MMS 2006 - third Keynote

Ron Markezich - our CIO

Proactive Management Strategies at Microsoft IT

Basically Ron's presentation was about we use our own stuff.  We have to 'dogfood' everything (i.e. run our business on beta software - we don't release products until our customers say it's OK & Ron's organisation get the last say).

He covered off some statistics about our environment (which seems to change every time I see the same/similar slide):  340,000 PCs, 7,200 production servers, 3 data centres (goal is 1), 189,000 SharePoint sites, 99.99% availability of Exchange, 3,000,000 internal emails per day, 10,000,000 inbound emails per day (9,000,000 of which are spam that is filtered at the gateway), 46,000,000 remote connections per month.

He put what he does into the frame of IOI, which basically helps you move from a reactive environment to a proactive one.  Then he covered off the three tenants of IT (People, Process & Technology).

People are either Users or IT employees.  For Users, his goals are to empower them, offer them seamless IT, help them be compliant and to make them cool.  For his staff, his goals are to empower them, to make them a global workforce, help them provide remote management and to give them a mission rather than a job.

Process is all about MOF (we get assesed every year).  His mantra is that what gets measured gets managed and he's putting a lot of effort info configuration management.

Technology is all about Standardisation, Centralisation and Elimination.

We got to see a couple of demos of how IT use the MOM 2005 SLA Scorecard to monitor our Exchange environment (there'll be one for SQL in September).  We also got to see how we use the Desired Configuration Monitoring to keep servers from 'drifting' from their desired state.  The demo was running the desired state rules against our SharePoint infrastructure (supposedly for the first time) - the results were pretty good - as in there was a lot of stuff wrong (so maybe it really was live).

Ron closed off by sharing what he's looking forwart to in the not-too-distant future:

Security (NAP, Strong User Authentication, Bitlocker Drive Encryption, User Account Control, Role Based Security and Secure Web Publishing) - which for me means that I'll no longer be able to bring 'rouge' PCs into the office, I'll have to start using my SmartCard to logon to the network, my laptop's disk will be encrypted, I'll no longer be an admin on my own PCs and I'll be able to access LOB applications from the Internet without having to VPN in.

Managability (ERP for IT, Desktop Instrumentation, Email Lifecycle Management, Mobile Device Management and Virtualisation of both Storage and Compute) - which again, being selfish, means to me that I'll be getting a 2Gb mailbox (up from my current 200Mb) - but I'll not be allowed to use PSTs anymore.  And my mobile phone will start to be managed by IT (I'll have to remove all the games I've got on it).

Must go - Dave.

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