Tim Vander Kooi

Attending a really great keynote by Mark Minasi on Windows 8 and the coming Windows Server. Awesome new capabilities coming for us Technology Professionals.

Well, I am at Tulsa International waiting for my flight to Las Vegas on my way to the WinConnections conference at Mandalay Bay. I want to say a huge “Thank you” to Microsoft UserCommunity for providing me with admission to the conference. This should be a great week to make new Technology connections (as the name implies) and to start some great new programs between GITCA (Global IT Community Association) and Penton Media as well as Microsoft. I will be posting regularly all week long on new ideas, concepts and relationships as I go.

Yesterday I had the privilege of being interviewed by Microsoft Senior IT Pro Evangelist Kevin Remde for his TechNet IT Manager webcast series. We had a great conversation about the importance of Community within the IT Pro profession.

You can listen to the interview here: http://bit.ly/iZcvRQ

We had the opportunity to cover many different areas in which being a part of the larger IT Community can positively influence an IT Pro in both their professional and their personal lives. Getting to interact and network with other members of our field is almost always a very positive experience, even if it is just to get different points of view on the things that we do day in and day out. There are few things in IT that are “black and white” or “wrong or right”, rather most decisions we make and systems that we build are done the way that we feel that it is “best”. Most of us over time fail to look around and see that what was “best” last year is no longer “best” this year and being a part of a discussion with someone with a different way of doing things can often help us to remove our “best blinders” even if we continue to do things the same way going forward. Worst case we end up with a better understanding of why we believe our way to be the best way for our situation.

One of the other things that Kevin and I had the chance to talk about was an area that is near and dear to my heart and which I have been doing my best to champion for a couple of years now – Public Speaking. One thing that I have become aware of over my many years in IT, is that many people in this field are lacking the ability to share their knowledge with others. Now please understand that I do realize that many people go into IT exactly because they like having the ability to work with machines and not with humans, and that speaking to a group of other people is not something they want to do. But the flip side of that is that a person with no ability to share their knowledge either via speaking or by writing has got a somewhat limited career path available to them. Someone who cannot share ideas with other business units, departments or managers will have a very hard time moving into an IT Manager role at any point in their future, and similarly someone who cannot describe and share their goals and plans for a coming year will rarely head a team or even achieve the best available IT Pro positions within their company. For that matter, when going for a job interview who gets the job first; someone who can state their mind and their ideas fluently and intelligently, or someone who has more knowledge but no skills when it comes to sharing that knowledge with others? I think that it quickly becomes evident that speaking skills not only make a person a better IT Pro, with far more doors opened to them over the span of their career, but it just makes them a more well-rounded person in life as a whole who is better able to interact with the people around them regardless of topic.

One of the ways I try to get IT Pros that I come into contact with, through user groups or other professional organizations, is to encourage them to get up and give a short talk on the subject of their choosing. This topic can be anything, from what they built in the workshop last weekend to how their child played in their last soccer game, I find that everyone has something that they are passionate about and that they like to talk to other people about. We start there, and then take the skills and comfort from that experience and then help the same person to talk about a topic in IT. Again, it is important to make it something that they are passionate about, the latest server they built or the new image they built for deploying the latest version of Windows, whatever it might be and it only has to be for 2-5 minutes (although most people find they have a hard time limiting the talk to 5 minutes once they find that passion). This then grows to more and longer talks over time, until someone who had a hard time saying their name in a room full of people now has no problem with giving a 30 minute talk on a number of different IT topics.

The last thing I wanted to mention that we discussed is the fact that I am spending the next year trying my best to establish IT Pro user groups anywhere and everywhere that there are not already existing groups throughout the U.S. and Canada. GITCA (the Global IT Community Association), which I have served and Chairman of the Board for North America for the past 2 years, has a great User Group Locator (http://www.gitca.org/UserGroups/Pages/default.aspx) which allows the user groups in North America to be seen quickly in a Bing Map format. Over the next 12 months, in my new role as Past-Chair and Advisor to the Board, I will be working to fill any existing open areas on that map.

To that end, if you are in a city without a local IT Pro user group PLEASE let me know. Comment on this post or send me an email so that I can get in touch with you and help you get the resources you need to get a new group up and running in your area. If there is already a group near you and you just did not know it I can help to put you in contact with them also.

I really want to say a huge Thank You to Kevin for the invitation and the opportunity to chat with him on his show yesterday. It was a lot of fun and hopefully a chance for people to learn a little more about what Community can do for you.

I recently did an interview with Microsoft evangelist John Weston for his TechNet Radio Community Corner series which is now avialable for viewing. If you would like to listen in, you can find the interview here: http://bit.ly/kDhHBt

I want to say a huge “Thank you!!!” to Harold Wong, Microsoft Evangelist, who joined me for the latest TechNet webcast on IT Pros and our ongoing role as computing in “The Cloud” becomes more and more prevalent.

If you missed the live webcast the archive of “Technical Talks with Tim Vander Kooi: IT Pros, Microsoft, and the Cloud: Where Do We Fit?” can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/techtalks.aspx?tab=Webcasts&seriesid=151&webcastid=17642

Harold did a great job of explaining how the Cloud will effect IT Pros and how we do not need to feel threatened by moving to the cloud, and how The Cloud is not an all-or-nothing option, but rather something that can be used to optimize the technology options that we have available in our IT Pro arsenal.

The other exciting part of this webcast is that it is just the first of a series that we will be doing, where we will be looking at moving to the Cloud on a product by product basis with experts from many different areas including SharePoint, Exchange, Office and more. I intend to get answers to how these products work in the cloud, but also how they work when deployed in hybrid configurations where some of the infrastructure is on premise and other parts are cloud based. I think that getting real world answers to how to best maximize these products will help IT Pros to better solve the business issues that we face on an ongoing daily basis.

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/drafts/800-145/Draft-SP-800-145_cloud-definition.pdf

Gearing up for my next TechNet Webcast in a couple of hours with Microsoft’s Harold Wong where we will be discussing how “The Cloud” will impact the futures and careers of today’s IT Pros.

You can register to take part in the discussion here: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032486204&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

The next TechNet Webcast in our Windows 7 series is tomorrow, Thursday April 21st. It is going to be a really exciting discussion with Microsoft’s A.J. Smith from the Windows 7 Management team who will be giving us a sneak peak into the next version of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP).

The registration link can be found here: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032484378&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

Or you can find the link from the Series landing page here: http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/techtalks.aspx?tab=webcasts

After the last talk that I had with Microsoft’s Brad McCabe, when he showed the capabilities that the Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset (DART) makes possible for recovering and troubleshooting Windows 7 computers, I can’t wait to see what other opportunities the next version of MDOP will bring to the table. I really hope to see you there.

For those of you who may have missed out on the first 2 TechNet webcasts I did with the Windows 7 team (and all the other ones that we did last year) you can find the links to them here: http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/techtalks.aspx?tab=webcasts

I am VERY excited to be hosting a new TechNet Webcast this Thursday (4/7) with Microsoft’s Brad McCabe where we will be discussing Windows 7 management and some of the powerful tools that Microsoft makes available to help you keep your Windows 7 deployment under control.

Here is the link to the registration page. Hope to see you there.

https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032481556