http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/inetpub/kevinremde/KROmniture.htmWe IT Pro-focused Technical Evangelists are often asked, “Hey.. Where can I find the download to try out such-and-such software?” And after I find out what they actually meant by “such-and-such”, I usually just tell them essentially to “google it on Bing”. But that’s not sufficient. So what I am doing instead, on this page, … Continue reading Where is that evaluation download?
Finally.. the day we’ve been waiting for. Office 365 has been released to the web. The beta is over. The horses are out of the gate. Office 365 is available for purchase. Here’s how their home page introduces it: “It's familiar Microsoft Office collaboration and productivity tools delivered through the cloud. Everyone can work together … Continue reading Breaking News: Office 365 is HERE!
This is really cool. The Windows Azure Team Blog just announced the availability of the new Pricing Calculator for Windows Azure. Check out the team blog post, or click this screenshot to jump right in:
If you’re living under a rock (or have better things to do) you may have missed the fact that all this month (April 2011) I’ve been creating one post each day having something to do with “the cloud”.“Yeah. I saw that.”And today, as a grand finale, I thought I’d list out titles and link to … Continue reading The Cloudy Summary (“Cloudy April” – Part 30)
System Center Advisor is: “That’s very pretty, Kevin. But what does it all mean?”Here’s the idea. You have servers, infrastructure roles (like Active Directory) and server applications that are configured and running. But are they configured and running properly? “Yes, I think so.”But do you KNOW?“No.”Exactly. And of course Microsoft has tools such as various Best … Continue reading Cloudy Server Configuration Advice (“Cloudy April” – Part 29)
As you may recall from part 16 (Hyper-V Cloud), one key aspect of what we define as “a cloud” has to do with it providing some level of “self-service”. You provide a portal or some other method of requesting and then being granted IT resources. “Yeah, I’d love to let my users do that, Kevin.”Of … Continue reading Serve Yourself (“Cloudy April” – Part 28)
System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 is a powerful virtualization management tool. It does a great job of organizing and managing your virtualization hosts, clusters, virtual machines, and libraries of resources (virtual hard disks, saved machines, machine templates, profiles for hardware and operating systems, etc.) And it does this for the management of … Continue reading What’s new in SCVMM 2012 – (“Cloudy April” – Part 27)
As you may recall from Part 6 (PaaS), Windows Azure is Microsoft’s implementation of Platform-as-a-Service. In a nutshell, it means that you build your application, configure your data, and load it up into “the cloud”, where it can be easily scaled and managed on top of our operating-system-in-the-cloud. And that’s great if you have or … Continue reading The Role of the VM Role Role (“Cloudy April” – Part 26)
Let me ask you something… Are you like many IT Pros I talk to Windows Azure about, who think, “Oh.. that’s cool. But it’s for developers. How am I going to manage it?”“Yeah.. that’s what I’m thinking! It’s like you can read my mind!”Exactly. And I’ve heard it a lot from the IT Pros I’ve … Continue reading Manage Your Windows Azure Cloud (“Cloudy April” – Part 25)
Are you a developer?“No.”Well, perhaps you’re not.. but someone reading this blog is. And they may have seen my articles about Windows Azure or the Windows Azure Appliance and may be wondering how exactly they’re going to get started building applications for it. “Okay.. for the sake of argument, let’s say I am a developer. … Continue reading Building Cloudy Apps (“Cloudy April” – Part 24)
Absolutely Full of I.T. 