The top ten things I love about ISAAC

In case you missed the game changing announcemetn from Enterasys, it's here. And of course if you follow @valaafshar on twitter you have been hearing hints about it for a while now. If not he is at http://twitter.com/#!/ValaAfshar

If you read the announcement there's a fair amount of marketing terms and buzz words in there. I'm not a real buzzwordy kinda guy so here is in real words what it is and why Isaac Rocks....

It’s really the next level in network management, integrated with social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Salesforce.com Chatter (which we use all the time internally). If like me you are never really away from work, having information on the network available in the same tools I’m normally using anyway makes it less intrusive. Plus it lets me deal with issues easily in a language that makes sense to me.

10.  it integrates the megatrends around mobile, virtual, and social media
9. it allows users to build their own custom language to manage a network
8. it lets me manage a network from any mobile device.
7.  it gives me an instant view into how the network is performing from my Android phone
6. my boss can generate real time stats to get answers to “If we decide to do remote training in Mexico, will the WAN support it” without asking the network engineers
5. it gives me a reason to spend half of my time on facebook and twitter without getting in trouble
4. when i'm having a nice dinner with family and friends and get called, i can fix network issues without getting in trouble
3. it lets me build simple commands to do complex things, like "#ratelimit rcasselb 1M"
2. it makes me feel like part of the under 30 crowd by being "hip and social" which helps offset my thinning hair and thickening midsection :)

but the biggest reason Isaac rocks is I get all of the above plus a ton of other cool things I haven't even really thought about yet.

Microsoft cloud

We had a great day today in Waltham, well once we got past the tipped over sheetrock truck on 95/93 interchange. Sitting on 128 for an hour was not great.

Wed reviewed Microsofts' Office 365 and azure offerings and I can honestly say that they seem to have a good story on how to get your existing Microsoft infrastructure in the cloud. Exchange is an easy move to the MS cloud and in the next year you will get new features more quickly than the on-premise versions. Very cool.

Office 365 allows you to change your licensing model and have "viewers" have a less expensive option that can be accessed anywhere from "any" machine. "Any" is somewhat misleading since it does need to be a current browser and a standard OS with silverlight support, or at least it didn't work on my joli OS based web machine. Someone more savvy than me might be able to get it working, but after an hour the challenge stopped being fun.

Even SQL seems to have a good roadmap of getting to the cloud. I'm not really a SQL guy but it looked pretty cool from what I know.

And Windows Azure also seems pretty cool, though having to rebuild applications for the cloud means legacy applications will probably stay where they are and new ones will be built on Azure instead. I'd rather there was a "upgrade to cloud" button somewhere, but I'm sure some partner somewhere will come up with one someday.

All in all it was exactly what I expected, which is the problem. It's not really disruptive. If you read my post on google's cloud vision, it was a drastically new way of running IT. It gets rid of clients (essentially) and lets me get out of managing clients and servers and all the things that go with it, like antivirus, patching and even backups. It lets me stop running IT and starting moving the company forward instead.

The MS one is a much easier migration with much less risk. In fact if done correctly most users would never even know they are in the cloud. If your CEO comes to you and says "We need to go to the cloud" and you are thinking "Ugh, who did he go golfing with that put this in his head", the MS vision is perfect for you.

OK that's a bit harsh, there are a lot of reasons to avoid a big change on a largely unproven technology vision.

If you are trying to shake things up though that doesn't do it. Sure it helps shift infrastructure costs to a monthly subscription cost, which frankly is a numbers game, IMHO. It also gets you out of managing servers and patches for the applications you move to Azure or Office 365 (sharepoint, Lync, Exchange) and it gets you "somewhat forced" regular upgrades. You have the option to wait up to a full year before being forced to upgrade. It's not bad, in fact for some people it's a great fit. I just wonder if it is enough of a change....

IT training

I tend to complain about training and how bad most IT departments are at it. Well we had a cool session today on Visio 2010. Our  Microsoft team recomended a local company called "Tips and Technologies" to do a 90 minute training class.

I didn't think we would have that much demand but I thought :hey if we can fill a room with 8 or 10 people why not right?" So we chatted it on salesforce and actually got over 100 responses asking to take the class. Now we only have 400 visio users so that clearly showed a huge pent up demand. We did provide breakfast and lunch but still that's a lot of people. 75 showed up for the class, which again is pretty good. 40 on sirte and 35 on web conference.

The training was great. Pretty fast paced, which was good. I've been to some classes where we spend 10 minutes learning to hit ctrl-p to print. I wasn't bored and learned a ton of cool tips.

I talked to Matt Roderman, the instructor and CEO of the company, and he has a great business model. The classes are $995, paid for by a credit card. No long drawn out statement of work, kegal contract etc and it's guaranteed. If the evaluations don't rate the trainer at least a 7.5 out of 10, you don't pay.  Even better you can have as many people in the class as you want.

We're already planning the next round f training to use him for. If, like me, you want to do a better job educating users on the software you probably pay millions of dollars for, check out http://www.tipsandtechniquesnow.com/

Microsoft cloud

We had a call yesterday with one of the Microsoft PM's for exchange online and I may have to re-define my take on the MS cloud strategy. It seems like they may actually have one after all.

OK that may be a bit harsh, but when we had talked to them before they really didn't seem to get it. In fact they would say things like "You don't want innovation, you want better QA", or "Cloud fixes the licensing challenges". While Google's message was a lot crisper.

I'm thinking now that MS just hasn't done a good job sharing their cloud strategy throughout the company. Of course with 8 billion products it's got to be hard to share all that expertise. (Yes I made up the 8 billion number)...

The product manager yesterday though said things like "Cloud will always get the new features first", "We plan on releasing new features monthly to the online version", and showed us some cool features that are coming down the line that rival what we saw with Google.

Which puts me in an awkward position. Up until this point, going google was a no brainer, but now it requires some thinking... Sigh.

Jolicloud rocks!

I'm not sure what I did, or if it was one of the magic updates you get when you are on a cloud OS, but yesterday I noticed a whole new folder of applications called "local apps".

Inside of that is all the cool gadgets I have been looking for, including network tools (like portscan, traceroute, ping etc), disk utility, monitors. Using the monitors application it was easy to setup dual displays. It works just like the windows 7 dual displays. I so happy to have my dual screens back!

I did also learn how to move icons between screens. Not that it's tricky I just hadn't done it, drag it to the side of the screen and wait a second and it will scroll over.

Of course now I'll need to find something else to complain about...

ipad -vs- cloud OS

Ok I realize comparing an ipad to a Dell running Joli isn't really an apples to apples comparison but when I decided to try giving up Windows 7 and going to something lighter I made it 4 hours on my ipad before booting up my windows machine, I've been almost two weeks on my Joli OS.

Now don't get me wrong I love my ipad, even though now that the ipad2 is out I feel less cool than I did when I first got it. It's great for kicking back on the couch using flipbook, facebook, twitter, or just goofing around on the web. The email is good, not great and there are so many apps I don't even know what all the ones I have installed do, let alone all the millions in the app store.

When it come time to really work I just don't like the virtual keyboard. Maybe I haven't really given it a fair chance, but when I need to write a doc, or create a srpeadsheet or template, I just find it harder to use than a laptop. I still fight with me HTC EVO 4G even with swype so I think that's why I don't like the ipad. Now before you tell me I could use a bluetooth keyboard or a doc, yes I know, but then I have to carry something else around with it. Not to mention talk about not looking cool. That would be like having training wheels on a harley... just doesn't go...

With Joli OS (or Jolicloud, never remember what it's called now) I get the fast bootup like an ipad, I don't need itunes, and get the laptop form factor I've grown used to.

Week two in the cloud

This ends my second week of being pretty much entirely in the cloud.

Gmail continues to "tune itself" and does a good job figuring out which emails are important and putting them in the priority inbox. Spam it seems to struggle with a little but and I haven't figured out how to whitelist some sites, like say linkedin, facebook, or google.

I didn't get any time to play around with google gadgets yet which I really want to do, but we did enable something called "Cloudworks" from Appirio that is very cool. By default it gives us salesforce integration and some gadgets for chatter, which we use all the time, and pulls in contact data. I think it does opportunities and leads too but since I don't email with customers on a regular basis, I haven't seen that yet.

Jolicloud released a few updates that got added for me automatically and I figured out how to lock my screen. Turns out it's Ctrl-Alt-L.... They also added two cool features that I just started with. The first is google docs integration so all my google documents show up as a folder on my desktop. They did the same thing with dropbox so I had to break down and create an account.

I'm still waiting on the ipad version and the dual display version.