Graham Chastney

System Center Capacity Planner 2006

Over the weekend Microsoft released a Beta of System Center Capacity Planner from my point of view this is actually a very big step.

For some time now Microsoft have published best-practice type papers, but have relied heavily on the hardware vendors to provide the sizing information. In my experience this has lead to a situation where one of two things happen. If you get all of your hardware from one vendor then you get a nice neatly packaged answer; if you are in a multi-vendor hardware environment then you get a story which is optimised at each layer of the solution. The example that Exchange environments always bring out is the one of storage. If the storage vendor is different to the server vendor then Microsoft will be no help at all and the storage vendor will give you their optimised solution, as will the server vendor. Neither vendor wants to be the problem, so they both over-do it a bit to make sure they are OK. The only way out of this is to do lots of testing, but that’s very difficult and costs more than just buying the over-done hardware. The problem with over-done hardware isn’t the capital cost though, it’s the fact that it’s normally more complicated than the ‘good enough’ stuff and costs more to support.

The fact that Microsoft is stepping out from under this shadow is a big move – it would be even bigger if they were to attach some penalty system to it. A penalty system that works both ways – if we tell you to buy too much we’ll pay, if we tell you to buy too little we’ll pay. That would be a very courageous thing to do but would be a massive boost to customer confidence. It would also make Microsoft’s life easier to though. Why would anyone not buy the recommended hardware configuration and if the software actually works, people would then get services that didn’t require a call to Microsoft every week. Microsoft would then a chance to scale down its support organisation and its reputation for delivering reliable services would increase massively.

Perhaps I’m writing fantasy now and I should move on.

Count Your Blessings #28 – A Few Hours with Sue

On Saturday Sue and I had a few hours together – alone. It was fabulous. For a couple with two children (13 and 9) this is a very rare occurrence. For these few hours to be on a Saturday when we don’t have anything else that ‘must’ be done is exceptional. These occasions come so rarely that it’s a surprise when they do and the problem with surprises is that its not always clear how best to react. It’s so easy to waste a surprise.

In the morning I had been speaking at a Men’s Breakfast for church and one of the things that we were talking about was ‘Adventure’. I was determined that we weren’t going to waste this time and that we were going to have an adventure of some description or other. The problem with many adventures is that they require some planning and it’s much easier just to sit back and ‘relax’. The day was also wet and miserable, so the pressure to do nothing was even greater. And it was mid-afternoon already.

One of the joys of living in Preston is that you can get into the beautiful Lake District in less than an hour. We both wanted to take in the autumnal colours and smells. A quick check of the weather forecast on the Internet showed that there was no guarantee that the weather would get any better, but it looked hopeful.

Off we went, up to Tarn Howes. Sue loves it there, it’s a place where she finds real peace and there was no time left for a really dramatic walk anyway.

It was fabulous. The weather cleared, the colours were tremendous, the walk was just right and the coffee at the new little coffee shop on the way down was tremendous.

Spending those few hours with the lady I love was more precious than any gold or silver. I felt like a school boy taking his girlfriend out on their first date, at the same time I felt like I was in a place that I had visited a hundred times before with each visit being as precious as the times preceding.

Count Your Blessings #27 – Cards that say Thank You

Yesterday morning I gave a talk at a breakfast for men that a team of guys from church put together. We have done these breakfasts a couple of times now and this time it was my turn to do the talk.

Afterwards I had some really nice feedback from a number of the guys. This morning one of the members of the team had gone to the effort of writing me a card to say thank-you. There is something about receiving a card that makes the sentiment more meaningful somehow. Why is that? The logical part of me says that it’s because I know subconsciously that it’s easy for people to say thank-you but it takes more effort to write a card. I’m not sure that this simple logical really goes far enough though. If that was all there was to it an email would have the same feeling, but it doesn’t.

I think that receiving a card has so much more to it because there is more to it than just the effort that has gone into it. A card reminds us of all of the pleasurable times of our life, birthdays with jelly and ice-cream and Christmas in the snow (not that we see snow around here very often). A card reminds us of all of the special people in our life. A card reminds us of our own searching for that card that says the right thing in the right words. A card reminds us of all of the cards that we have sent and the faces on those who we have sent them to.

Cards are blessings that work two ways – giving them is a blessing, receiving them is a blessing.

Ah, no not another Top 100 list

This post is going to sound like I’m having a bad day, but I’m not. But I am fed-up with Top 100 lists. It seems to be all we get on the TV these days and now I have to have all of my time and bandwidth wasted by another blog one – this time from CNet. As I subscribe to a number of these sites, I have today had to endure endless ‘thank-you and ’I’m honoured’.

Please no more. In the same way that I would rather my TV told me something useful, rather than repackaged the same stuff I’ve seen a 100 times before I’d rather these top 100 blogs told me something constructive rather than pointing to someone repackaging their content. Come on guys you are better than that. We are busy people and each one of these posts contributed to the (as Arthur C Clarke put it) “World-Wide-Wait”. Feeds a great for deciding who I want to listen to, this type of thing reduces the value. I’m only ranting because this isn’t the first time it’s happened. I really do not care where you have been ranked – I care about the content you provide me.

PS – these guys deserve to be noticed, it’s the cheap journalism that I hate.

Where is the real news?

This weeks ‘announcement’ from Sun and Google has got me thinking. Why is the IT industry so fixated with announcements? This announcement changes little, not because of its content but because announcements never change anything. Announcements simply indicate an intent t change something, and those changes are always incremental. Even if Sun and Google had announced a web based version of Office or whatever the big rumour was, it would still have been incremental, and for most people the increment would have been quite small. Within the industry we still like to foster this idea that we are radical and thrusting changing things overnight, but it just doesn’t work that way. Even the big things aren’t that big. Skype is big, in terms of numbers of people, but in terms of time used, is still very small for most people. Firefox is bog, in terms of numbers of downloads, but it’s still only a small percentage. RSS is big, but it’s about increments again. We have to start realising that we are not creating revolutions, we are creating incremental change, everywhere. Over time those increments build up to make significant changes, but a single announcement is only an increment.

It was while I was having these thoughts that the Read-Once DVD rumour/scam/hoax started. It kind of proved the point. More interested in hype than substance. Come on people, think about it, why would anyone want to buy a DVD that you can only read once, and how on earth could it be cheaper than ne that you can read more than once.

Here’s some real news for you. Software is changing every day – live with it. But the changes are incremental – live with it.

Count Your Blessings #26 – Laughter

I have a bit of a theory about stress. It’s completely unscientific but seems to work for me. The theory is this: the reason that stress is so harmful for us is because it stops us experiencing the healing power of laughing. I do know that there are scientific studies which show that laughter is good for us, linking it to stress is my unscientific extension.

I haven’t written a bless for a few weeks, because, well, not to put too fine a point on it, I’ve been stressed. Completely maxed out. For once this hasn’t really been a work issue, it’s been an outside-work. Those responsibilities just kept flowing in. One of the major ones has been a talk that I am doing at a men’s breakfast this Saturday, so I’m not completely out of it. The talk is prepared now, so at least the major pressure is off, until Saturday that is. When I am stressed I tend not to laugh. I get grumpy when I am stressed rather than giddy.

There have been a few moments over the last few weeks that have made me laugh though. I haven’t been completely grumpy.

This weekend I had a couple of days when everything I did took longer than expected. I don’t know whether you have days like that, or whether it’s a blessing that is reserved for me. I’m not saying that they took longer because I’m poor at estimating, but they took longer because the simple job turned into something much more complicated than normal. One of these things made me laugh though. I was setting-up the computer at church for the morning service and things weren’t going too well. I was already a bit stressed because PowerPoint had decided to destroy my presentation for the Men’s Breakfast and nothing was going right. Stress levels were building. I was starting to worry that I wouldn’t actually be ready for the start of church, which isn’t a good thing. Eventually, 2 minutes before we are due to start I get finished. Quick, I need the loo, just got enough time to go. Dash off; rush into the loos. Sit on the toilet, do the usual check to my right. Ahhhh, no loo roll. I only have 2 mins, I’m already stressed I can react in two ways, I can laugh or I can cry. The laughter just flows. I feel much better for a bit of a laugh, go off to find the spare loo roll and all is well.

Laughter is so important.

Sue and I have a group of friends with whom we love nothing better than to get together for a laugh. there is something about this group that generates situations where we all laugh. I only need to think of Dave with tears streaming down his face for my mouth to curl into a smile. Two of this number have been away on holiday, today we received a post-card, again I was laughing. I thought about typing some of it in here but I’m not sure that the joke would translate. It’s funny because of the person who sent it and their view on the world.

I don’t have a highly developed view of what heaven will be like, but I’m sure it will include laughter. In the Psalms it talks about God laughing and I’m sure it’s not a privilege that He will keep to himself.

Thinking Faster

Some great writing being produced over at Thinking Faster, a couple of tasters:

Teamwork Barriers

I’m concerned that we’re becoming even more productive individually and less and less productive in teams. One reason is the computing power we have at our fingertips. Most of us can create a financial plan, develop the powerpoint presentation and write up a proposal without speaking to anyone else or leaving our desks. With access to the internet, you too can be an instant expert on almost any subject without speaking to anyone in your company.

The unreasonable man

For all the processes, software applications, communication devices and modern office tools we’ve got, what does it actually take to move an idea forward? Is productivity driven by improved processes and methodologies, or are many decisions driven by a true believer who is willing to push any button to get what he wants?

I was thinking about this “nature vs nurture” type of question after reading a blog post of Shaw’s quote on progress.

“A reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Vista Vista

I try to keep my desk environment nice and tidy. I don’t see any point in having everything in front of you cluttering up your view. Today is a bit cluttered though. I have installed Vista on my Tablet and for the short term that means more than one device on my desk. And because I’m so used to a keyboard, I’m not using the pen interface to build it.

First impressions are very good. I don’t get the eye candy of glass (if I want the box to be usable) because the graphics card isn’t up to it.

Most interesting thing for me is the impact on end-user (me) productivity.

(Must work out which one of the kids it is that leaves so many pens on my desk)

IT Marketing Does it Again

I would hate to try and count the number of times when IT marketing has left my emotions completely messed up. I watched Dell’s new marketing campaign this morning and wasn’t sure whether to be angry, physically sick, throw something at the screen, say ‘what’, laugh at the irony of it all, sit in amazement that other companies also thought it was a good idea or to marvel at the fact that a modern IT company chose to use very old puppetry techniques.

http://www.delltechforce.com/

The great thing is that they are using ‘big iron’s’ servers to host the site; at least that’s who I assume that the dig it aimed at.

Stu talks about Notes and Workplace Roadmap

Stu has put together a post trying to summarise the rather complicated IBM roadmap for Notes/Domino and Workplace. It raises some good questions. But it doesn’t raise the one that probably concerns me the most.

Does anyone care?

Notes/Domino worked well as a business model when application delivery was client-server focussed. Now that it’s Internet/Browser focussed does anyone actually want to do any development that relies upon another set of infrastructure being available. You’d just do your development in a ‘pure’ Internet environment if you wanted to sell to the widest possible audience. If you strip away the development capabilities, what’s left? Well there is an email and calendaring tool, which the market isn’t moving towards, it’s moving away from.

That I think is the dilemma for IBM. How does it move people over to it’s development platform without loosing the email and calendaring piece. If you loose the email and calendaring piece then you are in great danger of loosing presence, and instant messaging, and then team collaboration, and on it goes.

Count Your Blessings #25 – The Smell of Autumn

I love the change of the seasons. This morning when I went out for a walk along the paths in the wood at the back of my house it smelt of Autumn. I’ve tried to think of ways of describing what I mean by that but the only way I can do it is to describe the pictures that are created in my head. I’m sure that Sue would be able to give it a description that would be suitable for any perfume, but I’m a man and we can’t even get our heads around the different types of colour (what is mauve anyway) so smells are a little out of my league.

So here are my pictures.

The smell of autumn makes me think of walking around Tarn Howes, taking in the infinite multitude of brown and gold. It makes me think of walking through small mountains of paper crisp leaves, kicking them into the air and watching them float their individual paths to the ground. I can see those same leaves swirling around, like thousands of tiny kites abandoned to the wind. I can hear the first crunch of frost under my feet. I can sense my face tightening in the glare of a cold crisp autumn sun, making me feel alive in a way that the warm sun never does. I can feel the smooth dark chocolate brown of a conker fresh out of its skin. I can see those deep red berries. I can taste those brambles and those apples warm, tangy and sugary hiding beneath a wonderful nutty crumble and covered in custard. I can see that deer revealed now that his cloak of vegetation has been removed. I can see the thousands of starlings swarming in a mass of black ready for departure to a warmer environment.

I don’t think I have a favourite season, I love the transitions between them.

There is a time for everything, a season for every activity under heaven.

A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest.

A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to tear down and a time to rebuild.

A time to cry and a time to laugh. A time to grieve and a time to dance.

A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones. A time to embrace and a time to turn away.

A time to search and a time to lose. A time to keep and a time to throw away.

A time to tear and a time to mend. A time to be quiet and a time to speak up.

A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3

Blog Succeed where Newsletters Fail

This is purely a personal perception which I have not had chance to investigate too much but it’s a view that may resonate with others.

I work for an organisation that has not yet embraced blogs internally, but does do quite a lot with newsletters. I rarely read these newsletters, and I know that others are similar. I take in far more information through blogs that I ever do through newsletters. So why is that?

Some of it, I am sure, is related to to a lack of concentration of my behalf. I have become the ultimate skim reader. If the title or the context don’t make we want to read – I won’t. Skim reading newsletters is not easy. They are normally created in a form that assumes that they will be printed off, this doesn’t facilitate skim reading. I tend to skim read because most of the time I don’t need to know a piece of information, it’s more important for me to know it exists and that I can get hold of it quickly. That’s where blogs have a huge advantage. In my reader I can see that thousands of bits of information exist, when I need them I can go and get them. I know that the information exists because I have skim read through. If something new and pertinent comes up I’ll read it there and then but normally I’m in skimming mode. Why should I waste my time reading something in detail?

Another reason is similar to this one, but subtly different. An individual blogs tend to deal (if they are done right) with a single subject. Newsletters tend to deal with a multitude of things. Finding the quality in all of the words is very difficult (and boring).

The final reason (for me) is that there is a sense of control with blogs which corporate newsletters don’t have. I have configured my reader to go and get information from this particular source, I am in control. Compare that to my normal attitude to newsletters – “oh no, what have communications set me now”. The ownership is completely different. Yes I know these communications people are trying to do me a favour, but it doesn’t feel like it.

So give me a feed any day, don’t bother sending me a newsletter, and definitely don’t give me another repository to look in.

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