Microsoft Training Blog

QuickStart Intelligence: IT and Job Health

As a QuickStart Intelligence Senior Principal Instructor, I spend most of my time in direct contact with a range of struggling yet extremely talented people who are asking the same questions these days.  “How can I keep competitive and get more done with fewer resources?”  To be blunt, the question today sounds more like “How can I maintain my edge, in order to keep my IT job?”  This question takes different forms when asked by IT workers, managers and CIOs, but it resolves to essentially the same question.  I’ve notice that, over the past ten years, the waves of new technologies and innovations are shorter-lived and more challenging to “ride”.

This blog entry attempts to help you, well, to keep your eyes on the prize.  While waiting for a flight to an overseas IT assignment, part of an IT academy taking three dozen participants through six months of intensive training, I’m going to offer three pieces of advice based upon some observations, which have taken shape over the last three decades in IT careers.  I’ve watched Microsoft ride the industry waves quite successfully, first with interoperability, then with security, and now with virtualization, with continuing development of IT process automation at each stage.

Number one, invest in continuing education, continuously.  This may sound like a no-brainer.  Yet many participants in IT training have not actively participated in skills training over the past three years or more.  However you do it, and I hope that QuickStart can help in some way, employers and employees share the duty to keep IT skills current.  An IT staff with outdated Windows NT skills is similar to trying to make furniture with dull tools and insufficient lighting—the results with put you and your company behind and you will lose out in today’s strained economy.  At QuickStart, we are continuously working with you to keep your skills sharp and well-honed.  For every week-long class that I deliver at QuickStart, I must give out references to about five times that many hours of free training links, hands-on-labs and continuing education that you can and must slipstream into your IT career.  Stay active, stay mobile, look beyond your daily IT routines.

Number two is a wide target.  Be vigilant that your job, and your employees’ jobs, are the subjects of automation and not the objects of automation.  Have you noticed that the simple application of IT skills to solve problems is simply not enough to stay employed these days?  IT people need to be actively modeling automated solutions to the tasks that they and their colleagues or employees have been repeating, sometimes a bit mindlessly.  While we infuse these techniques into most of our QuickStart IT courses, there are a few central automation technologies that you cannot afford to ignore.  Windows Powershell is one.  Windows PowerShell is not just some new scripting language:  It is the platform on which Microsoft software is being built, which behooves you to be in the driver’s seat.  Many people come to a PowerShell class when they realize that the applications they support, such as “little” ones like Microsoft Exchange 2010, are all becoming more and more based upon a Powershell platform.  Powershell is not text, but an exposure of Windows objects that permits automation and creative control by IT people, not necessarily software developers.  Do not think that PowerShell is for developers.  It is for IT infrastructure job role-holders.  There are many more automation tools besides Powershell, which we will visit in these columns, but for now, learn PowerShell before it becomes and emergency!  PowerShell powers all of the System Center family of products, which is the umbrella term and brand for Microsoft Management products.  If you can master and use one or more System Center products, you have the leverage of five to ten IT employees of a decade ago.  Our QuickStart offerings are growing in the System Center arena, with the current most popular courses being System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3 and System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.  Look to courses in Microsoft’s new Help Desk/Customer Service/Ticketing system, System Center Service Manager 2010 SP1. System Center Orchestrator 2012 will wrap around almost all of the server technologies, as well as non-Microsoft large data center applications.  Look for our course when it’s ready.  Give yourself experience with these tools and you will manage the world!

Number three, integrate and align IT services to your business outcomes.  IT cannot survive well if IT geeks try to drive your business model for IT-related reasons.  The industry leader of IT Service Management best practices is ITIL, with Microsoft’s current implementation, MOF 4.0 taking on a very pragmatic and operational point of view.  When you practice what you learn in QuickStart’s Microsoft Operations Framework 4.0 course, you assure the entire business is helped and driven forward with Information Technology, not held back or worse, weakened by misdirected IT projects. To survive, you AND IT must both become more dynamic and better aligned with business processes.  We don’t want to hold our business users hostage, but rather to build systems, applications and process models that promise success to whatever business or vertical market that we may be working in.

So for now, do good work, stay alert, keep your “IT eyes” focused on these issues and keep in touch with us at QuickStart.

What do you think?

Thanks!

Mark Wheatley, Systems Engineer, QuickStart Intelligence

Why Software Asset Management is Critical for IT Managers

Software piracy is a well known issue among those in the technology industry – but, what many don’t know is that one out of every five software applications in the US is pirated. So, as a statistical comparison, if five different people are reading this blog, one of them is using pirated software – perhaps unknowingly.

What some also might not know is the level of economic damage that results from otherwise legitimate US and global corporations who have unauthorized software installed. The commercial value of unlicensed software in the US alone was more than $9 billion in 2010, according to a study by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and IDC. But piracy isn’t just harming the software industry, it’s hurting the economy as a whole, stifling innovation and impairing technology’s ability to help businesses grow and create jobs. Another 2010 BSA/IDC study also found that if piracy was reduced by just ten percentage points in four years, more than 25,000 jobs would be created in the US and $38 billion in new economic activity would result.

This is why IT managers play an important role, managing a critical asset from the day it is purchased. Failure to manage this investment can lead to system failures, lawsuits, or debilitating viruses. When counterfeit software fails to provide the services companies rely on them for, it ends up hurting the businesses’ bottom line and their ability to perform. Just as with any other risks posed to a business, preventative measures must be taken to eliminate the potential for harm that pirated software can cause.

Fortunately, companies can easily protect their IT systems from these types of outcomes by taking appropriate action. One option open to software asset managers is SAM Advantage, which provides in-depth training on proper management of IT assets, allowing organizations to maximize their technology investments while minimizing costs and safeguarding against potential threats.

How are you using Software Asset Management?

Written by: Peter Beruk
Senior Director, Compliance Marketing
Business Software Alliance

What’s new in Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence?

It used to be that Business Intelligence with SQL Server meant a discussion of Reporting Services, Integration Services (SSIS) and Analysis Services.  With the release of SQL Server 2008 R2, we added Master Data Services (MDS) and PowerPivot, and a host of new features, mostly to Reporting Services.  With the upcoming release of SQL Server 2012, we are adding Data Quality Services(DQS), and Power View (if you are running Reporting Services in SharePoint integrated mode). There are also major changes to Integration Services (a new deployment model) and to Analysis Services - the ability to store data in tabular mode, not multi-dimensional mode. 

Integration Services has long had a model of deploying packages.  If you wanted to deploy scripts, or deploy a set of packages, you had to write your own script to move those files from development to production.  Now, with SQL Server 2012, you will, by default, be deploying projects.  You can still use the legacy method of deploying packages if you want to. Since you now have projects, you also have project parameters.  A discussion of what project parameters can do versus package parameters is here: Project parameters vs. Package Parameters.

As part of Microsoft’s retooling of deployment, they’ve also added the ability to specify environments, and environment variables which can be used during package execution.  You can specify a development environment, create variables used in development and also create, during development, the variables and values that will be used in your production environment.  Just as with the older configuration variables, these can be accessed and chosen or changed at runtime. 

With the addition of Data Quality Services and Master Data Services, attention is now being focused on what happens in enterprise data management before you start getting the data into a data warehouse. Master Data Services was added with SQL Server 2008 R2.  Donald Farmer gave a good presentation on MDS at SQLBITS. 

MDS allows users to create business rules that can be applied to data from disparate sources, so that they all follow the same rules.  Note I said that it allows users to manage the data.  This is Microsoft’s foray into master data management.  And, as part of their increased focus on involving the user, MDS is about data owners deciding what the business rules should be, not someone in IT, or in development.  The limitation of MDS is that MDS only really works for data that represents key business entities (e.g. “customer”, “product”, etc.).  For other data, that isn’t an entity, you could still have input errors, or duplicate entries.  For these cases, you will have users applying their knowledge of the business transactions through use of the Data Quality Services client application, or, alternatively, through use of Excel.  DQS allows you to say that the geographical location is US, not America, not USA, nor United States.  All of the non-acceptable entries would be identified as synonyms of US, with US as the leading synonym.  As more data is analysed, the application learns and saves that knowledge in a knowledge base.  This knowledge base can also be used to feed MDS, for the design of business rules.

To learn more about SSIS 2012, and about MDS and DQS, see the new beta version of the MS-10777AB course: Implementing a Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2012.  This course is beta courseware, with the SQL Server running SQL 2012 RC0.  When SQL 2012 releases later in the first half of this year, the course will be updated with the final release bits of SQL 2012. 

Your tool for developing SSIS packages is no longer called Business Intelligence Development Studio, but is now called SQL Data Tools.  Another change is that you will get two Toolboxes: one just for SSIS, and another generic one still called Toolbox.  As before, you can add other development tools to your toolbox. 

Remembering that SQL 2008 R2 had many changes to Reporting Services, and that Analysis Services has had few changes in recent releases it is no surprise that there are major changes to SQL 2012 Analysis Services.  Microsoft has realized that it takes a lot of design and development work to create a data warehouse.  Wouldn’t it be nice if users, without assistance from IT, could slice and dice data in their favourite tool, Excel?  PowerPivot has been created as an addin for Excel, so that users could import data from a variety of sources on separate worksheets in a workbook, tie that data together by identifying common column values (DBA’s call those Primary key-foreign key relationships), and then slice and dice that data. 

That tabular data can also now be stored in Analysis Services.  To do that, when you install SSAS, you now have three choices: Multidimensional, Tabular, and PowerPivot for SharePoint.  When you choose multidimensional, you create an online analytical processing (OLAP) model that includes cubes, fact tables and dimensions.  Tabular mode supports creating a model using tables and relationships.  PowerPivot for SharePoint integrates SSAS with SharePoint 2010, so that users can centrally store and process their PowerPivot for Excel workbooks, using a web browser.

While the bulk of the changes were made to Integration Services and Analysis Services, Reporting Services has seen the addition of Power View, a new way for users to create reports which are visually interesting and informative. Thus there are now three ways to create reports, Report Designer, Report Builder 3.0 and Power View. Again, you can see that Microsoft has put the emphasis on making data and the use of that data, into the hands of users and information workers.

For a closer look at the new features of Reporting Services and Analysis Services, please check out the new course: MS-10778AB Implementing Reports and Data Models with Microsoft SQL Server 2012.  Again, as with MS-10777AB, mentioned above, this course is a beta course, using SQL Server 2012 RC0. It will also be updated when the product releases.

What are your thoughts?

Saskia Schott, Systems Engineer, QuickStart Intelligence

SQL: Auditing Event Data While Protecting Auditing Systems and Data

This is the second article in a series discussing database auditing. The first article discussed the need to audit from various governmental mandates and best practices of auditing just the data you need to meet requirements- refresh your memory on SQL Server Database Auditing.  This article will continue discussing auditing best practices, including what data needs to exist in your audit logs and the need to protect your audit log data and auditing systems from being disabled or removed.

Auditing Event Data

First of all I need to say that auditing compliance is more than just having systems in place to track what users are doing with data.  It includes many other aspects besides just the monitoring systems.  All the security mechanisms are important but even with the best, state-of-the-art auditing system, if someone can walk in and walk out with your server or backups, you will be out of compliance with several of the regulations.  I could go on and talk about all the other security systems that need to be in place, but suffice it to say auditing of data access is just one part of auditing compliance and let us agree that we will all implement those systems. 

Returning to auditing (aka monitoring systems), a key part of any such system is a measuring and reporting mechanism so that the auditing data can efficiently be used.  While those are mainly outside the scope of our discussion of generating the auditing data, I will mention the ease (or difficulty!) of implementing those systems when we look at the various tools SQL Server 2008/R2 provides.

Any good auditing system will include, at the very least, the following information:

• Who accessed the data?
• What type of access was it?
• New data or change, delete, or read of data – could include systems change like permissions change or new users/logins
• What application accessed the data?
• Where was the access from? (What network and/or what computer?)
• What was the statement or command that accessed the data?
• Was it successful and what data accessed (if successful)?

Protecting Audit Event Data and Auditing Systems

Protecting your auditing data systems and audit data is a very important aspect of a compliant auditing solution.  You might otherwise have a very good auditing system, but if it can be disabled or removed easily, then in total, the system is weak.  Various techniques are used by system hackers (both external or internal) to cover their tracks.  If they can disable auditing systems in some way, then they can then do what they want without auditing occurring. 

Methods include:

• Straight out disabling, and if they can do so without us knowing so much the better,
• Filling up the auditing log location
• Disabling certain network traffic to prevent sending auditing records to remote servers
• Clearing the log at the end
• Generating large amounts of data to “push” their records out of rolling window auditing solutions.  

A good audit system will try to account for these types of attacks by:

• Providing ample storage for auditing events
• Having in place notifications for unusually high volumes of activity
• Using tools and methods that are difficult to disable
• Shutting down the server, if unable to log to the event location. (When government regulations are involved, denial-of-service can be better than insufficient logging).  

As a last resort, your auditing solution should include logging of disable events or clearing of event logs.

In our next article we will look at various tools that SQL Server 2008/R2 provides to us for auditing, including what methods are more secure with the above listed best practices in mind.

SQL Server training at QuickStart is available!

Thanks!

Steven Allen, QuickStart Intelligence, Systems Engineer

Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) v4

Wait, what’s a MOF?  Microsoft Operations Framework?  Why would I need that? 

In the 1980’s there was a movement to create standards for managing IT within the British government.  The result was the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) was initially published as a series of books between 1989 and 1996.  It documented IT best practices without regard to platform, nationality, industry or size of organization.  The sponsoring organization, the Central Computer and Telecommunications Industry, (CCTA) enlisted experts from various telecom and computer companies to write and edit the guidance.  Microsoft was one of those companies.

It was the intent of the ITIL sponsors that ITIL be adapted and adopted by software companies, industries, etc, since it deliberately left out platform or industry specific guidance.  Since the guidance did not cover Microsoft specific best practices, Microsoft realized that it needed to provide that guidance.   Microsoft began developing generic best practices guidance based on its own internal best practices, the best practices of its consulting arm, of its customers, and combined that with ITIL guidance.  The result was the Microsoft Operations Framework.  Both ITIL and MOF had as an underlying principle that IT should serve the business, and should provide services that the business needs.

At that time, Microsoft had already published its own best practices software development guidance, called Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF).  MSF had three key elements: it used a lifecycle approach, it embedded risk management into every phase, and it used a team model to assign responsibility, to hold members accountable, and to foster clear and open communication.  These three elements were key in the original development of MOF. 

As the industry continued to evolve, ITIL continued to revise its guidance.  ITIL v2 was released in 2000/2001, in the form of eight books; the red and blue books were the most frequently referred to: Service Support and Service Delivery. 

MOF v3 was heavily dependent on ITIL v2.  It used the ITIL materials, and presented them in a lifecyle, four quadrant approach.  The main differences between ITIL and MOF at that time were the Management Reviews embedded in the lifecycle at the end of each quadrant, the addition of operations guidance for the Microsoft environment which ITIL had deliberately left out, and the Risk and Team models mentioned above.

In May 2007, the new version of ITIL was released: version 3.  As Microsoft had continued to participate in the evolution and rewriting of the ITIL guidance, it was aware of the changes, and it worked on revising MOF.  However, for MOF v4, it decided to diverge from the ITIL approach; the new and current MOF was published in 2008. It is still based on a lifecycle approach which has three phases --Plan, Deliver, and Operate, and a foundational layer – Manage.   Moreover, MSF has been integrated into MOF – the MSF phases (Envision, plan, build, stabilize, and deploy) are now the elements of the MOF Deliver phase.

The Manage layer has oversight into and control responsibilities throughout the phases.  This oversight is divided into three Service Management Functions: Governance, Risk and Compliance is the first, Change and Configuration is the second, and the third is   Risk management is now part of the broader Manage layer, as part of the Governance, Risk and Compliance Service management function (SMF).  The third is Team.  There are still management reviews – six of them.  They are Service Alignment, Portfolio, Project Plan Approved, Release Readiness, Operational Health, and Policy and Control.  For those of you familiar with the shortcomings of MOF v3, you can see that the Manage layer, and its focus on coordination and control through its SMF’s has added an element of strategic planning and oversight that was missing from earlier versions.  In addition, as with ITIL v3 which added a focus on the Service Portfolio, there are two new management reviews in the Plan phase – Service Alignment, which begins the process of getting IT on the same page as the business, and Portfolio, which documents the planned services, the offered services (the service catalog) and the retired services.  Many of the SMF’s, such as Change and Configuration, Financial Management, Problem Management and Operations, are largely as they were in MOF v3.  However, the presentation of MOF has changed radically.  Guidance is now shorter, and is question based.  To find out more about MOF go to the MOF home page at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc506049.aspx  and take a look at the Reliability Workbooks, or the new IT Pro Quick Start Guide.

I started by asking some questions: Why do you need MOF? If you are using ITIL, you may not need MOF.  However, if you are using Microsoft products, then the MOF question-based guidance poses key questions with regard to the various aspects of IT service management. MOF is the Microsoft variant of ITIL.  If you are not using ITIL or MOF, then you should evaluate ITIL and MOF and start examining how your own best practices resemble and differ from those that have been refined over the last decade. What do you think?

Thank you!

Saskia Schott, Systems Engineer, QuickStart Intelligence

QuickStart adds HTML5, Opalis, Denali and more!

QuickStart Intelligence just added 5 new classes to the schedule.

50507 - Designing IT Process Automation with Opalis Integration Server  is 3 days and this course is intended for Enterprise Systems Engineers, Administrators and System Integrators who need to implement a Dynamic Datacenter using Opalis Integration Server.

Next, there are 2 new HTML classes. The first one, HTML5/JavaScript, is 2 days and the class is explained: HTML5 already figures prominently in developing interactive web sites for the iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile devices. Your instructor brings years of web development experience to the classroom, as well as a thorough understanding of the evolving technologies which comprise HTML5, so that you will be able to apply your new knowledge faster.

The second one is also 2 days and is called, HTML5/CSS3.  HTML and CSS are the two languages that shape most websites on the internet. HTML dictates the content of a website (text, images, and media plugins) and CSS defines the style (colors, fonts, and layouts). Although HTML4 and CSS2 have been foundational in the development of a functional and stylistic internet, HTML5 and CSS3 represent the next step in web technologies.

The last two classes are SQL Server.

MS-10777 - 70-463: Implementing a Data Warehouse with Microsoft® SQL Server® Code Name “Denali” is actually free. The class is 5-days and an instructor-led course which describes how to implement a BI platform to support information worker analytics. Students will learn how to create a data warehouse with SQL Server “Denali”, implement ETL with SQL Server Integration Services, and validate and cleanse data with SQL Server Data Quality Services and SQL Server Master Data Services.

MS-10778 - 70-466: Implementing Data Models and Reports with Microsoft® SQL Server® Code Name “Denali” is a free 5-day instructor-led course that describes how to empower information workers through self-service analytics and reporting. Students will learn how to implement PowerPivot and tabular data models, create and deliver rich data visualizations with Project Crescent and SQL Server Reporting Services, and discover business insights by using data mining.

Learn more information about the free SQL Server classes.

***Due to an overwhelming response, the two beta courses above are full and require pre-requisite skills. Please check back in March, QuickStart will be offering 5 Day SQL Server 2012 courses.

Please feel free to comment below if there are any questions or email at info@quickstart.com

Thank you!

QuickStart Intelligence

 

Microsoft West Region IT Camps in November and December

There is another set of events that will be taking place in conjunction with our TechNet Events. 

The TechNet Event runs from 8:30 AM to 12:00 PM.  We will take an hour break and then start a second event that runs from 1 PM – 5 PM.  We are calling these afternoon events IT Camps.

The format of the IT Camp is totally different than any other Microsoft Event.  At the beginning of the IT Camp, we will have everyone put forth a few topics for discussion / presentation.  Once we’ve collected the topics, we will have everyone vote for the ones that are of the most interest to them and then we will do our darn best to cover as many of them as possible in the 4 hour window.  This format allows everyone to have a say in the topics and also fosters great discussions amongst all the attendees.  If all goes well, we will have “experts” in different technologies present to help answer and discuss all the different topics.  These “experts” won’t necessarily work for Microsoft, but may be MVPs or other knowledgeable folks in the community.

In case you are wondering what topics are valid, let me just list a few to get your thinking going.

Active Directory, Cloud Computing, Certification, Exchange Server, Lync Server, Group Policy, Hyper-V, Virtualization in general, System Center, Office 365, Windows Azure, PowerShell, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Phone 7, Forefront Threat Management Gateway, Security, Upgrading, Migrations, etc.

Even if you can’t make the morning TechNet Event, I hope you can make it to the afternoon event.  If you would like, bring your laptops and we can try to do some hands-on stuff too.

Following is a list of all the cities, dates, locations and registration links: 

 

Date	Location	Registration Link	Main Faciliator
November 14, 2011	Microsoft Civica Office	Bellevue Registration	Chris Avis
November 14, 2011	Microsoft Los Angeles Office	Los Angeles Registration	Harold Wong
November 15, 2011	Microsoft Denver Office	Denver Registration	Chris Henley
November 17, 2011	Microsoft Tempe Office	Tempe Registration	Harold Wong
November 18, 2011	Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus	Silicon Valley Registration	Chris Henley
November 18, 2011	Microsoft Portland Office	Portland Registration	Chris Avis
December 6, 2011	Microsoft Lehi Office	Lehi Registration	Chris Henley

 

Find more information at my blog.

Thank you!

Harold Wong, Microsoft

IT at QuickStart: Self Service BI, Is it Here Yet?

The idea of “self-service” BI has picked up a lot of steam in the last few years.  The question is, is the technology there to really support it?

Self-service BI should allow users ranging across all technical skill levels to access and organize the data the way they feel is most useful.  This is a great idea, in that the users, who work with this data on a regular basis, are generally the ones with the best understanding of how to organize the data to give us the most meaningful insights.

We’ve talked about Report Builder 3.0 in the past, and the benefits it offers.  It’s a great product and it should definitely be a tool that we utilize, but let’s take a look at some other options that might be even friendlier, and offer some advantages that RB 3.0 doesn’t.

Performance Point Services offer a suite of new features that are accessible to the information worker, and integrated into SharePoint 2010.  I’m not sure that I can say this product is truly accessible to users across all technical skill levels, but it is pretty friendly.

The Dashboard Designer is the tool that exposes these new features in SP 2010.  It is built into the BI Site Center.  After you install it, you will be able to create dashboards, data connections, visual reports and filters, scorecards, and KPI’s.

Dashboards are the containers that we are going to use to display these other components.  The dashboard designer gives you the template, but it’s up to you to populate the dashboard with the reports, charts, graphs, scorecards, etc., which make it a true dashboard.  Each of these components will reside in a web part in the dashboard.  The idea is that a business user can access the dashboard focusing on a particular business unit (or the whole company for that matter), using the various components, and to get an instant overview of that area of the business.  Logically, you will have to maintain multiple dashboards for the different business units in your company. 

You will define your data connections, and at this point I should warn you, they really hope you are using SSAS.  You can obviously connect to relational data as well (including Excel and SP lists), but the maximum benefit is going to be generated from SSAS cubes.  Once these data connections are defined, they are available to be reused as often as you wish.

After you have defined your data connections, you can create your scorecards, which are really containers for your KPIs (key performance indicators).  The KPI functionality in PP is vastly superior to the KPI functionality in SSAS.  It is a lot easier to work with also. 

From there you can add your Reporting Services Reports, or create your own visual reports in the Dashboard designer.

We can link all of these web parts containing these various components together and create filters to give the users the ability to focus on particular data.  It’s a very powerful tool that allows us to display data in ways we haven’t been able to before.

Now, the question that I asked early on… Is the technology there to support true Self Service BI?  I don’t think so… not yet.  The technical barriers to access have definitely been lowered and it’s available to a larger segment of our workforce.  I just don’t think it’s reached all technical levels yet.

With that said, we have a new course offering, the 50465 class (MS-50465 - PerformancePoint 2010 Designing and Implementing Scorecards and Dashboards) that goes in depth into the Dashboard designer and is a great companion class to the 50429 (MS-50429 - SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence) class. 

One thing to keep in mind though, we are on the cusp of SQL Denali being released, and with it, Project Crescent.  Project Crescent is going to take another big step in lowering the barriers to access as regards Self-Service BI.

Stay tuned for my take on Project Crescent… coming soon!

I would love to know your opinion and what you think!

 

Larry Heppelmann, Systems Engineer, QuickStart Intelligence

IT and QuickStart in Ayiti (Haiti)

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to teach for the NetHope Academy Intern Program in Haiti.  I’ve been a teacher for over 30 years and a Microsoft Certified Trainer for half that time.  When asked if I would be interested in teaching Windows 7 and a myriad of other topics to interns in Haiti, I did not hesitate.  I loved volunteering with the Peace Corps in Zaïre (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Honduras, and I was looking forward to the opportunity in Haiti. 

I gratefully anticipated meeting the NetHope Academy interns and IT mentors at the campus of l'Ecole Supérieure d'Infotronique d'Haïti in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, ESIH or “Ezzie” for short.  Speaking of pronunciation, I was amused to find that Haiti is pronounced in the national language, Kreyol, as Ayiti or “IT”.  So we learned about IT in Ayiti for two weeks.  This program continues for six months with internships, certification exams, and lots of intense study and lab time practice.

What should a Microsoft Certified Trainer expect from a similar assignment with NetHope?  The personal interactions, deep intellectual curiosity and boundless drive and energy surpassed all other training assignments I’ve experienced. 

The two-week Boot Camp started before eight in the morning and continued past six some evenings. The class left late for lunch and returned early to share thought-provoking questions and observations regarding our Microsoft Windows  client and server working environment.  Such was our distraction, we had to be reminded to eat lunch some days. 

We had to be flexible at the Boot Camp.  Power interruptions and a warm classroom?  Not a problem!  Pounding tropical rains drowning out my loudest teaching voice?  Time to switch to lab activitiesThe dedication and drive of the interns speaks highly of the NetHope selection process.  The program is very well operated and managed.  It is not a free lunch.  Interns are expected to repay about half the cost of the program through a well-orchestrated microfinance system.  The repayment starts only after they become employed.  I could clearly see that the IT mentors (intern supervisors) who addressed the class were highly impressed with the quality of professionalism and communication shown by this year’s interns.   

I’m sure I learned as much from this experience as the interns did – if not more.  The interns really challenged me, and I highly recommend that all energetic and adaptable Microsoft Certified Trainers consider volunteering for NetHope.  In thirty years of teaching, it doesn’t get much better than this.   The energy, enthusiasm, and love felt during the Net Hope Academy training continue to inspire me each day.

I’d like to thank NetHope, its sponsors, and all those who made this assignment possible. There is a “program design excellence” that must’ve come from a multidisciplinary approach, and it really shines.  This program reflects a complete lifecycle of events that combine to produce a sustainable, healthy change in the participants.  The opposite of a quick fix, this process looks really promising other areas of international development, not only IT training

 I also want to thank my company, QuickStart Intelligence, as well as Microsoft Trainers Marc Michault and Andrew Bettany for going before me.  Opokua Oduro of NetHope deserves special mention.  She took care of everything and everyone with a big heart, friendly attitude, and unmatched planning and organization skills.  It’s with deep gratitude that I write about this experience.

And finally, let me thank the interns in my class.  You made me want to come to work every morning.  I knew you were giving your best and I wanted to do the same for you. 

Peace Corps already has taken this slogan, but maybe I can paraphrase it somehow--“Net Hope, the toughest job you’ll ever love.”

Mark Wheatley, Volunteer Microsoft Certified Trainer, QuickStart Intelligence

NetHope Academy Intern Program – Haiti

Exchange 2010 at QuickStart

I have been involved in Exchange training and consulting for the past 12 years. I’ve seen Exchange progress from a decent messaging system in Exchange 5.5 to the present release of Microsoft Exchange 2010. There have been many improvements over the years. I am going to list some of the best features of Exchange 2010 for you to help you understand why you may want to implement Exchange 2010 with training at QuickStart. Here you go:

8 reasons to use Exchange 2010 as your messaging system:

• Incredible storage improvements.  From improvements to the Store Schema, Sequential I/O, Larger page file size with cache dehydration together provide another 70% reduction in disk I/O over Exchange 2007’s improved I/O. When you compare the I/O from Exchange 2003 to the I/O of Exchange 2010 there is a whopping 90% reduction!! This could allow tier 2 SATA storage for your Exchange Mailbox Database storage. I say could because there are many other factors to look at for your storage. Fiber Channel SAN’s and SAS storage still have many advantages over tier 2 SATA storage. 

 

• Role Based Access Control, which allows more concise administrative privilege assignment in Exchange 2010.  It works because of the new Powershell remote capabilities allowing for Powershell commandlets to be tailored to exact administrative needs and sent remotely to an Exchange server. There are built in RBAC groups that have very specific privileges based on need and assigned specific Powershell commandlets to execute without provided any unnecessary privilages. One example is the Discovery Management group having the privilege to perform multiple mailbox searches without any additional permission assignment.

 

• Unified messaging has much tighter integration with Office Communication Server to provide a complete phone, video, and presence support. Also included with 2010 Unified Messaging is support for Voice to Text. Which will allow a voice mail to be viewed as text instead of listened to.

 

• Conversation view in Outlook Web App and Instant Messaging support are great new features too. Also, Exchange 2010 supports all browsers with premium service. That means Safari or Firefox clients will get the same premium access to their mailbox as Internet Explorer clients.

 

• Federated Sharing policies allow a 2010 Exchange organization to share calendar and contact information with another Exchange 2010 organization.

 

• Email Archiving support by allowing users to have an additional mailbox (archive) to have their mail stored in as opposed to a PST. The new Archive mailbox is much more attractive with SP1 since it allows for the Archive to be in another Database other than the primary Mailbox is in. With the archive you can bring your users PSTs back in house and under your administrative control which will make any e-discovery much easier. This could also leverage the cheaper Tier 2 SATA drives as well.

 

• In Exchange 2010 all mail clients connect to their mailbox through the Client Access Server. That means Mapi clients running Outlook, as well as all other clients will connect to their mailbox via the Client Access Server. Seems like a step backwards until you look at the benefits of doing this. One thing we get is the ability to move mailboxes while the user is online.  The CAS server maintains a connection to the original location for the user and the user can send and receive mail the entire time the mailbox is being moved. After the last message is moved the CAS server disconnects the user from the old location and connects them to the new location. They will only experience a brief disconnect-reconnect and may need to re-open outlook. But the entire move didn’t affect the user at all while in progress.

 

• Another benefit to having all mail users connect via the CAS is the Database Availability Group, commonly referred to as a DAG. My favorite new feature of Exchange 2010 is the DAG.  The DAG is Exchange 2010’s version of log shipping that was introduced with Exchange 2007. Unlike 2007 however, the DAG is capable of failing over at the Database level. Which means the server itself will continue to provide all other services it is configured with, but the failed DB will automatically be failed over to another copy of that DB in the DAG. This happens automatically without any intervention from the Exchange Admin at all. Also, you can have other roles on the Mailbox server that is in a DAG. So companies that have fewer users could have 2 servers with all roles installed and be configured in a DAG and support high availability for all roles, CAS, HT and MB. Very cool.

There are many things to get excited about with Exchange 2010. Have you taken advantage of all the new features? What kind of experience have you had with Exchange?

 

Pat Utley, QuickStart Intelligence, MCITP, MCSE, MCT