My Digital Life

I’ve just been reading over on Johann Kruse’s blog that Messenger for Mac 7 has been released.  I guess for most people the big news for most people will be the usual Live Messenger support, but if you’re an Enterprise IT guy like me its the Office Communication Server (OCS)support that’s interesting.

One of the challenges I’ve got at work at the moment is how best to integrate Macs into our (mostly) Windows environment.  Before we tackle the big problems we’re focusing on providing access to our basic services - email, file and IM. 

At the the moment we’re using Live Communication Server rather than OCS, but hopefully we’ll be moving to OCS over the next year or so.  One of the big drivers for that migration is OCS’s multi-party audio and video conferencing.  Having a Mac client that supports this is a huge bonus.

Maybe it’s time I got myself a Mac of my own.

Working for a company that does significant amounts of design work, being a ‘Microsoft house’ can cause our users some headaches.  Although the design guys all love their mac’s, as an IT group traditionally it’s been hard for us support them and integrate them into the rest of our environment.  There are plenty of aspects to this problem and it’s something I’ll be writing about more over the coming months.  For now though, lets just say its an area that we know we can do better in.

It was with great interest then that I read this post over on RoughlyDrafted about IBM’s own testing and pilot project for Mac’s.  I imagine that IBM’s drivers are much the same our own, end user demand being weighed against a business driver for IT cheaper IT services - and hence an standardised environment.  Not something you’d currently want - or be able - to do with Apple, multi-platform has to be the way forward.

The article is perhaps a little over-zealous, there are huge challenges in providing multi-platform IS services and still being cost effective, but I’ll be watching this with interest.  I think I’ll be calling in my IBM account guys for a chat soon.

Anyone else out there do similar work or running both platform in a big way?

Back in the day I used to look after big desktop deployments both here at Atkins and a few other places.  Managing large numbers of desktops is always a problem.  There’s no doubt that managed desktops are A Good Thing(TM), but the tools available to do the job were always a bit harsh on either the end users or the IT guys. 

Whilst Group Policy is great, you almost always needed other scripts and tools to get the complete result you wanted.  Whether those were included in the image or applied at logon it didn’t really matter, they were a pain to manage.  Group Policy also completely enforces the settings, there is no way to set the default value, but allow the users to edit the setting if they wished.  Once its set, that’s it for Joe User.

The new Group Policy Preferences functionality allows you to configure mapped drives, deploy files, setup shortcuts, quick launch buttons etc, manage ODBC sources, IE settings, all kinds of stuff.  It can also filter the settings on a per setting basis, no need to have new policies for each filter like GPO.  Plus the range of criteria available for those filters is huge.

There’s too much detail to go into here, but take a look at this screencast over at Technet Edge to see some examples.  It’s good stuff and will take a lot of work out of the more detailed config that enterprise managed desktops require.

Seeing as I’m involved in getting a new Data Centre at the moment this post over on ZDnet could my eye.  Looks like HP is to target a ‘data centre as a service’ product at enterprise customers. 

I’ve heard bits about this for a few years now - HP account managers will bore you silly with stories of renting computing time to Shrek - but this is the first I’ve heard about an actual product.  It sounds like there are four favours of service on offer initially:

1. A compute intensive service for number crunching applications (the Shrek example!)
2. A SAP 6.0 optimised service
3. An Exchange optimised service
4. A more generic Windows and Unix application server service

From what’s described it looks like a decent start, it’ll be interesting to see whether they start offering additional specific configurations.  Something for SharePoint would probably be a good start.  As it takes off within bigger companies more people will start grappling with the infrastructure required to run SharePoint in a big way and look for service solutions.

This is my problem for the next few weeks…

S+S and the other software and services initiatives from Google et al may well take away a fair chunk of the work needed to manage an effective IS service.  If we can do that we can devote our efforts away from the day-to-day ops and into making a difference elsewhere.  Sure there will still be challenges, but hopefully most of the operational overhead will be focused on service management and commercials than day-to-day technical design and admin.  So…  If I’m an enterprise customer planning my IS architecture for my business over the next few years what should I be thinking about?

The first thing that comes to mind is the cloud where all these services will live…  Where is it, and how do I get to it?  How do my users authenticate to it?  How is my information secured between the cloud and desktop?  How do my customers feel about having their data in a cloud somewhere in Redmond or Mountain View?  Might I be part of the cloud for my customers? 

The software side shouldn’t too much of a problem (famous last words!)… getting software to people we can do, but the more I can move that into the cloud the happier I’ll be!