Technology - Michael J. Thom

Windows 8

Michael — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 13:51:40 +0000

Editor’s note: This was originally written in August 2013… but for some reason was never posted. I’m posting it now, despite it being slightly out of date. Oh well!

I’ve used Windows 7 since its pre-beta. I used Windows 8 on a Surface Pro tablet. Now I run Windows 8.1 (beta) on my primary work laptop. And yet I’m writing this on a MacBook Pro, my personal computer. So I get around, as operating systems go, and I am in no way married to one platform. The count at home right now is actually: 3 Android devices, 2 Mac OS computers, and 1 Windows PC. If you count my work laptop then that’s 2 Windows machines.

All that to say, as an operating system, I love Windows 8. Well, 8.1. Though on principle I don’t love that Microsoft kow-towed to all the complaints about Windows 8 not having a Start button on the taskbar or letting you boot straight to the desktop, I do feel like it’s the OS Windows 8 should have been. Windows 7 was awesome right out of the box, the first version. But Windows 8… not so much.

Will Windows 8 Save the Windows Platform or Kill It?

Look, anyone who asks this question has missed the truth about Windows’s place in the world of computing. One single version — almost regardless of how great or how terrible it is — is not capable of singlehandedly derailing the whole ecosystem. Users may complain, businesses may hold off on upgrading (I’m looking at you, Vista), and the “state of computing” may not be furthered, but then they’ll fix it (or just move on to another version altogether), and those businesses will then go ahead and upgrade and move on. We saw this with Windows ME, and then Windows XP got everyone basically back with the program (though some of course stuck with 2000). Windows Vista was definitely a “skip” version, but then Windows 7 came along and has proven to be a venerable option.

So will Windows 8 continue the good-bad-good-bad pattern of late? I truly believe the answer is no, but not because it’s an overwhelmingly needed upgrade.

Look, the basic functionality, even many of the kernel-level choices, aren’t terribly different from Windows 7. For the majority of users — business and personal alike — there is no single bit of functionality (or security, or speed, etc.) that makes Windows 8 an upgrade worth forking over the cash to do right now. As long as the hardware you’re using is still in good shape, just keep on truckin’ with Windows 7. But if you’re looking to replace, upgrade, or add hardware, then by all means, make the move to Windows 8. Especially with the changes put forth in 8.1, there’s absolutely no reason not to get 8.1 pre-installed on your next machine.

The fact is, it *is* faster, it *is* a bit prettier, and it *is* more flexible. As much as people will complain about the interface-formerly-known-as Metro UI, the way that it combines with the desktop environment is actually pretty innovative and flexible, and once there is a good selection of worthwhile Metro apps available, it’ll be a decent piece of the OS. Some will never use it, and that’s fine. It’s not hurting anything if you just never use it.

Looking Ahead

Going forward Microsoft really needs to think long and hard about what the strategy is going to be. I do believe that this hybrid world of having both a tablet and a “classic” Windows environment isn’t sustainable, as it is inherently a compromise. Apple has been heading down that road, but the previews of Mac OS X Mavericks are pleasantly devoid of hardly any additional iOS-sourced ideas and UI elements. I think they’ve realized that while some technologies can be shared, as long as I have a keyboard on my desk with a screen separate, it simply isn’t the same thing as a handheld device with one shared input *and* output device, the screen. I hope this trend continues, and the two worlds remain clearly separate.

Windows, meanwhile, will persist for the forseeable future. Even if today they simply stopped making the “desktop” UI, what we know and love as Windows, we would not have a mass exodus of Windows users to Mac OS. Windows is here to stay, and it’s still the most flexible, supported, and powerful business platform out there.

The post Windows 8 first appeared on Michael J. Thom.

Google Glass – A Brief Review

Michael — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 16:45:43 +0000

Google Glass Explorer. Glasshole. Michael.

Call me whatever you’d like, but I just got done living with Google Glass for about three weeks, and I have a few thoughts to share. (Why only three weeks? That mess is $1500… so I just played with it while still within the window to return it, and I have now sent it back for a refund.)

Overall impression: WOW. The UI, the UX, just the overall usability of it is actually pretty stunning. They’ve really spent a lot of time refining the experience of wearing and using Glass, and it shows. We’ve all seen the videos online that show how it’s supposed to work, but when you put it on and find that itÂ actually works as well as the videos show, that’s something.

Coolest feature today: Translate This. Really the only augmented reality app so far, the Translate app takes whatever you’re looking at, translates it, andÂ replaces it on-screen with the new text, in a font and color that closely match the original. It’s a bit sluggish and finicky, but it’s so impressive when it works. And yes, I saidÂ replaces — it’s not a subtitle, it completely deletes the original word from the live-view image and replaces it with the translated word. Too cool.

Weirdest feature today: Winking to take a picture. I mean, neat… but seriously? #creeperalert

What it looks like to wear Glass at Starbucks

Social impact: Let’s get one thing straight — people still look at you like you’re a weirdo when you go anywhere in public wearing Glass. I would expect nothing less. Will this reaction decrease over time? I believe so. I made it my goal while wearing it to educate people and help them understand 1) no, I’m not always recording or taking a picture of you, 2) the screen’s not even on most of the time, and 3) if I walk into a wall please just point me in the right direction.

(I didn’t actually walk into any walls… but at one point at work I was walking toward a closed door, doing something on Glass, when I realized I had stopped walking altogether, right in front of the door, to finish what I was doing before opening the door. Yep, I was the guy standing 8 inches in front of a closed door, seemingly just staring at it, unsure of what to do next.)

A quick video shot through Glass while on a run.

The future.Â Spending time with Glass really made me believe in the future even more than I do already. It’s coming, and it’ll be augmented with wearable devices of one sort of another. Maybe it’s Glass or a derivative, maybe it’s an iWatch, maybe it’s an implant (this can’t come soon enough!). But there were definitely times that the accessibility to information and the immediacy with which I was notified about (and could respond to) emails and texts were so handy, especially while multi-tasking (driving, walking while carrying things, etc.).

I’ll close with the requisite image of me wearing Glass. Feel free to save it for blackmail as needed.

You’re welcome

The post Google Glass – A Brief Review first appeared on Michael J. Thom.

Interop 2013 – Wrap-Up

Michael — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 15:15:45 +0000

Back in May I was fortunate to get to attend the Interop Las Vegas IT conference. I’ve already discussed my trip as a whole and the Principles of Effective IT Management workshop in the previous two posts. I wanted to take one more post to describe briefly the rest of the conference.

Wednesday, Thursday, and the first half of Friday comprised the main part of the conference. Wednesday and Thursday each began with keynotes, and then the rest of the time was filled with breakout sessions and time in the expo hall.

The breakout sessions were a definite mixed bag. Some of the ones I attended were frankly fairly boring and generic — nothing I couldn’t have stepped up with about a day’s notice and presented myself, and I’m an expert in almost no relevant areas. But others were in fact quite interesting and well-presented.

Frank Andrus, CTO of Bradford Networks, had a very good session entitled “Breaking Through the FUD: 10 Steps to Secure BYOD.” He actually presented some interesting technical solutions to common BYOD issues, which made it unique from some of the BYOD sessions which seemed to basically just say “BYOD is coming if it isn’t here already, and it’s going to be a challenge!” (No kidding.) Furthermore, he spent a while reinforcing what was, to this IT pro, the key takeaway of the session: “BYOD is NOT about the devices, it’s about the human behavior change” (such as the common desire to be always connected).

The keynotes were pretty cool. While not the “keynotes” that the public generally thinks of (Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, and so forth), we had representatives from HP, Cisco, and PayPal and the FIDO Alliance (which is super fascinating, by the way). There were no product announcements or any other headline-generating presentations, but lots of good information. Much of the content seemed to revolve around the theme of SDN — Software Defined Networking. I’m still unsure whether it was intentional to have that as a recurring theme or not.

Finally, we had the expo hall. This was a pretty cool experience. While I can imagine CES (or Comdex!) is a considerably larger show (albeit obviously consumer-oriented), the show floor was in fact quite large. Most vendors had very impressive-looking displays. But even more than that, I was glad to find that most of them were staffed by very intelligent people who knew their products but more importantly the industry as a whole.

The icing on the top of the expo hall cake, though, was the InteropNet. As a listener of Fr. Robert Ballecer’s This Week in Enterprise Tech (TWiET) on the TWiT Network, I knew to expect this. The backbone, the NOC, of the entire Interop show is run out of a space located right on the show floor — the InteropNet. It is intended to be a show-and-tell NOC, where they have many screens of real-time metrics turned so passers-by can check them out. They also do narrated tours throughout each day. I may not be a network engineer per se, but I am hugely fascinated and interested in the architecture and engineering that goes into putting together a network of this sort — particularly since it has to be mobile and set up (and torn down!) so quickly.

Overall, the Interop show was well worth the money. (Okay, easy for me to say, since my employer paid for it. But seriously, I came back with so many ideas that it really was valuable.) It was also a lot of fun. While I didn’t arrive knowing anyone, and didn’t even walk out of there with more than a couple new solid contacts, everyone was friendly and willing to chat. The networking is something I will take even more advantage of in the future.

I recommend this show to any IT pro — whether Help Desk technician or manager or C-level — who has the time and budget to make it happen!

The post Interop 2013 – Wrap-Up first appeared on Michael J. Thom.

Interop – Principles of Effective IT Management

Michael — Mon, 02 Sep 2013 12:45:54 +0000

This post is part 2 in a 3-part series. Check out the first post if you haven’t yet.

I want to review a workshop I attended at Interop Las Vegas in May called Principles of Effective IT Management. It would be tough to recap all my notes from the 2-day workshop in blog posts, simply because they’re so exhaustive. I would however like to highlight a few of the key takeaways, at least from the perspective of my experience and current situation.

We Are a Value-Add, Not a Cost Center

One of the main precepts that came up again and again was that of providing value to the business. “We are definitely not a cost, we are a value,” Tom Randall kept reminding us. Most businesses have a tendency to treat IT as a cost (both as viewed by Accounting but even just as a general feeling), and it’s completely in opposition to the way we should function. But beyond simply convincing the rest of the business to see us “properly,” it also affects the way we treat ourselves. If we just consider everything as a cost, we’ll be driven in decisions and approaches by the simple dollar amount — the bottom line — more than we should. When we think of ourselves as providing value — regardless of the dollar amount — the way in which we spend those dollars becomes considerably more impactful.

He also had this wonderful nugget to share, regarding the trend towards consumerization of IT and so much hardware: “It was a lot easier when what we did was effing magic.” So true.

Stewardship Reports

Tom mentioned one concept that, while it almost seems obvious, was new to me. He recommended sending what he termed “Stewardship Reports.” These reports should probably be weekly, and they would contain simple metrics on what the IT department has been up to lately. Include volume of work, time spent on tickets, and benefits to the users. This is not so much about dollars spent or dollars saved, but about letting your users know what you’ve been up to! Far too many users — either ignorantly or cynically — don’t have an accurate concept of the work that goes on in IT — until their workstation is broken, of course — and this is a friendly mechanism to help them understand.

As an IT department of one at my current job (as well as my last), this isn’t something I’ve implemented yet, but I’d like to consider it for the future. I’d love to hear if you’ve implemented something similar (or your company’s IT department does something like this). How do you like it?

SLAs

We spent quite a lot of time discussing SLAs — Service Level Agreements. While to some this is a very familiar concept, I’ve been noticing more and more how many contracts are lacking SLAs. When you’re a vendor and have a service problem, you become quite grateful that your clients didn’t think to make you include an SLA in your MSA (Master Services Agreement)… this has crossed my mind a couple times in the past couple weeks for a couple real-life experiences at work. I’m not going to go any deeper into those though.

But from the IT department perspective, including SLAs in your contracts with vendors is so absolutely critical. At a very high level, SLAs “guarantee” a certain level of service (uptime, speed, I/O, etc.) from that provider. But in reality, the provider should be trying to provide this level of service anyway… what the SLA provides in essence is a way to receive monetary compensation from the vendor should they fail to meet the agreement. While money can’t always truly compensate for downtime, lost business, and unhappy customers, it can certainly help. And it can motivate the vendor to perform.

There’s another way to consider SLAs. As an IT department providing service to the business — whether that’s standing up a server, building an application, or even just responding to Help Desk tickets — having an SLA in writing within your own company can go a long way to ensuring not only a level of service from your IT staff, but also accountability. Plus, this helps encourage buy-in from the business, ownership of the project, and a greater trust that the project will be taken seriously.

This post only covers a very small portion of the topics covered in the 16 hours of the workshop. As you can see, there were many great ideas and plenty of great conversation about them.

Finally, I want to leave you — without comment — this list from the very end of the workshop. It’s something I try to review frequently as I consider my own professional growth.

Tom Randall’s Top 10 Requirements of a CIO

Leadership
Expertise in aligning & leveraging technology
Business savvy
Relationship skills
Management skills
Communication skills
Ability to create & manage change
Knowledge of or experience in specific industry
International or global experience
Ability to hire, develop, retain high-quality IT pros

On to part 3 in the series…

The post Interop – Principles of Effective IT Management first appeared on Michael J. Thom.

Interop Las Vegas

Michael — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 18:28:28 +0000

During the last six months of my time at Slingshot SEO, I was fortunate enough to get approved for my first work trip. And catch this — it was to Las Vegas!

Interop is the world’s largest independent IT conference (put on by UBM Tech), and they have a few different venues each year. The Vegas conference is the primary show, and it is attended by tons of IT pros, CIO/CTOs, and other interested parties.

First, I’ll just be honest — I love traveling by air. I love the airport experience, I love being in the air, and I love getting to stay at a cool hotel. Specifically, I got to stay at the Mandalay Bay resort on the South end of The Strip. For more on the venue and my time as a tourist, check out an upcoming post over at my video and photo site.

The conference has a few different options for attendee passes, including expo-only, main conference passes (Wednesday-Friday), and “All Access” passes, which adds all-day workshops on Monday and Tuesday. I had the latter.

Though there were many one-day workshops to choose from on Monday and Tuesday (and a few half-day ‘shops as well), I chose one of the most popular sessions, the only two-day workshop offered: Principles of Effective IT Management.

Principles of Effective IT Management

This workshop has been taught by the same fellow for something like 15 or 20 years in a row now, but it is not stale. For one, many of the overarching management concepts don’t change considerably with new technologies. But also, where appropriate, he definitely has updated his presentation (for example, “cloud computing” wasn’t a common concept in the ’90s, but it sure is now). His name is Tom Randall, and he is currently a VP of British Telecom Americas. He mentioned that when he retires (soon), he hopes to turn this presentation into a book, since there’s such a dearth of good IT management books out there. This is a book I would read!

The audience was made up of a variety of guys (literally — not many women in the room, unfortunately) of different ages and from different sized companies representing many different sectors. Amusingly, there was only one other 20-something in the group (and Tom made sure to entertainingly point out our youth on several occasions). The guy’s name was Ted, and it was good to get to know somebody else in a surprisingly similar situation to me.

(Sidebar: The Shoppes at Mandalay Bay has a terrific Irish pub called RÃ RÃ¡; check it out if you’re out there and like Irish food or Irish beer or Irish music or Irish people.)

Anyway, I took notes furiously. I’m an Evernote guy, so it’s tough say “I wrote X number of pages” — but printed, my notes would come out to something like 19 pages. And that’s even with knowing the deck would be available after the conference, so I didn’t have to record the content of each slide in my notes.

Just so much good stuff.

Though Tom’s perspective and background is mostly in the large enterprise (in some cases even running an IT department of over 1000 people!), nearly all of the concepts and ideas still apply to the small and medium business world that I’ve so far been a part of. Some were good reminders, some were familiar concepts, and some were fantastic new ideas. New to me anyway.

I will discuss some of my main takeaways in a follow-up post to this one. This post has gone on long enough already. Suffice it to say the conference cost would have been well worth it even if I only came for the Monday-Tuesday workshop with Tom Randall.

The post Interop Las Vegas first appeared on Michael J. Thom.