Technically Speaking

I wanted to wish everyone a very happy holiday season in 2008. Hopefully during these rather tumultuous times your holidays are filled with joy and good cheer.

I will be back regularly with new IT management items in January to help you be the best Information Technology Professional you can be. If a new tool or idea crosses my mind between now and then, I will send it your way as soon as I can.

Have a great holiday season.

Cheers!

Derek

Many larger organizations are facing cutbacks to their labor pool and the IT department is no exception. It is likely that the smaller the organization, the less likely these cuts are to occur, but IT managers need to be prepared for the best and the worst either way.

My day job as a systems administrator/help desk/support/project manager/application specialist brings a number of hats to my office and though my official title is IT Manager, some days managing IT is the last thing I get to do. This makes it increasingly more difficult to be seen as a manager, sometimes there are things that just need to be done, one such project is Windows Update management.

This is ongoing for us due to the frequency of the updates and the number of computers in our environment. We do have a WSUS server (more on those in a coming post), but as many IT managers know, automation is perfect only in theory. Getting patches caught up to allow the WSUS server to function as best it can is one of the biggest tasks I face at the moment. It is coming along, but coupling it with support and disbelief in our back office system… managing IT, even in a small organization can be quite the task.

On another blog recently, I read an interesting post comparing IT leaders and IT lemmings. The post is found here, and is worth a read. Just for something to keep in mind as you move ahead in your IT management career.

One thing that remains hard for me as a single employee technology department is being able to feel ok relying on outside consultants for help with any problem. If there is something that needs to be solved or changed and the answer is on the tail of your mouse, it might be worth putting in a ticket with a consultancy to aid in the process. Putting your pride aside to get a solution implemented correctly can be a tough spot, but as I too am learning, it will help you in the long run and you might even learn something.

I have found myself using OneNote 2007 to accomplish a good number of tasks during my workday. It has helped me eliminate a good deal of paper for single use tasks like jotting down voicemail messages or taking notes when in a meeting. Since I use it alot during the course of my day I thought I would outline some of my process here.

Note: I loosely follow David Allen’s Getting Things Done, for those of you who have seen that methodology some of this will look familiar.

When I get to my desk in the morning, after getting some coffee and getting into email and a browser OneNote 2007 is next on my list.

OneNote contains several notebooks. One for current items, like voicemail and notes, one for Work related reference, Personal reference and Writing assignments. Separating these items amongst several notebooks helps keep my work area current with the items in front of me, but also allows the storage of other items to be looked at later.

The GTD portion of OneNote for me is the Reference notebooks, One Note allows me to move any text or page to another notebook where it can live forever (or until the drive holding the notebook fills up). Because I can search across all notebooks, I usually have no trouble location items filed for reference. I also keep current copies of the company directory or other documents I might need to reference stored in One Note. Doing so, if I search for 144 One Note will find all instances of 144 in any notebook that is open. This allows me, in this example to look up a phone extension (or the name of a co-worker) and find the person or extension to call.

A sample of my current info notebook is shown below.

Voicemail in OneNote

The portion of the image outlined in red shows that my notebooks are currently not in sync. This is because the notebook files are stored on a flash drive to allow them to be used on multiple PCs. One Note syncs between the actual files and temp files for the notebooks stored in this fashion, allowing work to continue even when the stored files may be unavailable.

Because it behaves more like a paper notebook than the usual PC file/folder structure there is no need to worry about saving things you record. Like a paper tablet the saving happens automatically.

Aside from quick and easy note taking, if you are able to use a pen tablet (or even better a tablet PC) One Note supports ink entry. This will allow sketches or drawings to be included in typed notes. If a microphone or web camera are available, video and audio notes can also be stored.

The last feature that I use regularly is the office based integration between Outlook and One Note. This helps keep email messages I need for reference off of the mail server and allows me to clean up email messages as soon as they are processed.

When One Note is installed with Outlook, an add-in is configured that will allow messages selected in Outlook to be sent to One Note for safe keeping. Copies of attachments can be stored with the messages as well.

My goal was not to review One Note as a whole and go through all of the bells and whistles that the application has to offer, of which there are many, but to provide a brief look at how I use One Note to manage my day to day work. I am beginning to think I would be quite lost without it.

Managing technicians and equipment can provide quite a challenge for the new manager. The servers and workstations need constant monitoring and support but the people within the department need opportunities to grow and learn new technologies. Where does an IT manager look to ensure that all of these things are being accomplished as efficiently and effectively as possible?

Using a social bookmarking service, like TechNet Bookmarks, can help you easily store information that you may need at any given time. This new social bookmarking service was created to help users of the TechNet website keep track of items they read or sites they frequent. Any social bookmarking service can be useful for these items, however TechNet bookmarks is geared toward technical users and if you are visiting TechNet for information on a regular basis, why not store your bookmark list there as well.

Account Setup

Many of you reading this have probably heard of delicious.com, the social bookmarking application from Yahoo!. The Microsoft Technet Social Bookmarks application is quite similar, but the focus falls to technical users who use the Technet website. To get started, sign in with your Microsoft passport at http://www.technetbookmarks.com and create a profile.

Once you have created an account, you can provide some information about yourself, and upload a photo, and then begin saving bookmarks. Each time you login to TechNet bookmarks and return to your profile, you will see a list of the bookmarks you have added recently.

A brief version of my profile is shown below.

My Profile

As you add bookmarks to the system you can share them with the TechNet community and other users of the application or mark them as private to keep them for yourself.

Contexts for bookmarking

While this post is primarily concerned with the TechNet and IT Professional role for Social bookmarking, there are other sites at Microsoft where the service is available. This allows others, such as programmers or designers to store bookmarks and have content shared with others using the service like they are. For example, if a programmer visits http://social.msdn.microsoft.com and stores bookmarks, others accessing the website from the MSDN context of the application will see those bookmarks when they are discovered by the service. Someone who visits the TechNet side of the application at http://social.technet.microsoft.com will not see the bookmarks stored in the MSDN context.

This helps the application focus on a specific scope. Allowing IT Professionals to see content related to TechNet and developers to see content related to MSDN.

Once you begin using the service, any of the contextual sites you visit, will allow you to see your bookmarks when logging in, regardless of where you were when you saved them.

Existing bookmarks online or off

In addition to managing new bookmarks online with Microsoft TechNet Social, you can also import bookmarks stored in your web browser or in other social bookmarking services. This will help you keep all of your bookmarks in one application, and make them accessible from anywhere there is a browser and Internet connection.

The application also has bookmarklets and browser extensions to make using the TechNet Social bookmarks site even easier. To install these items, simply click the tools link at the top of the page. Doing so will provide all of the links to tools and importers available with the service. This page is shown below.

Tools available for easier use and importing

When importing bookmarks from another service, like delicious.com, you will need to export your existing bookmarks to a file and import the file into Social. The goal of importing is to make your bookmarks accessible from any web browser and keep them all in one place. Because all browsers support bookmarks or favorites, the concept of storing frequently used web addresses has been around a long time, social bookmarking allows content to be shared by a team or just accessed from anywhere, making them even more useful.

The Microsoft TechNet Social bookmarking application is relatively new so the best advice I can give about getting started is to jump in with both feet and give it a whirl, it might make your memory for those once in a great while fixes a bit longer and easier to thumb through. There may be additional posts in the future as I play with the application and see new features that may help you manage your online resources, but for now creating an account and adding some links is a great place to start.

Get started with a few bookmarks

There are many resources online, including TechNet for the infrastructure items. I have compiled a list of resources that many technology managers may find useful.

• TechRepublic – a collection of blogs on all things IT. From the latest gadgets or patches to the best advice on handling career moves or issues at work.
• BNet – a business management blog by CBS Interactive
• Experts-Exchange – a community driven support site available for solving technology problems
• Petri.co.il – a technology knowledge base created by MS MVP Daniel Petri

This list is certainly not all inclusive, but can assist IT managers in solving both technical and non-technical issues.

Until next time… happy bookmarking.

Being my first post at TechNet I thought I should take some time to point out what to expect from the blog and the posts made here.

My goal is to help beginners to the IT profession learn something that will help them succeed in this field. Sure there are tons of tricks out their and technologies that have grown a lot in the past few years, but we all started somewhere and I would like to look at some of the basics and hopefully make the jump to IT a bit smoother for everyone.

Hopefully there will be enough daylight to bring two posts per week to the blog with a certain theme. If the theme happens to be one near and dear to me, i might carry it for a while. I encourage feedback and surely the folks at TechNet do as well.

For a bit more about me, please check out my bio and feel free to contact me or post comments to interact myself and other readers. This hub at TechNet is really here for all of you both beginners and seasoned professionals please help make this worthwhile for everyone.

Found a post at CNet today about a virus striking users of poular social networking site facebook.

The virus, called koobface infects computers by sending messages to facebook users and referencing a video, with a message something simialr to “You look funny in this video”.

Many of the hot toys are technology items, from the iPhone to Blackberries or video game consoles, these items seem to be the latest and greatest and reach the top of the holiday lists of many.

While technology is useful and fun to play with when opened during the holidays there are a few things to keep in mind when making the technology dreams of your family come true.

1. Keep the receipt – (or get a gift receipt) This can save you if the tech you chose was a little more over the top than necessary or if there happens to be a defect. This is common practice for all gifts and is important just in case, but can be especially helpful for tech gifts.

2. Encourage the recipient to read the manual – As boring as it can be to read the manual that comes with a digital camera or video game system, the manual can also be essential in ensuring the proper operation and highest enjoyment for the gift.

3. Talk to the sales people about the gift – If the item you are looking to get was not specifically requested, get all the literature you can and ask questions of the sales people. This will help you understand the product in the event that the person receiving the gift has questions about it.

4. Do not be nervous or afraid of the tech gift you choose – If you arent technically savvy do not worry about choosing the wrong gift or trying to impress by getting technology as a gift. If you do your homework and can answer questions for the recipient, things should go over smoothly.

I am sure there are piles more things to suggest in technology gift giving but these are the stapes in my opinion. They should take you a long way in making someone in your family very happy.