates last day at Microsoft.....like you were able to miss the biggest retirement since Bill Clinton (not that I am comparing Ballmer to George W!). I have to write a small thank you to Bill, as without him I would not have a job, the passion I have or the vision for the world I do.

I think there are many people in the world who have passion for technology like Bill Gate`s. Most of us do not the opportunity to take that passion to the same level Bill has. Equally I believe there are a number of business savvy people around the world on par with Bill. What differentiates Bill Gates from all others, other than maybe Steve Job, is his extreme ability in both of these fields. He is an uber geek and a ruthless businessman all rolled in to one, and it as been awesome to watch.

I received my first home PC computer in 1984. I used to write basic applications to help my dad’s company cost out products it manufactured and keep track of the average cost of the year’s production. I was just entering university and there was a limited number computer classes but I was enrolled in them. I ended up leaving university after the 2^nd year to go to work for a while to try and find my focus but kept working on computers.

It was from this point that I started to use predominately Microsoft products. DOS, the early releases of Windows, Windows 95, 98, NT, the early releases of Office and Windows Server. Sure I learned some UNIX, Novel, Corel, Adobe and Apple along the way, but the reality is that what I have been using, like most of the computer world is Microsoft’s products. No other software company has been able to find a niche in almost every single computer field. The bread and butter is the OS business, on the desktop and server side but the dominance in the browser, development tool set and framework, productivity tool sets, email solutions, mobile solutions and gaming systems is unbelievable. While they do not own some of these markets, they are usually 2^nd in all other niches.

Sure there have been some failures along the way (see Bob, ME, URGE, TabletPC, UMPC and some of the hardware they have pushed) but they tend to succeed way more than they fail.

I love technology and the possibilities it provides, and for this I thank Bill Gates for his vision of a world with a computer in every house and on every desk. Some said it was crazy, but in some areas of the world it is the norm. I have had 20+ years to watch the evolution of the PC and computing in general, and can’t wait to see where it goes. Gates fingerprints are all over this…..for good or bad some may argue…but no one can argue his impact.

I am a big fan of the Edge Community at TechNet and the work of my hero's department...Jeff Sanquist, Senior Director of Evangelism for microsoft who is from Estevan, SK. A slick graphical UI and fun the use of new media make this a great site with even better information. I blogged on Edge for TechNet Canada's CanITPro blog a while back and saw this video post on SBS and needed to promote it again.

http://edge.technet.com/Media/SBS-2008-Setup-PM-demo-and-interview/

Will

[Today's post comes to us courtesy of  Kevin Beares]

This is the third year we have published an SBS WW Community Survey to the SBS Community.

We have learned an amazing amount of information from the people who have taken the time to tell us what they thought. Some things we kind of knew already, but other things were not as clear before we had received the feedback.

Because of the previous surveys, we have made some adjustments in our community engagement. To name a few; we really worked on putting more focus on the Official SBS Blog. Our Sustaining Engineering team runs mini betas with our MVPs before KB's and Bug Fixes are released via Windows Update. We try to get more involvement in our techbetas from our User Groups. The list does go on.

To the survey, the SBS Product Team would like to hear from the Windows SBS Community again. This survey is completely anonymous. In fact, some of you may have to sign out from Live in order to take the survey. So, if you get a PAGE NOT FOUND error message, please log out of Live and click on the link to the survey again.

We want to know how valuable your experience is with the community resources and information that is available to you today as a member of the Windows SBS Community. We also want to know what you think could be done to improve your Windows SBS Community Experience. Please take a couple of minutes to provide us your candid feedback via this survey and let us know what you think.

SBS WW Community Survey 2008

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

So the weekend did not go as planned, but I am still very Energized by its outcome!

Friday's trip to the Microsoft offices was cancelled for me at the last minute due to an issue at work that needed my attention. Disappointing in that I did not get to interact with the Program Managers I had hoped to...but work comes first.

I still was able to fly out late Friday afternoon and participate in EnergizeIT! I got into Toronto at about 10:45 and headed to the hotel to drop off my bags and over to the convention center to drop off my server and gear for setup. As we are driving up to the event center, there are about 1000 (no lie!) Anime convention attendees walking the streets in full costume going to the hotels and restaurants around the area. Apparently we were sharing the building with as many as 5000 Anime North 2008 attendees, most of who were in full costume all the time. More on that later.

After a few minutes more onsite, we headed back to the hotel. It is now 1:15 AM and when I try to turn the TV on in my room, it does not work. After some tech help from the front desk (me telling them I tried everything...move me) I get a new room. It is now 2:00 and we have to leave for site at 7:00. I run through my presentation, make some more notes and drop off at about 3:30-4:00. Up at 6:30 and off to the event at 7:00 sharp!

Energize had a different setup this year. The stage was in the center of the room so the event was in the round. This is cool as everyone gets a clear view of the stage. They also have 10 big screens setup around the entire space so everyone has a way of seeing close up what is going on. All the speakers were invited to have a private breakfast with Phil Sorgen, the President of Microsoft Canada and at 9:00 it is off to the big rooms for the event. Rock concert lights and pounding music get the day started as a version of ACDC's Thunder Struck (Energized! remix) plays. A T-Shirt toss starts the days off as people cheer loudly to get some free swag. The morning is a large group session for all attendees with presentations from the IT Pro and Developer Evangelist teams, Phil Sorgen with the Microsoft Canada awards, a presentation on the changing face of IT careers, and the EnergizeIT Demo Competition.

The Demo Competition was 3 great presentations on how to use Microsoft technology in a fun way. I was on team Shell Shocked and as part of the demo we “bribed” attendees to vote for the demo by throwing out more T-Shirts, some with copies of Vista Ultimate or Office inside. This was a great way to hype the crowd and keep people interested in the presentations. A little fun thrown in the middle of the day made for a great experience. The Powershell demo also included the largest Rickroll in Canadian history to date. Next up is the boxed lunches and off to make my first presentation.

My presentation was an overview and demo on the soon to be released Windows Small Business Server 2008. This is a product I am passionate about and as such it was fun to give an insight into a beta product for some equally existed participants. I like to make presentations interactive, and as such took a lot of questions throughout the 70 minutes and really had a dialogue with the people in the room. This was my first experience presenting at a Microsoft event of this sale and it was fabulous. People responded well to the presentation; ask questions before and after, so I took that as a good indication.

I also made a joint presentation with Mitch Garvis from Toronto on the choice between SBS2008 and the new EBS2008 product, and when to use each later in the afternoon. This was a completely unscripted presentation, with the slide deck consisting of 8 slides thrown together over lunch but I think it was a great dialogue with the participants on the fit for both of these products and why as a consultant I will want to know and use both of these in my practice. Anyone who knows or has met Mitch will agree that he is an imposing figure, at 6’3” and 265 (I am being kind here!) he is a presence just as he walks in the room. His physical size is dwarfed by his personality though. He is always on and as a professional presenter and teacher, he has this game mastered. It is a bit intimidating to co-present with Mitch, but think we delivered a great presentation that was enjoyed by all….including us!

The event is winding down now and the best part of the day has began as far as I am concerned….it is off to the restaurant for the post event meal and some drinks and then to the hotel lounge for some more drinks and the hockey game. The best part of becoming an IT Pro UG lead and MVP is the chance to interact with the Microsoft staff and other leaders from across Canada. Over the next 7 hours we had the best time winding down, laughing at each other and bonding as a national community. And to a great extent finding new jokes about the fact the event was next to the anime event…..what is the difference between a geek and a nerd? $60,00 a year in income and not living in your parents basement at 32! This is the reason why I go to these events!

Now for my personal reviews of the event:

Pro’s:

·         The event space was so much better than last year by making the event in the round

·         The demo challenge was awesome and hopefully will become a yearly tradition…..maybe we can have the user groups involved in the challenge and make it a national event

·         Having 11 tracks and 33 presentations in the afternoon made for a diverse group of attendees and topics to be in a single forum. This was a big improvement over the agenda from last year

Con’s

·         The fact there was no physical demo labs and only virtual ones where people could download the material from wasn’t as good as in the past….and a bit confusing for the attendees

·         The recognition awards do not have anything to do with the user group community. Awards are given for Developer and IT Pro people and groups for solutions they achieve based on Microsoft technologies but there is nor recognition in a forum like this for the work done at the community level by user groups across the county.

·         The morning presentations go from a euphoric high with the opening of rock music and shirt giveaways, through some not so slick presentations and then end with the euphoric demo competition….they need to work the flow a little bit to keep the morning energy higher while still delivering some information…think Ballmer at MIX008 when he is asked about the monkey boy…you can still deliver the message with a whole lot of excitement…ENERGIZED!

So that was my 34 hours in TO in a nutshell….great time and great event but even greater people

Cheers

Will

I have to give a presentation next weekend in Toronto as part of EnergizeIT!, so I have been preparing my slides, doing research and a bunch of dry runs...including one with Damir from Microsoft and Mitch from the IT Pro Toronto User Group via LiveMeeting. I give lots of presentations now between work, the Regina IT Pro User Group and CIPS so it is not a big deal for me. But I have been thinking twice about my style in the last few days.

I had the pleasure of bringing Jeff Sandquist to Regina last week for the 2008 CIPS Regina Spring Seminar. For those unfamiliar with Jeff, he is the Senior Director of Evangelism for Microsoft, and a guy originally from Estevan, SK. I have been following Jeff's work for a couple of years now, after stumbling across the fact he was from Saskatchewan when reading his blog. Jeff made a 60 minute presentation on Evangelism, his teams work and how he got to where he is today on 8 slides in PowerPoint and 2 short videos. Even better was the fact none of his slides has bullets. He honestly had 1 slide up for 30 minutes, and it took to the end of those 30 minutes to get to the slide. The great part was the fact the slide was a picture of a Channel 9 squishy toy! Jeff's presentation was really a series of stories that came across more as a conversation with pictures than a presentation.

This got me to thinking about the presentation I was about to make. Now granted, I am doing a product demo on the release of Small Business Server 2008 coming later this year, so they are not quite the same style of presentation but how can I turn that into a conversation. I recently did the Heroes Happen {here} Community Launch in Regina, presenting on the new Windows Server 2008. I had 40 slides in 1 hour and 2 very short product demos. It was very clinical, and did not engage the audience the way I would have liked. I don't want the presentation at EnergizeIT! to be the same. I attended the event last year and found some of the afternoon sessions to be the same.....Death by PowerPoint.

So now I am sitting here cutting slides from my presentation and working on speaking notes to turn the presentation into a conversation on my experiences with the Small Business Server product line over the last 9 years and how the newest release compares in features and usability. I want the presentation to be a two-way conversation with the audience to understand if they are business people, Microsoft partners looking to expand their market through this product or IT Pro's working with SBS.  This combined with some heavy emphasis on a hands-on product demo should make the presentation fun.

We will see how it goes!

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Regina has a chance to participate in a national security tour specifically geared towards the recently launched Windows Server 2008. May 22^nd at the SaskTel Auditorium we will have the opportunity to first hand discuss security within the Microsoft platform of products with subject matter expects.

Register now

With new products being launched,  new technologies being introduced and increased pressure to ensure security across the board, it’s hard to know what the best way is to get up to speed and make sure you’re ready for this wave of opportunity. And even if you do know your “stuff”, how to prove that to your boss or clients?

Join us at the Energize IT Certification Bootcamp where we will take you through hot topics such as Windows Server 2008 and Virtualization Security as presented at this year's Energize IT event in Toronto and discuss certification paths available along with tips and suggestions on how to approach exams.  Be ready ahead of the curve and show what you know through certification.

By joining us at this event, you will have the opportunity to choose a certification study kit from one of the following four books:

1. MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training (Exam 70-299):
Implementing and Administering Security in a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network
2. MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-640):
Configuring Windows Server 2008 Active Directory
3. MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-642):
Configuring Windows Server 2008 Network Infrastructure
4. MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-643):
Configuring Windows Server 2008 Applications Infrastructure

About the Presenters:

Kirk Munro started his professional career in 1997 as a developer at FastLane Technologies Incorporated, where he worked on an advanced scripting language called FINAL (FastLane Integrated Network Application Language). 10 years later while working at Quest Software he returned to his scripting language roots and became a Poshoholic when he started working with PowerShell and PowerShell-based applications like PowerGUI. Today he is a member of the PowerGUI team and spends all of his professional time using PowerShell and helping others use PowerShell through newsgroups, online forums, events, and his Poshoholic blog.

Kai Axford (CISSP, MCSE-Security) is a Senior Security Strategist in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group.

A nine-year Microsoft veteran, Kai is responsible for discussing and recommending security solutions for both private and public sector organizations. In addition, he conducts Chief Security Officer councils worldwide, taking executive feedback and affecting change within Microsoft’s security products and processes.

Kai started with Microsoft in 1999 as a Server Support Engineer and then moved on to become an IT Pro Evangelist, focusing on his peers through the Microsoft TechNet Events program. Kai has delivered more than 200 security presentations on a variety of topics, including digital forensics, security management, and incident response. He is a frequent speaker at security conferences, executive meetings, and business seminars around the world.

Kai is currently pursuing an MBA in Information Assurance and is a member of ISSA, INFRAGARD, ASIS, and the North Texas Electronic Crimes Task Force. He was the recipient of the 2006 “Rising Star” award from the Information Security Executive council. Kai is interested in security management and hopes to become a Chief Security Officer one day.

Prior to Microsoft, Kai served as a leader in several real-world operations with the U.S. Army's elite 75th Ranger Regiment. Originally from Wisconsin, Kai is a huge NFL Green Bay Packers fan.  He is based in Dallas, Texas with his lovely wife and a (very wet) yellow Labrador.

Cheers! 

I had the pleasure a couple of weeks ago of co-hosting the Community Connection event here in Regina, sponsored by Microsoft, CIP, ICTC and ACCC as part of the launch tour for Server2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL 2008. As part of this event I was able to participate in the afternoon presentation to about 50 SIAST and high school students as well as the evening session for IT Professionals. There was a sound message delivered as part of these presentations, there is an immediate and short range need for a large number of people to enter the field.

The numbers presented by ICTC indicate a 33,000 person shortage for 2008 and 89,000 in the next 3 to 5 years. Those numbers are staggering when you look at the enrolment numbers in computer programs across Canada. In Regina, there are currently 12 declared CSS students at the University of Regina, with 20 people attending SIAST Wascana campus’s networking class, and another 20 in SIAST Palliser campus for the programming class. Those numbers are not reassuring when you are looking to hire staff. I recently attempted to hire a QA Developer and a .net Developer. We had approval to make this happen as fast as possible and in the end I was hard pressed to find any candidates from Regina. We ended up interviewing people in Calgary, Winnipeg and finally ended up hiring the .net developer from Halifax.

What seems to be the market condition at this time in Regina is the consulting firms are having employees jump around between them to take on various new postings, but few if any new people actually are entering the workforce. This will really lead to a problem in the next 3-5 years when the baby boomers start to retire. My personal take away from the Community Connection was to find a means of encouraging enrolment in the school programs around the province, and find a way to increase the public’s awareness of this need.

In Saskatchewan, we are experiencing a bit of a renaissance in terms of population growth, economic growth and revitalization in general. One of the by-products of this boom is a need to fill professional and trade positions to meet the demand. In the case of the nurses and teachers, they have a collective bargaining group in the form of a union to lobby on their behalf to encourage the government to hire more positions as well as to market to the general public, and the current high school students in particular of the need for these professionals. This is lacking in the IT sector as we all work for different companies and organizations. Far be it from me to preach the virtues of a union, but I do believe that there is a need for a common voice to represent the technology profession in Saskatchewan at some level.

Within Saskatchewan, there is an organization that could do this. SATA is a non-profit organization that has a large membership of corporations and companies with IT interests. The downside is that this organization has mainly made its mandate to present information as to why the outsourcing of IT jobs by the government is the right choice to make. Funny enough, most of the membership companies are consulting firm who would be the beneficiary of these practices. That does not make them the right voice for the industry in my mind.

This then leads me to the second option, CIPS. As an organization, it is exclusively made up of volunteers with no paid or full-time staff. They would have a great deal of trouble in finding the leadership to take on this task. It requires statistical analysis, marketing, lobbying the provincial government at different level, the education institutions as well as making presentations around the province to perspective students. It is a giant undertaking and one that a volunteer organization can’t do effectively.T

his then leads me to my third option. For those who have been following my blog since the start of the year will know that I have been looking for a means to become a Technology Evangelist within my own community and how to turn this into a profession; this may be the opportunity to do just that. Who it is that would sponsor such a position (or non-profit organization)? That is the part of the mission I need to work out, but I now have a starting point to work towards my goal.

I will keep you updated as I continue to work this all out.

Will