Going Rogue: Do the Advantages Outweigh the Risks?
Are all rogue IT projects bad things? Could this type of activity be beneficial? If rogue IT projects could be beneficial, should they be supported or even encouraged? Read More »
Office 2010 Has More Than You Think
Microsoft’s Office 2010 has been out for a couple of years now, but how many people actually know about it and its full capabilities? It’s like those people who are just discovering Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby. I mean peanut butter inside of a pretzel inside of a pint of ice cream, is that even possible? I guess so because we landed on the moon. Well Microsoft Office 2010 has been around for some time as well and I bet a lot of people are still using older versions of Office mainly because, hey it works. Sometimes Microsoft’s biggest competitor is itself, but in this case Office 2010 does have some nifty features that older versions of Office don’t have, and I find that these useful features save me time during the day that I can spend doing more appropriate things, like say eating ice cream. Read More »
Changing World of End User Devices
Let me start out by saying that I am not an Apple fan boy. I am not a Microsoft zealot or a Linux aficionado. I use them all daily; it is all about usability to me. Read More »
Automation and Orchestration: Why What You Think You’re Doing is Less Than Half of What You’re Really Doing
One of the main requirements of the cloud is that most—if not all—of the commodity IT activities in your data center need to be automated (i.e. translated into a workflow) and then those singular workflows strung together (i.e. orchestrated) into a value chain of events that delivers a business benefit. An example of the orchestration of a series of commodity IT activities is the commissioning of a new composite application (an affinitive collection of assets—virtual machines—that represent web, application and database servers as well as the OSes and software stacks and other infrastructure components required) within the environment. The outcome of this commissioning is a business benefit whereas a developer can now use those assets to create an application for either producing revenue, decreasing costs or for managing existing infrastructure better (the holy trinity of business benefits). Read More »
Guest Post: Cloud Management
By Rick Blaisdell; CTO ConnectEDU
Cloud computing has definitely revolutionised the IT industry and transformed the way in which IT Services are delivered. But finding the best way for an organization to perform common management tasks using remote services on the Internet is not that easy. Read More »
Virtual Appliances and the Networking Team
Over the last few years there has been a lot of progress made towards virtualizing a decent amount of the traditional, network-centric appliances that used to be just hardware based. Why are some companies still resistant to this software-based approach? Is it because that’s the way it has always been, or is it inherent to the networking geeks who may be less virtualization-savvy than some of their cohorts in the other technology silos? It reminds me of the days when VoIP was first being introduced and the subsequent lack of acceptance that some of the old-school, traditional telephony engineers fueled. Some of them accepted it and others retired. The point is though that it makes sense and those who accept it will be much the better for it. Read More »
