Windows Server 2012: An Upgrade Only a Geek Could Love

Microsoft has a problem. A marketing problem. That problem's name is Windows Server 2012.

You see, as an operating system, Windows is pretty dang robust already. There's not a lot that we need it to do that it doesn't do. So Windows Server 2012 doesn't come with a flash-bang set of features. There are no massive changes to AD. Printing is still printing. Clustering works fine. Sure, it's probably "the most secure version of Windows ever," but I don't think anyone's dumb enough to try and sell that line anymore.

Posted by Don Jones on 06/22/20129 comments

Are Microsoft's New Certifications Worth the Effort?

I'm sure you've seen endless analysis and opinion about Microsoft's re-re-revamped certification program, so I'll avoid adding any more to the pile. However, I do want to ask some questions -- because ultimately the value of these certifications comes from decision makers in organizations. If the boss cares, then the employees care, HR cares, and so forth.

First, one minor bit of opinion: "MCSE for Private Cloud" does, I have to admit, make me puke in my mouth. Just a tiny bit. I'm so sick of the "C" word, and this certification -- simply some Windows Server 2008 exams added to a couple of System Center 2012 exams  -- seems to be no "cloudier" than a nice day in Phoenix. But whatever. The marketing people probably could help themselves.

Microsoft's new certification program stacks into three tiers: The Associate level, the Expert level, and the Master level. These each break into two categories: "Certifications" and "Cloud-Built Certifications" (deep breath, hold, out the nose).

So... do you care?

In the beginning, these certification programs -- and I'm talking Windows NT 3-era here -- were largely a play by Microsoft to say, "Look, there are tons of people who can support our products, so why doesn't your business just send us a check for some software, hmmm?" Microsoft's certifications, like most IT certifications, have never been an attempt to protect businesses, to protect the public, and so on -- not in the way other professional certifications, like those in the medical or legal industries, are intended to do (whether they do it or not is, I'm sure, debatable).

So does the large body of Microsoft-certified human beings make you sleep more easily at night?

Do you find that a Microsoft certification acts as anything more than a bare-minimum filter for HR to hone in on when sorting through incoming resumes?

Knowing all about the "paper MCSE" syndrome, the scores of brain-dump Web sites, the certification cheats and all of that, would you still rather hire a certified individual over a non-certified one?

Would you discard, out of hand, the resume of someone claiming eight years of IT experience who doesn't have a certification over someone with less experience who does have a Microsoft title?

If you were to offer some advice to an IT person who doesn't have a certification but who's worked in a lower-tier IT position for a year or so, would you advise them to the exams needed to earn the new MCSE, MCSA or whatever? Or not? Why?

In short, how does Microsoft's certification program affect your business? I'm genuinely curious, and I'd love your comments. Drop 'em in the box below.

Posted by Don Jones on 06/05/201225 comments

Are Datacenters Transforming into Private Clouds? Sort Of ...

I've given up on being frustrated and annoyed with the IT marketing industry's profligate use of the word "cloud." I now am a happy user of cloud mail (formerly "Outlook Web App"), cloud storage (formerly "FTP server"), cloud computing (formerly "hosted virtual machine") and cloud services (formerly "Web site"). My last point of resistance -- the "private cloud" -- has been whittled away by the incessant efforts of Microsoft and other vendors' marketing machines.

Posted by Don Jones on 05/24/20120 comments

Windows Server 2012: IT Pros Will Need WS-MAN Remoting Skills (And Not Just for PowerShell)

I'm seeing a worrying trend in the world of Microsoft IT. Let's politely call it the "head in the sand" phenomenon. My theory is that it comes from such a long period -- around a decade, really -- of relatively few major OS-level changes, especially in the Server version of Windows. Not that Windows 2008 didn't feature improvements over 2003, or that R2 didn't improve upon that, but they were largely incremental changes. They were easy to understand, easy to incorporate, or if they didn't interest you, easy to ignore.

Posted by Don Jones on 05/14/20129 comments

IT Maturity Part 4: Conclusions for a Successful IT Organization

You have to be pretty careful in trying to draw conclusions from our little survey, because we deliberately didn't look at some of the things which absolutely impact an organization's ability to succeed with IT. We didn't look at managerial experience. We ignored their operating system choices and other vendor decisions. We ignored important things like time-in-profession for top-tier IT staffers. We thought those were all pretty obvious in terms of tactics to achieve success; we were looking for less obvious markers.

Posted by Don Jones on 05/07/20120 comments

IT Maturity Part 3: What We Didn't See in a Successful Organization

What was really interesting is a total lack of correlation in the one place we expected it most: salary. The staffers in our successful organizations were not necessarily the most highly paid folks we looked at -- they were almost always hovering right around the mean. Money is clearly important to retaining the right people, but you can't necessarily spend more to get better people. You have to get great people and then pay them what they need.

We also saw no correlation around the topic of certifications. Some organizations cared, some didn't; some employees cared, others didn't. It didn't seem to matter, as these attitudes were evenly spread throughout all of the organizations we looked at, including both successful and unsuccessful ones.

Posted by Don Jones on 05/01/20120 comments

IT Maturity Part 2: Behaviors of a Successful IT Organization

Having figured out how our survey organizations define success, we needed to look and see what else we could tell about those organizations. Our goal was not necessarily to figure out how they were successful, and that's something important to keep in mind as you read. Correlation does not always equal causation, and we were mainly looking at correlation here: Observed characteristics of an organization that just so happens to be successful under our metrics. We specifically tried to avoid cracking into how these organizations achieved their success; we wanted instead to look at the less-visible things that helped to organically support that success. Here are some of the major things we noticed:

Posted by Don Jones on 04/22/20121 comments

IT Maturity Part 1: What Does a Successful IT Organization Look Like?

For years, analysts have put forward models of IT maturity -- even major vendors like Microsoft got into the game. Basic. Proactive. Agile. Remember agile? Some big, big companies got behind that word.

I recently worked with a group of consultants who completed a 300-company survey of IT maturity. Rather than trying to apply fancy terms to different levels of maturity, we focused on two things: What do companies want from IT, and of those companies who are getting it, what are some of their other characteristics? In other words, what does a successful IT team look like?

I'll present our findings in several parts; what you'll read is essentially a summary of everything we learned. Keep in mind that we didn't actually make anything up for this -- we simply surveyed companies to define success, and then observed companies who were, by that criteria, the most successful in IT. You're welcome to contact me if you or your organization would like to learn more about our findings.

What Does a Successful IT Organization Look Like?
This was obviously the first and most important part of the study: What does a successful IT organization look like? We started at a fairly high business level with executive statements revolving around delivery and overhead, but then took those and started to drill into specific numbers. Mind you, most of the companies we spoke with were not successful according to their own criteria; we based our final findings on statistical averages and means across what every company told us. We then tried to abstract the numbers just a bit so that they could potentially apply to every organization, not just ones of a certain size. Finally, we re-scaled the numbers to make sure that what we were seeing in terms of criteria truly did match back to what companies told us, once we adjusted for company size.

So here's what we're told a successful IT organization looks like:

Posted by Don Jones on 04/09/20120 comments

What Color Are Your IT Team Members' Collars?

We're accustomed to thinking of IT as "white collar" positions -- office jobs with little or no manual labor. But I've started revisiting that presumption in recent customer engagements. Many of my customers' IT decision makers are struggling to motivate their team, to update their skills and to get critical projects underway -- and sometimes, a portion of that struggle comes from not appropriately understanding/managing "blue collar" and "white collar" employees.

Posted by Don Jones on 03/23/20121 comments

IT's Take on Help Desk Software

I closed out last year with several articles that prompted you to complete a short online survey. Several of you were kind enough to speak with me on the phone for some follow-up questions, and I'm ready to share some results.

This time I'll focus on my questions about help desk management software. My interested was prompted by the fact that help desk software seems to be so prevalent today, compared to a decade or so ago when there were only a few major commercial solutions and a lot of home-grown ones floating around (I wrote one myself when I was at Bell Atlantic Network Integration). I'm also seeing more and more solutions being released that incorporate help desk software -- which struck me as odd, because I kind of thought everyone already had something in place by now.

Posted by Don Jones on 03/08/20125 comments

Survey Results: IT Teams' Essential Skills Lacking

Last year I asked you to complete a short survey on your team's essential IT skills. A huge number of you took a few minutes to answer those questions -- thank you! Thanks also to those of you who agreed to speak with me on the phone for some follow-up questions.

The news, unfortunately, is not good. I'd asked about your team's grasp of basics like network troubleshooting, AD basics, and so forth, and almost 50 percentof you said that less than half of your team (but more than a quarter) really understood those basics. Another 25 percent of you said that only about a quarter or less of your team grasped the foundations. That means we're seriously lacking some basic skills -- and I think I know why.

Posted by Don Jones on 03/01/20124 comments

Clearing the Cloud Part 4: Tweak Your Résumé

If you're working in the IT industry and not prepared to position yourself as a useful resource in the era of the cloud... well, I hope you have a copy of "What Color is Your Parachute?" sitting around.

Whether the cloud is the right thing or not for your company isn't really important. Some companies will make the right decision regarding the cloud, and many won't. The short-term attractiveness of the cloud's pricing model, if nothing else, will make many organizations take the plunge whether it's the right thing to do or not. Fight that decision when it's a bad call for the company; be prepared to benefit from the cloud whether it's the right thing to do or not. In other words, don't be caught flat-footed.

Posted by Don Jones on 02/13/20120 comments

Clearing the Cloud Part 3: 'Private Cloud' Is Just a Different Way of Thinking

All of today's talk of "clouds" is often accompanied by "private cloud," a phrase that's nearly as overused and useless as "cloud" itself. Isn't a "private cloud" just what we used to call "our datacenter?"

From a technical perspective, yes. The private cloud is just the stuff that's always been in your datacenter. What's different is in how you manage that stuff, and in how you offer it to your organization.

The public cloud has some very specific characteristics that differentiate it from the type of outsourcing we've used in the past:

Posted by Don Jones on 02/09/20121 comments

Clearing the Cloud Part 2: The Cloud Is an Evolution, not a Revolution

Part of what frustrates me about "the cloud" is that it isn't anything entirely new. There are really only two major things that are driving this new wave of cloudiness in IT:

Multi-tenancy. Software vendors are now offering products that have a built-in understanding that multiple customers will be sharing the same infrastructure. The software thus builds walls between those customers, so they each feel as if they have a service dedicated to them. Service providers have been doing this for years by hacking together custom management consoles -- Web hosts being the leader in doing so. The cloud has taken off in large part because the first-party vendors are now building that intelligence into their products.

Bandwidth. The wide availability of cheap bandwidth -- both wired and wireless, including cell-based bandwidth -- means it's easier and easier to get to your data and services regardless of where it lives. In the past, we used dial-up to get everywhere. It made sense to dial into your company's datacenter, so it made sense to keep all of your services there. Nowadays, you're using the public Internet as your "dial-up." That means you're always on the Internet, and then you use it to reach your data. So your data might as well live anywhere, not just in your company datacenter. Security issues aside, there's no connectivity reason to keep data in the datacenter.

Posted by Don Jones on 02/08/20121 comments

Clearing the Cloud Part 1: Embrace or Die

I think it's a good time for IT Decision Makers to face some stark realities. This "cloud" thing is creeping up on us, and many analysts claim that 2012 will be the year that cloud computing and cloud services really take off. That means, like it or not, you're going to be dealing with something "in the cloud," if you're not already. What's that mean?

Within a couple of years, every single business with more than a couple of employees will, in some fashion, be using "the cloud." Whatever "the cloud" means. Smaller businesses will likely be using cloud-based e-mail services like Gmail or Office 365; many are already beginning to do so. Some businesses will get their cloud-based services -- like e-mail and collaboration -- from a Managed Service Provider (MSP), whose datacenter can now officially be called a "cloud." Even massive enterprises with huge infrastructure investments will, in some way or another, be using something from "the cloud," even if that's nothing more than the cloud-based Web site analytics called "Google Analytics."

I'm seeing an awful lot of IT professionals beginning to live in Cloud Denial. They've spent years honing their skills as Exchange admins, SharePoint admins, SQL Server admins and so forth, and they're full of reasons why this "cloud thing" shouldn't be used in their environments. In some cases, they're correct: For some businesses, certain functions should be in-sourced and not out-sourced. That reason, however, should never revolve around an IT person who fears their job will go away. The decision to in-source or out-source a given service or function should be a 100 percent business-related decision, based upon costs, benefit, control, security, and more.

I recently got an e-mail from a fellow who had recently lost his job as an Exchange administrator. His company had been using Exchange Server 2003 (!!!), and when faced with the costs of upgrading to 2010 -- new servers, new software, new training, new architecture and more -- decided it was easier and more financially efficient to outsource its 5,000 mailboxes to someone else. It still had a degree of administration, such as mailbox adds/changes/deletes, that need to be done, and so it retained the portion of the Exchange admin staff that was needed to perform those tasks. My correspondent, however, had been in denial about the coming of the cloud, and didn't have up-to-date skills (or an interest in obtaining them, from what I could read). So he was let go.

It's unfortunately, but it's going to happen. There may be a zillion legitimate reasons why your company can't outsource some particular function to the cloud, and you should be prepared to make that argument in business terminology. You should absolutely help your company do the right thing. However, you should also be prepared for the "right thing" to include outsourcing, and make sure you're positioned to still have a job if that happens. Frankly, I think it's only practical to also assume that your organization might outsource something even if it's the wrong decision. Companies do make bad decisions, after all, often when looking only at short-term goals. That being the case, make sure you're well-positioned to be retained even if your company does make a bad decision about outsourcing. Don't just fight the tide – be prepared to swim with it.

Posted by Don Jones on 02/06/20123 comments