As an IT professional, you probably find it hard to communicate effectively with your less-than-technically-adept manager. Dr. Masha Petrova is determined to help you get your point across, and suggests 5 essential techniques that will get your documentation read.… Read more
Mailboxes moves happen all the time, and given how precious the data in mailboxes can be, you should know exactly how to monitor their progress and make sure they transition smoothly. You also need to know what happens when something goes wrong. Johan imparts the necessary skills.… Read more
Continuing her campaign for better technical presentations, Dr. Masha Petrova now provides simple yet fundamental guidance to becoming a great speaker, in 3 easy steps. She even lets us in on the secret ingredient of a fantastic presentation.… Read more
The so-called 'Blue Screen of Death' has inspired fear in the hearts of mere mortals, but Systems Administrators are expected be capable of casually beating back this sinister beast. So imagine Ben Lye's distress when he discovered that many aspiring SysAdmins had no structured approach to tackling the root of the problem. Setting out to remedy the situation, Ben lays out a simple 3-step plan, and dispenses some good advice.… Read more
Frustrated by technically interesting yet agonizing conferences, Dr. Masha Petrova leaves geeks with no excuses for making bad presentations, and begins her campaign ensure that the people with good ideas also have good presentation skills to back them up, and get them noticed.… Read more
With security concerns being a constant litany, it's worth considering Active Directory Rights Management Services as a powerful tool in your access-control arsenal, particularly when it integrates so neatly with Exchange 2010. Elie Bou Issa kindly takes us, step by step, through everything we need to know to install and start using this versatile technology like a pro.… Read more
Ben Lye uncovered a memory leak in the nonpaged pool which was crashing his servers with disquieting regularity. Luckily it was relatively easy to troubleshoot, and he's sharing the tools and techniques he used to get his servers back on track in double-quick time.… Read more
There are some skills which are extensions of your instincts, and which you can only learn though years of experience. Matt Simmons has this brought home by the fact that he was recently minutes away from a data-loss disaster, and he doesn't quite know how he prevented it.… Read more
Snapshots are a useful feature of Windows Server 2008. Taking a snapshot of Active Directory as a scheduled task can prove to be a wise precaution in case disaster strikes. Once they are mounted, they can be accessed by any LDAP tool which allows the user to specify a host name and port number. Ben Lye shows how you can restore attributes to a large numbers of broken distribution groups from a snapshot.… Read more
Dr. Masha Petrova compresses, into a small space, much good advice on networking with other professional people. She draws from her own experience as a technical expert to provide a detailed checklist of things you should and shouldn't do at conferences or tradeshows to be a successful 'networker'. As usual, she delivers sage advice with a dash of humour.… Read more
Technical people generally don't easily adapt to being good salespeople. When a technical person takes on a customer-facing role as a support engineer, there are a whole lot of new skills required. Dr Petrova relates how the experience of a change in job gave her a new respect for the skills of sales and marketing.… Read more
It has never been so important to enhance your employability as it is today. Job security can never be taken for granted. Employability, increasing your professional value, means far more than just collecting qualifications, as Dr Masha Petrova explains: It also involves communicating, writing, and participating in communities.… Read more
Hiring someone for a technical post is a task that should never be tackled half-heartedly. Matt Simmons provides some general advice on the subject, illustrated by a recent experience of hiring an IT administrator to help share the load. It opened his eyes to the real state of the economy.… Read more
The key to a long career in IT is in learning how to cope adaptively with stress. Matt Simmons, like many, didn't realise it applies to everyone until he was rushed to hospital with what looked to be a heart attack. It was a salutary experience. He then discovered that there are many effective ways of unwinding, and it pays to be aware of them before you get the warning-shot.… Read more
Bill Holmberg takes a practical look at Change Management, and list the steps you need to take. To make things simpler, he also provides a sample Word template you can use to follow through a complete change control cycle on a given project. Leaving nothing to doubt, he finishes with an illustration; a fictional exercise so you can see his guidelines in action. … Read more
What level of trust do you afford users by default? What level of support do you offer users who have low technical skills? Are you creating a system which is more difficult to use with little or no payback? Are you adopting administrative policies as a punitive measure? do users believe that you are deriding them for their ignorance? Matt provides some timely advice.… Read more
In the first in a series of monthly articles, 'Confessions of a Sys Admin', Matt describes the issues involved in Change Management, and gives a simple guide.… Read more
In our mission to make history relevant to the busy IT executive, we speculate how Email might have helped pivotal events in history. Could the War of Independence have been due to a misunderstanding?… Read more
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