IT Training

Free Cloud Resources for IT Pro’s

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A couple of years ago Microsoft ended TechNet. A lot of IT Pro’s were unhappy with that decision. IT Pro’s used TechNet to practice in their own labs and get up to speed on new technologies. Well on April 20th, 2016 Microsoft has an answer for this (NOTE: this is my opinion not any official statement from Microsoft).

2016-04-21 01_58_40-Microsoft IT Pro Cloud Essentials

Microsoft has launched the “Microsoft IT Pro Career Center” and the the free “Microsoft IT Pro Cloud Essentials“.

The Microsoft IT Pro Career Center is a free online resource to help map your cloud career path. Learn what industry experts suggest for your cloud role and the skills to get you there. Follow a learning curriculum at your own pace to build the skills you need most to stay relevant.
Microsoft IT Pro Cloud Essentials is a free annual subscription for IT Pro’s that basically gives you Azure, EMS, O365 resources to practice and learn with. It even comes with a Pluralsight account. It includes:

Free Azure credits to try cloud scenarios like backup, disaster recovery, security & dev/test.
Free Pluralsight subscription for on-line training.
Free Priority support in the TechNet forums.
A free phone support incident for Azure or on-premises products.
A free certification exam voucher. [2]
Extended trials of Enterprise Mobility Suite and Office 365.

This is huge. Many of my IT buddies have said they want to jump in on cloud but could not afford to pay for the accounts out of pocket. Well this is no longer an excuse.

Recently Dice published a report that Azure was #2 on the list of the fastest-growing tech skills. Here is the link:

http://insights.dice.com/2016/04/12/dice-report-fastest-growing-tech-skills-2 . I would bet that with the pace Microsoft is moving with Azure this will become the #1 tech skill in the near future. As an IT Pro Azure is something you definitely want to be looking into.

If you are an IT Pro and you want to get started with cloud jump out there and get started today.

Microsoft IT Pro Career Center:

https://www.itprocloudessentials.com

Microsoft IT Pro Cloud Essentials:

https://www.itprocareercenter.com

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Surviving the Future of IT as an IT Pro

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At MMS 2015 we had some interesting discussions in the Ask the Data center experts session. One of the discussions was centered around how IT is changing and how to adapt. For a while there has been a paradigm shift happening in IT. It is hard hitting for those on the front line especially IT Pro’s.

With the advent of many technologies moving to XaaS (x as a Service) based and the challenges for IT pro’s to move from strictly the ops side of IT to more of a DevOps model as well as becoming an internal technology consultant to the business IT Pros can feel lost in the paradigm shift.

The goal of this blog post is twofold. 1. I want to expand on this discussion with my opinion of how an IT Pro can remain relevant in the future of IT. 2. My friends over at Savision asked me to write a blog post and I thought this would be a great topic for it because they have some tools that can help with this transition.

Here are key points and additionally skills/mindset needed as an IT Pro moving into the future of IT:

  • Accepting Shadow IT….. Ability to manage anyway.

Shadow IT is the practice of business units spinning up their own IT solutions without organizational approval. With the expansion of cloud Shadow IT is becoming easier for business units to undertake.

  • Technology Budgets are no longer 100% controlled within IT anymore. Many departments own their own technology budget.
  • For so long IT has had the reputation of being “No People” and a dinosaur that takes forever to get things done. Embracing Shadow IT is about enabling the business, moving faster from conception to solution. Embracing Shadow IT will also change the reputation IT to “Yes People”.
  • This will cause the business to come back to IT first as internal SME’s to help them select the right outside solutions bringing internal IT Pros back into the loop.
  • Instead of focusing on how to stop business units for spinning up the technology solutions they need, help them. At the same time look for solutions that can help put governance and management around Shadow IT. A good example of this are three solutions from Microsoft such as Cloud App discovery (Discovery of cloud applications used in an organization), Azure Active Directory (Single Sign On, Centralized log on to cloud based applications and much more), and OMS (Management of cross platform clouds i.e. Amazon, Azure, Rackspace etc.).

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2015 MVP Summit and MMS 2015

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The past two weeks have been full of tech awesomeness. The first week was the 2015 MVP Summit and the second week was MMS 2015. I will recap both of these in this post. Well for the MVP Summit I can’t actually say anything about it but I can post a couple of cool pictures from it. 🙂 Here are some pics from the Summit.

With PowerShell MVP Trevor Sullivan and my roommate/friend CDM MVP Jakob Svendsen during breakfast.

With the man! Mr. OMS/System Center Jeremy Winter.

Good discussion with a bunch of smart guys. CDM MVP Stanislav Zhelyazkov (Stan the man), CDM MVP legend Cameron Fuller, and CDM MVP Jedi Dieter Wijckmans.

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Speaking @ MMS as one of the 3 International System Center Chefs

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I am excited to be co-presenting a Service Manager session at MMS 2014 on November 10th. The Midwest Management Summit is a 3-day conference purposely capped to just 500 attendees so that nobody gets lost in the crowd. Almost 60 Microsoft MVP’s will be presenting on System Center topics and more.

Areas the speakers will be presenting on are Operations Manager, Configuration Manager, Orchestrator, Service Management Automation, Service Manager, Data Protection Manager, Azure Pack, PowerShell, Desired State Configuration and more.

The session I will be co-presenting in is titled: 900 Degrees of Service Manager with 3 International System Center Chefs. I am lucky to be co-presenting with:

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Here is what you can expect from the session:

“In this demo-packed session, you explore the depths of customizing Service Manager with Samuel Erskine, Dieter Gasser and Steve Buchanan (MVP). We will walk you through real-world scenarios of using advanced customization techniques such as the Authoring Tool, PowerShell, and Visual Studio to build and customize classes, forms, workflows and console tasks in Service Manager. We also discuss best practices, recommendations and processes you follow when customizing Service Manager. You will learn how to plan for customizing Service Manager for business processes. Transform your plans into custom solutions using the advance authoring tools. Finally the session is delivered by 3 deep experts with vast real world deployment and authoring experience.”

Here is a video from the MMS site with us talking about the session:

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About me:

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Full details about this session can be found here: 900 Degrees of Service Manager with 3 International System Center Chefs

UPDATE:

MMS has extended reduced conference registration until Friday, October 17th. So go and register today to keep from paying the higher conference and hotel rates!

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Online Orchestrator Clinic

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The Windows Management User Group (WMUG.co.uk) – @WMUG presents the August 2014 Clinic in which System Center Orchestrator will be discussed with Sam Erskine (@samerskine) and a team of Orchestrator Guru’s. The team includes: Steve Beaumont (MVP) – @StevybSC Dieter Gasser – @DiGaBlog Steve Buchanan (MVP) – @Buchatech Andreas Baumgarten (MVP) – @ABaumgarten Sam Erskine … Read more

Concurrency at TechED 2014

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TechEd is coming up soon. Be sure to connect with all of us from Concurrency out there. All of our MVP’s and other experts will be there. The Concurrency team that will be at the event:

  • Lee Berg
  • Christopher Mank
  • MVP Shannon Fritz
  • MVP Annur Sumar
  • MVP Nathan Lasnoski
  • MVP Steve Buchanan

Here is a breakdown on where you can find us:

– TechEd Sessions –

System Center MVP Nathan Lasnoski will be presenting at two sessions.

DCIM-B224 ITIL Crash Course for IT Pros: Building to Operate

Monday, May 12 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM

Track: Datacenter and Infrastructure Management

Topic: Information Technology Infrastructure Library

Planning a Service Management project and barely know how to spell ITIL? Come to the ITIL Crash Course for IT professionals so you can engage in re-discovering how to deliver on IT better. Find out how to determine what to deliver to your customers, how to set expectations, and how to operate successfully. This crash course will help you interact with the business and successfully map process to technology.

DCIM-B370 Transform Fortune 100 IT Organizations Using IT Service Management with Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 and Office 365

Thursday, May 15 1:00 PM – 2:15 PM

Track: Datacenter and Infrastructure Management

Topic: Information Technology Infrastructure Library

Learn about a global deployment of IT Service Management for over 200,000 users and 30,000 servers, transforming the business for the cloud using System Center, Office 365, and Microsoft Business Intelligence. We walk through the approach, lessons learned, and the techniques for success. Get a glimpse of a Service Manager deployment processing millions of requests per year. These business and technology techniques will help you to plan your deployment, build the right technical framework, and deploy in a way which leads better IT visibility, process improvement, and automation. This session shows you how ITIL concepts will translate into a real-life implementation with stunning results

System Center MVP Annur Sumar will be presenting one session.

CIM-B416 Microsoft System Center 2012 R2: Continual Availability in the Datacenter

Wednesday, May 14 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM

Speaker(s): Annur Sumar, Symon Perriman

Track: Datacenter and Infrastructure Management

Topic: Microsoft System Center

Keep your services online by using System Center 2012 R2 high-availability features to dynamically and automatically manage your highly-virtualized datacenter. Attend this session and learn how System Center can leverage such technologies as service templates, clustering, load balancing, infrastructure monitoring, bare-metal deployment, VMware management, application performance monitoring, crash recovery automation, and service continuity through Microsoft Azure. This session explores many new features in Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), Data Protection Manager, Operations Manager and Orchestrator.

– Vendor/Booth Sessions –

On Monday May 12th @ 1:00PM Nate Lasnoski will be presenting @ the Cireson booth (#309).

Title: Visualizing CMDB Data with Microsoft PowerView and PowerBI

Description: You’ve gotten all sorts of data into your CMDB, now what? Many ITSM efforts focus on getting data in, but they don’t plan around how to get data out. We’ll show a technical walkthrough on taking data from the CMDB and presenting it in web based Microsoft PowerView dashboards for analysts, managers, and executives.

Check out the full line up of System Center experts that will be presenting at the Cireson booth here: http://cireson.com/teched2014/

System Center MVP Steve Buchanan will be doing an interview with Savision at their booth (#1236). For more information on Savision’s MVP interview sessions go here: http://www.savision.com/resources/news/savision-will-be-buzzing-mvps-teched-na2014

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Lee Berg is planning some video sessions with the Concurrency team (Including everyone mentioned above) to keep you updated on what’s happening at TechNet. Keep an eye on Lee’s blog: http://www.concurrency.com/blog/author/lberg/ and his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/LeeAlanBerg for more information on these.

Lee Berg @ the Microsoft booth:

You can also catch Lee Berg at the Microsoft booth during the conference. He will be at the Windows Information counter and the System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management counter. Be sure to stop by and say hi.

See you at !

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FREE Modern Datacenter Event 3-28-14

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There is a free System Center event coming up at the Microsoft office in Edina, Minnesota. At this event discover how Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, and Windows 8.1 work together to help you to provision and manage cloud and data center infrastructure, provide business continuity, deliver services, and manage applications. Both … Read more

Free Hyper-V and System Center Training from MVA

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More free training coming soon on Hyper-V and System Center from Microsoft Virtual Academy (www.MicrosoftVirtualAcademy.com). This is going to be one event you don’t want to miss. I am also happy to announce I(@Buchatech) will also be a part of this event answering questions during the System Center 2012 R2 Datacenter session. Here is the … Read more

System Center Universe Jedi finalists

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Earlier this week System Center Universe announced the 3 finalists for the SCU Jedi contest. If you don’t know what the contest is here is the description for it: System Center Universe has a contest to give one lucky presenter the opportunity to present at the next System Center Universe conference. This lucky presenter will … Read more

MVP Cameron Fuller Presenting at SysCTR MN User Group

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This month the Minnesota System Center User Group will have System Center MVP  Cameron Fuller presenting "Monitoring and tuning System Center with SCOM".  For those of you not familiar with Cameron, he is a Operations Manager Most Valuable Professional (MVP).  A Principal consultant for Catapult Systems, an IT consulting company and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. … Read more