Technically Speaking

Working primarily in a support role for the past few years has taught me a thing or two.  One of the things I learned was about helping others and this is the focus for this post.

When providing support it is essential that you deal with other people, it is also essential that you try to avoid the blame game as much as possible, however it is unreasonable to think that one will never fall into the “he said she said” blaming of others.

Another think I have noticed, perhaps recently (and maybe far too late), is that matching the level of politeness and patience can go along way, but being polite regardless of the other end of the conversation is a home run.  Working on this takes time, frustration, and possibly some conversations with yourself during the ride home from work.

Being helpful and able beats being right

There are times when it is fun to be right.  For example, when the colts beat the saints on Sunday it will be fun to have been right (although this isn’t guaranteed) and maybe even bring in a few bucks for me.

When doing technical support, being helpful is more important than being right, no matter the situation or the reason.  Imagine if you will a relative who asks you to look at their computer because the Internet doesn’t work.  Sometimes it is an inconvenience, sometimes it is happening again, but think about how much better it feels to help than to complain or refuse. 

I will admit that I have to eat my own dog food here and can surely improve this, but I am confident that I can.

Helping with purchasing decisions

There are many organizations where a purchasing department places the orders for the needs of the company and handles all of that, but from time to time they will ask another department for help.  Sure they could get help from the vendor, and maybe they’ll need to anyway, but when asked providing the information you can might save extra work for these individuals.

For other systems, like when Aunt Mary asks what computer to buy, probe a bit and discover the ultimate use of the system and provide your opinion.  Be honest when asked “what would you do?” but make sure you let them know that you are providing an opinion about a system.  This way if they shop around or ask others as well, they wont feel like they are stepping on your feet.

Remember it is OK to ask for help

Along these lines, when you are asked to help someone solve a problem, you may need to ask for help from a colleague or co-worker or even an outside party.  If this is the case, make sure you let the person who asked you for help know you need to get assistance so they do not feel you are blowing them off.

Thinking about these few items in relation to the support calls and requests you receive might make your day a bit less stressful because helping someone just for the sake of helping them, can be rewarding sometimes.

Community is something that for a while, at least to me, seemed a bit lost.  Sure there are facebook pages and twibes and twitter lists full of people ready to discuss something or get involved in some cause, but where is the real community?

I participate in both facebook and twitter, although not as much as I could I suppose, and those communities are great for reaching out to others or planning events… for those of you who are on twitter, I am a regular at the #bbhill tweetups held on alternating Fridays.

Wherever you find them, communities are essential.  Knowing where to go to find help with any number of issues, in this case more technical than not, but any issues really at all can be quite a relief.  Being busy with projects and family and keeping up with the Kardashians (so to speak) has left me little time to consider community.  For quite a while I spent a good deal of my time at Experts-Exchange, a site built to provide points for answers to questions.  The site has evolved a great deal since I first signed on (January of 2003 with a paid account).  In the years I have been a member, I paid for my account, earned my account, and now have been awarded my account access.  Just looking at the transgression from paying 10$/month to where I am today shows something about community involvement.

I like to help people with technical issues.  Sure I may not know do not know all the answers to all the questions, but there are a good amount of people in that community who know where to look for certain things.  It has been quite a fulfilling experience and I am looking forward to getting back into the swing of things.  I had stepped away for a while as some of the procedures on the site for new features were a bit confusing, but when I get into it for its core, the community, and jump into help others… it is a great place to be.

There are other communities I am involved in (and hope to increase involvement in) over at TechNet and TechRepublic, both built on getting help for those members who ask questions, but the community that really sort of sucked me in was Experts-Exchange.  I will hopefully grow in all three of these communities as well as those on twitter and facebook as effort to help those around you grow (either physically or at the other end of the data connection) will allow you to grow.

My participation in these types of activities has also helped, to some degree at least, to keep my skills sharp.  Sure helping others is a good boost for me and might cause me to remember that I once fixed problem x for someone, but it isn’t going to get me through the certification learning I need to do.  There is still room for other types of growth and learning, but community participation can boost your happiness in what you are working on or act as a type of skills test.  Not to mention, the feeling that I get from helping someone, even if it is just to explain a bit about hoe licensing works (I understand it, but am not sure I am an expert there… I think there could be a masters degree offered in licensing) is very rewarding.

Who knows, you might just help someone so much that they seek you out for other projects or even a new career. 

Being the sole IT person for an organization, I have often wondered where the value in technical conferences lies.  Is it in the interaction with other IT professionals or the opportunity to meet those who work in similar (and dissimilar) environments or perhaps it falls in the training and support gained from attending.

I have been to a few tech conferences in the years since I took this position and no year was more filled with them than 2009.  I started slow, attending Microsoft Convergence for a few years to get the latest on the Dynamics line of products (some of which we use) and to see what new BI might help my organization be better.

Convergence was great, I met a great many people who helped me understand more about the application I was supporting and determine that a change in Microsoft Partners was a good move for us.  Since the partner change, life has been much easier, at least in the "Who ya gonna call?” sense.

In 2009 I attended a customer interaction session at Microsoft for the System Center Online Desktop Manager product (still in beta) and because of some pure geek miracle the MVP Summit, which puts awarded MVPs on the Redmond campus for a week early in the year to learn about what’s here, what’s coming, and how/why Microsoft does x and y with those products the way they do.

Summit was awesome and there were tons of great people to meet and new opportunities I could never have imagined.  Being an MVP has taught me this fundamental principal:  use your technical skills to help those around you and be willing to share the information you have.  Good things come to helpful and willing people.

Following the MVP Summit last year I attended Microsoft Tech Ed North America for the first time.  I had previously wanted to attend Tech Ed, but the cost was prohibitive for me and my work schedule made it difficult as well.  Participating in several panels at the event was a great experience, although I was a bit nervous when getting started.

In the future, perhaps not in 2010, I will be returning to Tech Ed, the benefits and learning opportunities are amazing.

Technical conferences are a rather big expense, especially for individuals, but the possibilities for learning and networking with others are very high.  I think the bottom line is to look at the things you are interested in or use in your job and determine which conferences will advance your knowledge of the topic to better your job skills and work to attend these shows.  With the skills you acquire at the conference may well be worth the price of admission.

So this week the G Drive became available from Google, allowing users of Google Docs to store up to 1Gb worth of data in the Google cloud.  The files can be any variety of files and are not limited to the Google Docs suite of applications.  This is a good thing because it allows users or even organizations to store files in the cloud realatively easily.

Microsoft allows up to 25Gb of storage in its Sky Drive cloud application which to me seems the better deal.  Sure there are reasons to use both, depending on how the service is used and what applications it will be used with.  If you are a Docs user, the Google solution makes sense as long as you can keep within the 1Gb limit.

So where does this stack up for organizations?

I have accounts with both Google and Microsoft and have looked at both services briefly, each one coming in quite handy on days when for whatever reason, I forget my flash drive(s) at home.  But I am a bit curious as to the concept of organizational cloud storage and how this might start to change the game for companies.

Sure many companies still use on premise storage, either on a SAN or NAS with disk or tape backup to keep things recoverable, but would it make sense for an organization to push backups and even file storage into the cloud?  In coming years I think the answer will be a very loud yes.  Google and Microsoft can get server and disk space very cheaply per Gigabyte because they buy so much disk space all at once.  My organization can get the disk space to meet its needs in an on premise solution fairly cheap because we aren’t talking tons of storage, but for a larger organization, the need for storage space is likely to become much greater than today.  Allowing someone else to purchase, maintain, and handle the disks in your storage solutions might make the most sense.  This requires companies to have less IT staff and less server room overhead.

Pushing the stores to the cloud could cut into the overall energy utilization of a company quite quickly given the reduction in back office servers and tape drives that must be run to ensure business continuance.

What about today?

I am not sure the cloud is ready to take over entirely for on premise storage and backup but it is growing a bit more everyday.  In the future I have a feeling that storage other than an external hard disk for ITunes or other entertainment and a few files will be done in the cloud.  Maybe the disks in workstations will be large enough to foot the bill and a synchronization of the data to the organizations slice of the cloud will ensure backup all the way to the desktop.  Sure the bandwidth to the Internet would need to increase, but with fiber coming along and broadband being a mainstay already, this seems like the natural progression of things to me.

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Lately the goofed up tape backups happening at my office have been quite the challenge.  Working with drive support and testing various theories about the order of the backup jobs and the likelihood that once the library puts the tape away there is some crazy leprechaun messing with my setup… which by the way turned out to be false. 

It turns out to simply be a matter of hardware support.  The card I got to operate the library and drive was not on the list recommended, tested, certified, blessed, etc. by the manufacturer.  Rather than try to get it working and hoping for the best, I replaced the card and rebooted the server.

The next attempt at backups (and two since) have gone off without a hitch, even with multiple mounts of the tape. 

Following the recommendations of the manufacturer is a good idea.  While I knew this, I had a perfectly good card here and thought it surely should work.  Should and will… definitely not the same.

Thanks to the folks at Quantum support and to a few readers of my blog who emailed me with suggestions.  The effort put forth by others to lend a hand has been outstanding.

Here’s to many successful and undisturbed backups to come.

Taking a slight cue from a post I read earlier today on TechRepublic, and a brief lull in the craziness that has been flying around the office lately, I thought I would see if I could come up with my own list of resolutions for geeks, namely me, but if they suit you feel free to use them.

1. I resolve to be a better co-worker.

I am not a bad person to work with, but there are times when all of us need a little motivation to be helpful to others.  I want to improve that.  Think of it as the “plays well with others” resolution.

2. I resolve to write more in the new year

I am going to do my best to crank out more content here, at TechRepublic, and wherever else the opportunity pops up.  Writing is fun… it just seems that other things, including Xbox 360 get in the way of that upon occasion.

3. I resolve to Learn more

This one is pretty broad, but in general increasing my knowledge of things tech and not seems like the right thing to do.

4. In relation to number 3 I am going to learn one piece of software and use it. 

Not sure which app I will choose but there will be at least 1 application that I get, learn, and use in 2010.

Because I am not generally able to keep/follow resolutions, I am going to quit while I am ahead and stick with those four this year.  Maybe putting them online for the world to see will help, assuming that the world is reading my stuff.

Happy New Year to all and make 2010 a great year!!

Now that the backup device and jobs to fill it have become the main focus of my work day, it seems I have also discovered that the root of the backup issues I am seeing stem from a locked tape drive.

I am not exactly sure what would cause the tape drive, in the middle of whichever job it chooses, to lock.  When this happens, the job runs… and runs… and makes no progress.  I guess understanding the root of the problem is good, but figuring out what causes a tape device to lock is another battle all together.  The tape is not full, there are enough tapes in the library to last for a good long time so I am really grasping at straws about the locking thing.

Digging through Bing and Google have not been much help either… I think figuring out this issue is going to be my goal for the week between the holidays.

If anyone has any thoughts about why a tape drive (used in a library) would lock, please share.

I have a few more backup and storage related post ideas coming in the new year, looking at the overall experience with the new Quantum Superloader, but I want to get it working completely and really understand it first…

I would also like to wish all of my readers, however many of you there are, a happy and safe holiday season.

Recently at my organization we ran out of room on our backup tapes, which was both good and bad.  Good because it allowed for a tape library and less messing around with tapes once I get the library and schedules and things figured out, and bad because we had to finagle a 2 tape backup configuration in the meantime.

Backups are getting done, but it has been quite the on going experience with the new Quantum SuperLoader.

The point of this post I guess is that I am slowly becoming a storage junkie, and that learning the best way to efficiently store data. 

It appears that the speed of backups with the new library is quite improved… still not perfect, but as I get a handle on it surely the performance and efficiency will improve.

If anyone, storage junkie or not, has any suggestions please pass them along.  I am curious to know more about storage and backup. 

I also wanted to thank the Microsoft Storage team for linking my blog.  Hopefully I will learn from that blog to help this blog improve.

The blogging front for me has been very quiet in recent days/weeks due to a rather large project at work.  Putting in a phone system is a project for sure and the long days that go with it are great too.  Now that the project is done or to the continuous support phase, finding the little things are left to get done.

In my estimation the project was about 70%-75% complete and ready on the day after the cutover, but there were some things (and still are) that needed to get addressed and worked through as soon as possible.

The point of this post is not to discuss the methods and size of a project, but from an IT management view, to discuss the idea of wiggle room.  Contingency is a given in business because there are always things that might cause a bit of problem during the project, but the users who you complete the project for may not see things as wiggle-appropriate.  If there are things that are different than they were in the past, you might have a problem.  Handling these issues is not easy because you need to anticipate and encourage users to find things that they feel are problems and let you know of things they would like to change.  Will all changes happen?  No, but listening to the concerns before, during, and just following the project will be worth its weight in gold (or sales) when you find the things that make your users completely nuts and get them cleaned up.

So what does this mean to you?

As a project manager, you will be held responsible by users and likely management when there are things that do not meet expectations.  Be willing to listen, even if you may not agree, even if it is something that just brings peace of mind to a group of people.

On my recent project, a lot of things were discussed, but there were places that more could have been helpful.  I know that there is not a likely chance to get the project perfect as that is just too high an expectation, but working more closely with the users to get ideas and things down on paper for further discussion is something that I will do from now on.

I would recommend the notes twice cut once approach, similar to measure twice cut once used in other in areas.  Take the time to discuss notes and ideas with users, then review the notes again and discuss them, along with any changes or new ideas you may have after the initial meetings.  This will help you determine the costs and work associated with the project way up front. 

Consider the user at all phases.

Sure there are times when the user community will need to go along with changes even if they weren’t involved, but giving them a little information and ownership or involvement in the project will help them with the horse pill that is change.

My project went (and is still going) very well and would not necessarily change anything, but working to be prepared for a project regardless of size is the best thing that any planner could ask for.

Microsoft Outlook carries a great deal of convenience for its users.  Some of these conveniences, like calendar, mail, tasks, and contacts in the same application are available from a majority of similar applications, but Outlook handles them really well.

The focus for this post is on the NK2 file and what it brings to the user, convenience, and also on making sure it is managed well by IT.

what the heck is the Nk2 file?

This file is where Outlook stores e-mail addresses as they are used.  For example, if I send an email to mike@myemail.com to catch up with a friend and then send an email to matt@widgetsplus.com to order parts for a project, the email addresses are plunked into the Nk2 file.

From then on, if I start typing an email address with m as the first letter, a dropdown list appears in the To: line of my message containing all of the entries in the NK2 file that begin with the letter M.  This feature is very very handy, but is not the best implementation of the address list.

Note: It has been said that Microsoft is working to incorporate this list of used addresses into the Outlook application for the Office 2010 release, making the Nk2 file go away.  I am curious to see what happens there.

Why do users care about this file?

Users in general do not care about the Nk2 file specifically, they only care about the list of addresses kept in the file.  Think of this as a makeshift contacts list.  Why would the vast majority of people put a contact into Outlook, when the list just appears as they begin entering addresses?  That is a huge waste of productivity and time.

When something happens to the Nk2 file for one or more of the users you support, it is likely that you will hear about it.  When I first experienced Nk2 atrophy I didn’t even know where to find anything about “the wiped out drop down list of addresses I need to send email”.  I spent a good amount of time learning that the dropdown list was contained in the NK2 file, stored within the cavern that is Outlook application settings within the user profile.

Will this file save the day?

It can be quite the safety net for a good majority of Outlook Users, but the contacts folder is the best place to put addresses.  Relying on a single file with no default backup is not a good idea, although most users (and sometimes myself) do it every day.

You can create a backup of this file for your users by copying the file to the network on regular intervals, which is highly recommended.  This way, if the list of addresses goes empty, the nk2 file can be copied over the old one and should be back to normal when Outlook restarts.

Note: In my organization we use Desktop Authority to manage the user experience, it copies the nk2 file to the users home directory when they logoff every day. When they logon, the local and remote files are compared and the newest one wins.  If that is the remote, due to locally corrupt or deleted file, the file is copied during logon and the list works as needed.

Using a scheduled copy script on regular intervals will accomplish the important part of the task, the backup.  Then when the user notices the issue, you can copy the backup to their machine and restart outlook.  Presto! Working address lists.

Creating a backup copy of the file

To get a backup of a users Nk2 file you simply need to copy it to another location.  Using a utility like xcopy works very well here, but remember to run the operation when the file is not in use to catch any entries that may get added (and make the process much smoother).

The local Nk2 file lives at c:\documents and settings\<username>\application data\Microsoft\Outlook

and is typically named according to the Outlook Profile (usually a userid).

so the source portion of your xcopy operation might look something like this:

Xcopy “c:\documents and settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\username.nk2”

Note: <username> represents the user id of the user whose Nk2 file you need to copy.

Add the destination to the xcopy script, typically the users home directory, I usually use a mapped share for this:

Xcopy “c:\documents and settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\username.nk2” “U:\<username>\<username>.nk2”

Then specify the needed xcopy options for the job, typically just /Y to prevent prompting to copy.

Save the file and schedule it to run for your users.  This way newer copies of the local nk2 file will overwrite older ones on the network, keeping the most recent copy backed up and on tape with the rest of the data.

Using the backup

Now that the nk2 files are backed up, if the user loses their address drop down list, you can quickly rescue them by copying the file back to the local application data folder.  Then when they restart Outlook all should be well.  Since the copy only takes a few minutes (depending on file size and bandwidth) you might have the user close Outlook then copy the file.  This way when started again the list should reappear and the user will be back to normal again.

Being the type of administrator who assigns accountability to files created by users, i.e. they have to get their files saved to the network for backup to happen, I have found this a very good idea because the user is not likely to know about this file if they can get to its location.  Automating this backup has proven very helpful for both my IT department and my users.