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How To Save Your Company Millions Of Dollars The Easy Way!
What would your IT Director and CIO say if you ran into them in the elevator and asked them "What would you say if I could save the company a half a million dollars a year?" Not too long ago one of the projects I was managing was a TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) project. We looked for the highest costs for desktop support and focused in on those areas only, so we left out things like training...
Vista Tips Galore
Well it has been a long, long, difficult project, but come tomorrow around 8:30 my time, all of my long hours and non-SMS work will come to end. Our customer comes on site for a week long of test scenarios and unless there is some issues with the Dell blade servers, EMC SANs, VMware servers, McData switches, Foundry FastIron load balancers, or Cisco Catalyst switch, I only have a couple of the test...
End of the Year - Here Comes the Pressure
It is that time of the year again. In just a few hours we will be going to a pumpkin patch/Christmas tree farm to pick out pumpkins for carving. This annual trip always reminds me that the year is almost over. If your company follows the calendar year, or close to it, you can expect to start getting more and more calls, emails, and visits about making sure you get this done, finish this, where are...
Project Management - Meetings Eveyone Hates Them
If you ask most people they will likely say that they hate meetings, they are too long, nothing gets done, they are boring, redundant, you can fill in the blank. I disagree, if these are the types of meetings you attend, then you are at the wrong meetings OR the meetings are not being held in the best way. If your meetings are too long, then you are not controlling the meeting, if nothing gets done...
Project Management - Assign Dates
Project management is not as difficult as people make it seem, there are projects that are nightmares and there are projects that flow without a single serious problem. But you can usually minimize the amount of problems with effective planning. And planning is more than just sitting down one day after lunch and writing out your elements, it’s a lot more actually. But one of the biggest errors...
Change Management - It's Not Really Bad
I am currently in the implementation phase (my personal favorite) on two large projects for my employer. But as I begin to look ahead on day-to-day AD and Group Policy operations, and requests for packages, inventories, reports in SMS I see a need for change management in our environment. I know CM is usually something most people in IT hate, but I see it as a huge advantage and here is why. 1. Is...
Enterprise Architect - UML Design Tools and UML CASE tools for software development
If you mange software development you know how important documentation can be on a large project. And you know how Use Case diagrams and Class diagrams can be critical during your planning and analysis and you also know how long it can take to create these. Enterprise Architect is your new best friend…Drag and drop, this will make your documentation process a breeze! A single license is only...
How Microsoft Deployed Data Protection Manager
This document describes how Microsoft deployed Data Protection Manager to 130+ remote sites. It also includes comparitive data along with best practices. This is version 4 and was released today. When I was at MMS last month I spoke to one of the Microsoft reps regarding Data Protection Manager, I had already gotten a little news about this last summer from our emerging technologies briefing, but I...
SMS OSD Testing
A little background first... The company I work for has its annual users conference at the San Diego Convention Center, much like MMS this year. We actually take up all three floors, yes there are three, most people miss the second floor and that is by design because that is where the SDCC staff have most of their offices. We also take up the meeting and conference rooms at the Marina Marriott, the...
