February 6, 2010

VMWare Partner Exchange 2010

I’m getting ready to head to PEX2k10. Looking forward to the sessions and the meet and greats. If you are going, let me know.

December 29, 2009

A way to save the airlines

Ok, so I’m not that smart to as actually come up with a way to save the airlines but here is one way that someone could get some seriously good press.

We’re strolling to our gate at Nashville International Airport when I notice “Children Play Area” on a sign. We go looking and low and behold, there is a great little children’s area. (I’ll post pics later).

Now, every airport needs one of these. In fact, they should have one on every concourse. I would even propose that an airline could donate one of these to the concourse they are on and slap their name all over the thing.

December 14, 2009

OCS 2007 R2 XMPP and GTalk

First, I’ll be honest, I love OCS. I have pitched it as a consultant up against GTalk. It is a superior product. It does way more but at times, I just want to be able to chat with a client that doesn’t have OCS yet. Almost everyone has a Gmail account. Well, thanks to the new XMPP Gateway for OCS I can achieve my wish.

Now, I’m not going to go into all the details on how to set this up. The OCS Team has already done a great job on that here. I did however end up having to do things a bit differently. We had run out of IP’s on the Internet connection on which our Edge server lives therefore I had to go with a dual-homed approach. I placed external interface on a different Internet circuit which had available external IP’s and I put the internal interface on the same DMZ as our Edge server (we are NAT’ing our Edge server).

December 13, 2009

Time goes by quickly

Wow, I decided it was time to do some blog posts and I realized it had been over a year since the last post. Well, I’ve collected 3 or 4 ideas and will be working to get them out over the next few weeks. Three of them are on leadership and one is on Office Communications Server.

For those of you who still have me in your RSS feeds, I’m sure this post will be a bit of a surprise but hopefully you will read the next few posts and like what you read.

November 6, 2008

Expectations

I struggle with expectations. I constantly expect a lot from everyone, including myself and I’m consistently disappointed. I decided to write out my expectations so I thought I would share them.

I expect people to work when at work. I understand that there will be times when you have fun and talk at work but in the end, I expect you to work. I expect that you will use your time wisely. I expect you not to spend significant time surfing the web or playing games on the computer.
I expect that you can be competent in our core functional areas (whatever that may be for your company).
I expect you to act in a professional manner at all times.
I expect you to expand your knowledge.
I expect that if you use your time wisely that you can expand your knowledge while at work.
I expect you to be to work on time and to be available during core hours (again, whatever those may be for your company).
I expect that you will pursue professional certifications and that you can prepare for them outside of business hours.
I expect for you to try. I don’t expect perfection but I do expect an honest effort. If you need help ask for it but only after you have given an honest effort. I expect you to complete tasks in a timely manner. I expect for everyone to lead by example. I expect that you will do what you said you were going to do, when you said you would do it.

October 10, 2008

Virtual Center and IIS conflicts

I have seen this several times and have had the idea of how to fix it but I was missing some steps. The guys over at Xtravirt have it solved. If you haven’t heard of them, take some time on their site as it has a bunch of useful knowledge. Here’s the link to how to solve it:

http://knowledge.xtravirt.com/hot-tips/virtualcenter-2x/12-virtualcenter-2x/32-virtualcenter-and-iis-conflicts.html

October 5, 2008

Do as I say, not as I do

I’ve been thinking about this subject for a few weeks now. In general, no matter what, every so often I struggle with the leadership around me. I see great leaders out there but typically, I’m not engaged with them for whatever reason.

Lately, I have noticed that many people who are in leadership positions don’t do the same things that they ask their subordinates to do. In my case, it is my direct boss and because of this, I am losing more and more respect for him. Too often he makes requests of my co-workers and me to do things (such as get certified, etc) but yet he is unwilling to do those very same things. In the case of certification, we all need to have certain professional certifications (him included) so he tells us to go study and take the tests. His best advice is schedule the exam as it will force you to study when there is a deadline. While I completely agree with this and have done so just to keep me motivated, it is hard to stay motivated when you have taken and passed 8 tests in the past 12 months and he hasn’t taken any.

September 25, 2008

OCS 70-638 Test

Done. Whoo-hoo. I’m stoked that I passed first try. While I may know the product pretty well, I don’t tend to test well, especially with Microsoft tests. I scored a 785 which is much lower than I would have liked. I’m just a bit competitive with myself.

Here is my take on the test, I thought the questions were either very hard or very easy. I also disliked when you could get it down to two answers and they only varied by a few words. Now, I know where and what I need to change but I don’t always remember off the top of my head what the EXACT dialog is on that box.

August 8, 2008

Simpsons Movie Countdown with PowerShell (Repost)

Here is a repost from my old blog. This was originally posted on July 27th, 2007. Sorry all pictures are gone.

Yeah, I’m trying new things with PowerShell. Someone challenged me to see if I could come up with how long til the movie. Well that was pretty easy. I did:

New-TimeSpan (Get-Date) “7/27/2007 12:01:00″

Days : 1 Hours : 20 Minutes : 31 Seconds : 53 Milliseconds : 146 Ticks : 1603131460301 TotalDays : 1.85547622720023 TotalHours : 44.5314294528056 TotalMinutes : 2671.88576716833 TotalSeconds : 160313.1460301 TotalMilliseconds : 160313146.0301

August 7, 2008

UC Software Update Services (Issue #2)

So, the second biggest issue that I faced in getting the UC Software Update Services up and working was getting the configupdatesserver.vbs script to run correctly. Whenever I ran it I got a Unknown Username or bad password error. Well, turns out we must have an invalid character in our password cause I changed it to something without a special character (^,$,~,etc) and everything worked.

Seriously, this is just one crappy product. I spent at least 15 hours trying to get it to work. The documentation is ok but is missing key steps (see my previous post) and then this. I love OCS 2007 but the Phone Edition is not nearly as easy to update.