A New Way Of Doing Business 🙂
I am an IT Pro Evangelist in the US East Region (Developer and Platform Evangelism [DPE]). Starting FY11 (July 2010) we are changing our way of doing business so ITE’s (that’s me) are going to be focusing on specific product areas and I am chartered with obtaining very deep technical knowledge (400 level) and sharing some of that knowledge with our customers through our evangelism efforts. I will be responsible for the Management and Security spaces.
As you could expect, I will maintain a high level of competence on our operating systems Windows 7 as well as Windows Server 2008 R2. I will continue to share deep technical knowledge on these as well as other products that I have the technical capacity to share value on. I will try to continue to keep my skills at least current in other areas as time permits. In the past, we (ITE’s) were expected to know much about everything and share this knowledge with you, our customers. As individuals, we chose our own topics to become experts in, (virtualization and server were my hot buttons) and then we just did our best on other technologies. When we did an event on a particular product or technology, we would have to dive deeper on these products at that time. It was a massive amount of work to learn the products well enough to be able to create and deliver the content and be “prepared” to answer your questions. Microsoft’s portfolio of products is enormous and it is not reasonable (or possible) for anyone to become an expert on all of our products and be able to answer the many, many technical questions we get every day. Because of this, and because you have asked us to deliver even deeper content on our products, we will have area’s of focus and we will deliver deeper content based on those areas of focus. I do not yet know exactly what this will mean because I am still working on my plan of execution. I expect this plan will be finished in the next month and I will give you another update.
SharePoint …
I am really excited about SharePoint in particular and was hoping that SharePoint would be one of the products (or platforms if you prefer) that I would be covering but when it came down to making a decision, Management and Security won the day. I have been working with SharePoint for years and have done many deployments and enjoy it very much. I will do my best to not fall behind to rapidly on this technology but it will not be a primary focus. I have made commitments to some that I would post in particular, some SharePoint and office content. I will honor these commitments and get these posts done as soon as I can. After that, I will be hyper-focused on Management and Security.
Virtualization …
I am still excited about virtualization and I expect I will be able to maintain a pretty solid level of competency in this area. I am still passionate about it as it has changed my life. Managing the enterprise cannot happen without managing virtualization and virtualized machines so I will still be knee deep in virtualization for the foreseeable future. I will continue to use the products and virtualization will be included in much of what I teach in one fashion or another. My teachings in virtualization will be more about other products with less direct focus on the virtualization space. Clearly, Hyper-V is part of Windows Server 2008 R2 and SCVMM is part of the System Center family of products so I certainly will not be ignoring them. I will simply not be diving as deep on specific products that make up the virtualization stack.
What I do know now is you can count on me to have deep technical expertise and potentially deliver content on:
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- Security
- Networking
- Group Policy
- Domain Services
- Certificate Services
- Rights Management
- Clustering (High Availability)
- Windows 7 Client – All
- System Center Family of Products
- Configuration Manager
- Operations Manager
- Data Protection Manager
- Service Manager
- Virtual Machine Manger – SCVMM is actually covered by Virtualization
- Essentials
- Opalis
- Forefront Security
- Forefront Essentials
- Forefront Client and Server
- Forefront Gateway
- Forefront for Exchange
- Forefront for SharePoint
- Etc.
- Tools related to Management and Security
- WSUS
- TBD…
I have been working for the last month on building competence in these areas and will continue these efforts as I work on my plan. Please stay tuned. If you are interested in any of these topics, hold on to your seat, because it is going to get interesting 😉
These changes will have little or no impact on other areas of my business like community engagement. I will continue to give support to MVP’s and community leaders and probably even expand that support this fiscal year. Hint to user group leaders… This is a new list of topics, I will soon be willing to deliver to your groups.
If you want to get up to speed with me… Check out the following:
- Microsoft Security: The Latest In Computer Security
- System Center: Management From The Desktop To The Data Center
- Forefront Security: Business Ready Security
If you want to dig even deeper… Try the video’s on TechEd!
- TechEd: Management
- TechEd: Security
- TechEd: Server 2008 R2
- TechEd: Windows Client
- TechEd: Everything Else … Click Browse by Subject at the top
