Technically Speaking

Welcome to June.  Today Microsoft launched Bing, it’s new approach to search and so far, I think it is pretty slick.

Suggested links based on your query are placed along the side of the page, offering a list of additional items. 

For example, searching for Green Bay produced a list of popular Green Bay related sites as expected, but the list on the left provided other things I might like to know about Green Bay such as restaurants, weather, airport information and other things.

Figure A below shows some of the results returned for Green Bay.

Figure 1

The site also includes related search terms in the left column to help find other resources based on what is entered.

I have also noticed that Bing is location aware.  For example, when I searched for Star Trek, the movie listings for the area I am currently in appeared.  Helpful when travelling and looking for things near by for sure.  Figure B shows my current results for Star Trek.

Figure B

Surely I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface on the features brought out in Bing, but I will give it a shot and see if Microsoft can catch the competition.

So what does this have to do with IT Management?

The answer to that question depends on how you look at it.  Taylored results and additional suggestions, beyond sponsored links, can be very helpful.  It seems to me that the search engine is smarter in calculating results and delivers more useful content.

Imagine attending a conference for your company and being able to rely on your search engine to check flight status, get a cab, find reasonable dinner choices, and get the baseball scores for the game of the local baseball team.  Saving time in looking for local results based on your IP address.

Giving your users and staff a predictive search tool could be a huge benefit if the technology Microsoft is using is well maintained and stays afloat.  Predictive search results might be a boost to the productivity of employees because they will spend less time searching for results and more time actually using found information.

I am excited to give Bing! its due.  Check it out at http://www.bing.com and leave your thoughts or usage suggestions in the comments.

I know that there are still many IT Pros out there looking for work, or things to keep them up to date on the latest features, and even though the previous give away has ended, the Thrive Site is still going strong. It is packed with information to help you advance both your skills and your career.

The site contains webcasts of sessions to build your knowledge as well as links to valuable blogs and other sites that might be of value to you or those in your communities that are trying to grow in the Information Technology field.

Many statistics today focus on those who have been displaced from a career and are looking for work and thrive is moving this way at the present time as well, hopefully in the future some material or webcasts involving educational institutions and career offices to help those coming out of college find things in the IT field that will better their careers or skill sets.

I strongly encourage you to check out Thrive if you haven’t already. If you have been there, there are new links and resources coming every day to help broaden your skills and increase your career opportunities.

If anyone has any suggestions for things that might help improve the site or increase the resources available please post them in the comments and I will make sure to pass them along.

On Monday April 20 2009, Kevin Remde (of MS Technet and IT evangelism fame) hosted another Town Hall style live meeting covering how Microsoft does BI.

The topic of discussion was varied discussing how BI is used with data in a SQL Server and how other platforms, such as Oracle, DB2, Excel, and Sharepoint information could be gathered into one place for analysis.

I will update this post with the link to the on demand session as soon as it is available.

Be sure to register for the next Chat with Kevin, scheduled for Monday May 4 at 11 AM PDT, covering Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management.

Hope you can make it to the next session.

The first live chat, covering virtualization is in the books.  Overall it went quite well and was a great experience for me.  I hope that the chats continue and that the attendees were able to take something valuable away from the session.

For those of you who were not able to attend the session, the replay is available by clicking the link below:

IT Manager Community Chat with Kevin – Virtualization – 4/9/2009

Working on meetings and ensuring all of the parties and details are captured can be very tedious process.  Just arranging a time that works for everyone and getting into Outlook can be a hassle.

There are ways to take these meetings online, Microsoft’s Live Meeting, Citrix Goto Meeting, or Webex are three that spring to mind.

Note: Because these applications can be quite pricey, it is not my goal with this post to sell software for any of the vendors listed.

I wanted to look at the Microsoft solution, Live Meeting, not to try and get more shops to adopt the technology, although it is a great tool, but to suggest that IT staff take the time to attend some webinars sorry Live Meetings and get to know the application.

Meeting with vendors, customers, co-workers, and other groups or individuals via the web can save time for all involved.  It might even allow for IT Managers to send their staff to seminars, using web technology, to help them grow their skills.

If you go so far as to demo the technology to co-workers and management outside of IT, you may find savings in all kinds of places that might justify the cost of the application.

Note: I do not plan to review Live Meeting in this post, though I am considering doing so in the future. I wanted to get you thinking about meetings and how web technologies might remove the need for meetings or enable better use of meetings and the time spent in them.

Microsoft has tons of Live Meeting events, some public, some not, but they host tons of Live Meetings.  I would recommend looking around TechNet for a live meeting that might cover a topic that you or your staff struggle with or have questions about.  Or attend one of the IT Manager chats coming up as those will be done with Live Meeting.

Live Meeting has helped me tremendously in allowing travel to be reduced while keeping PowerPoint on the table.  It will not always replace a face to face meeting for many organizations, but in some it could as web cams can provide a visual experience.

From where I sit, Live Meeting makes conference calls more robust and more useful.  Making them a true alternative to face to face meetings.

So I encourage you to participate in the web chats for IT Managers or at least look into what Live Meeting might be able to offer your company, you might be surprised at the adoption and possibilities it brings.  I know I do.

I read an interesting post the other day about just being a Microsoft shop and that got me thinking. Thinking about where we, the IT community might be without companies like Microsoft.

Sure there are other technologies, phones, mainframes, UNIX, and others that would likely be around somehow, but I have had the benefit of being able to learn Microsoft products and technologies and use them to do my job or get my job and all of that. There have been times when I wasn’t sure that Microsoft was the right path for me to learn down but try as I might it seems Microsoft and related products keep me the most interested. And then came twitter, but that is another issue altogether.

The technology available from Microsoft has been steadily getting better, even Windows Vista has its strengths. I am glad for all of the experiences I have had and opportunities I have been given because of Microsoft. This seems to keep me coming back down the Microsoft path.

I am sure most shops, even Microsoft itself, have other technologies running on the network and this is a good thing because it keeps us as IT managers and Systems Administrators fresh. There is no way to know all of the technology that is out there, and likely no way to know all of the Microsoft stuff or the Sun stuff or the Apple stuff, but choosing the things that are most interesting to you will likely lead you a certain way.

Continually building skills that can help your taste for technology grow and at the same time aid your company in accomplishing its goals will be a popular path for a long time to come. In our currently tough economy technology might be pressed by management to show rapid ROI and have budgets reviewed and downsized, but taking the initiative on yourself (or with your team) to learn and keep growing will help you in the long run. Just keep somethings that are truly interesting on the front of your desk, this might help motivate you to keep pushing when the reading gets dry and the fun runs short.

Hopefully those of you that feel you just work in a Microsoft shop will step back and look at the technologies you do use. I wonder what the world would be like today if Microsoft had decided to produce seat cushions instead of software.

Given the state of the global economy in 2009 and the budgets of organizations frozen or sliding, many technical conferences may see attendance drop this year. In a post on Tech Republic, Jason Hiner has looked at conference attendance and put up a poll.

Personally, I will not be attending conferences this year on the company dime, however I am going to attend Tech Ed. Because I have found learning and interacting with those also in IT, these conferences are important, but they are expensive and organizations looking to stretch budgets might be wise to cut back on sending employees there.

I have included a quick poll below to get an idea how the teams managed by readers of this blog communicate. As it is my first poll it is rather simple and to the point, hopefully these are a useful addition and will help gather more information in future posts.

 Loading ...

Learning things can be one of the most challenging things for an IT manager to remember. Not necessarily remembering things like “Hey I should learn how to…” fill in the blank with your latest adventure in knowledge, but learning as a tool to help yourself and those you work with grow and provide better value to themselves and the organization.

I have found that learning takes a good amount of focus and determination which can be present in varying degrees depending on the subject matter, the cost of the training, and a myriad of other reasons. Training will take you only so far. The manual or book that you can use to understand a concept or discuss material in a classroom cannot present too many real world scenarios that will determine if the student has understood the material.

Be sure to provide opportunities

Because of the daily changes in technology it is important to ensure that those on your staff with any desire to learn something, no matter how small in the grand scheme of things, have the chance to learn their chosen technology.

For example, when a member of your team suggests a training class in SQL queries to help them better understand how to retrieve information from the database, you as a manager need to work with this person to determine their interest level in the subject and to find out where this will benefit both the company and the individual.

Working with those members of your team who show definite interest in learning can show other employees on the team that learning is a positive experience. The goal with learning isnt to force employees to learn things that are of no interest to them. Doing this may reach the goal of completion of a project, which is necessary, but may ultimately be a waste of time and money if the employee doesn’t take enough interest in the subject to continue using the knowledge.

Try not to confuse training and learning

It is true that users or IT staff members are likely to learn something when they attend a training class. Usually something new comes out of any attempt to learn. However this does not always have to be the case. Think of a time when you were watching television and something you may not have known was presented to you; how to prepare a meal or desert perhaps. Now think of the last training session you attended. Were there some parts of the class that felt as though they were necessary and no new information was presented?

It is far easier to train for something than it is to learn it, however the two are not mutually exclusive. I liken training to the vehicle for learning. If you attend a seminar or training class on a topic, there is a good chance that you might come away having learned something. If you as a manager provide ample opportunities for learning and the training to facilitate that learning, your staff and co-workers will thank you for it.

Follow up

After an employee has learned a new skill, help them put it into practice. You do not need to test them, but provide them projects that will showcase the skills they learned. This will help to keep them from losing the skills they have learned.

Keeping a steady flow of new knowledge accessible to those in your organization who want it can be quite rewarding all the way around. It may bring new opportunities for employees to move between positions or just bring out the best in someone because a manager within their organization listened to their needs to get some training and additional knowledge. This can grow your employees respect for you as a manager and add value to your organization.

Keeping in touch with the technical community is a very good idea for an IT Manager. If this is your primary role and you are engaged with your team everyday it can help you keep in an ongoing state of communication with your team as well as help ensure that technology does not pass you by.

One way to not only keep an ear to the technical community and its ever changing state, but also to provide assistance and get a bit of help when you need it is to become a member of an online community. Every so often I will feature a community or membership that I think will be of value to the readers of this blog. Beginning with this post, I hope to find an interesting online community on a quarterly basis to showcase here as a potential benefit to IT Managers and technical readers. Many times the communities I review are those which I use in my own IT career. I will include disclosure for those communities.

Disclosure: I am a qualified expert member of Experts-Exchange and use the site to solve technical problems.

Community: Experts-Exchange
URL: http://www.experts-exchange.com

Overview

Experts Exchange is an online support community with several levels of membership. The goal is to post questions to issues that are occurring within your organization to receive help in solving these problems from many experts in the subject matter. Currently there are approximately 300,000 members subscribed to the site helping to answer technical questions (and often asking them) everyday.

How does the site work?

Experts-Exchange has a patented system of allowing members to ask questions and then grade their responses according to usefulness. The grades are weighted by the system which then awards points to members for answering questions. The accrual of points allows different ranks within topic areas on the site and can help a qualified expert earn and maintain a free membership. As points are awarded, an expert receives ranks within any of several topic areas. As milestones are reached, signatures and other distinctions are awarded to the member.

No monetary reward is provided to the participants in the Experts-Exchange community for their use of the site. Members are awarded points for answering questions, which they can then use to ask additional questions. Qulified Expert status allows unlimited question points to the member.

Membership

Anyone can register as a member of the site completely free for seven days. This allows perspective members to post questions and get help to the issues they need. If during or after this trial period, the user decides the site isnt for them, the account can be cancelled at any time.

Membership can be purchased for 12.95 per month and additional discounts are offered for extended agreements. Organizations can purchase corporate licenses that allow several employees within the company to have accounts on the site and those are administered by someone within that organization.

Some memberships do not have a cost. When a member begins assisting other members on the site, as answers are selected to questions, the points assigned are totaled. Once the member reaches 15,000 points they receive qualified expert status and the membership fee is waived. Once a member has become a qualified expert, the status must be maintained each month by earning 3000 points. If the point quota is not met the member will use a grace period and be allowed to continue uncharged, however if this continues for consecutive months, the membership fee will be reinstated.

Difficulty of use

Experts-Exchange is very straightforward and it is encouraged that all members actively participate. The membership fee allows unlimited question points to paying members. These points are used to reward experts who answer questions on the site.

Why is this a benefit to IT Managers?

The benefit is quite simple, for a small fee (or no fee at all if participating actively) the manager or staff gain access to a large knowledge base of technical information. This information can be very helpful in solving real world technical issues. Since beginning my career as an IT Manager, I have found this site invaluable to getting timely answers to questions that were just out of my reach or those that were far outside my area of knowledge.

Sharing ability and knowledge
Being able to participate also allows IT Professionals to share things that they have learned with a world wide community. Using the site both for help and to provide help is a small way for the technical community to help one another succeed.

I hope that you will check out Experts-Exchange to see if it might meet your needs and perhaps allow you or members of your team to give back to the technical community.