As a Consultant

This years Microsoft Ignite conference was all about transforming your business with technology. Here is a techy summary for business-minds. Going forward, IT-Pros must prepare to answer both tricky business questions, and leverage new tools to meet business demands. I imagine questions like these:   What are the needs of our business? How can we empower our users to apply the cloud to gain competitive advantages? How can we innovate with greater agility and optimize our IT resources? How can we migrate from the traditional model where IT is just a cost-center, to a lean/mean machine where IT is the engine that powers our business strategy with increased earnings? A model of the traditional business case We live in a traditional world with traditional problems. Simplified a business consists of a few silos: Internal users Your customers Your suppliers and partners The remainder of the universe All of these are connected directly and indirectly throu...

I have created another Powershell module. This time it is about Console Menus you can use to ease the usage for members of your oranization. It is available on GitHub and published to the PowershellGallery . It is called cliMenu. Puppies This is a Controller module. It uses Write-Host to create a Menu in the console. Some of you may recall that using Write-Host is bad practice. Controller scripts and modules are the exception to this rule. In addition with WMF5 Write-Host writes to the Information stream in Powershell, so it really does not matter anymore. Design goal I have seen to many crappy menus that is a mixture of controller script and business logic. It is in essence a wild west out there, hence my ultimate goal is to create something that makes it as easy as possible to create a menu and change the way it looks. Make it easy to build Menus and change them Make it as "declarative" as possible Menus The module supports multiple Men...

I have created yet another GitHub repro " PesterOperationTest ". Feels like I do this every week, however that is not the case. But why? The purpose of this repository is to collect Pester Unit tests for your infrastructure. Anything that is mission critical for you business deserves a tests that validates the correct configuration. It will make you sleep like a baby and stop worrying when you implement a change in your environment if you tests pass. This will only become as good as the contribution you make to the repository. I would love to do all the work myself, however there is not enough time in the world. Think of it like you are helping yourself and at the same time a lot of other people could benefit from the test you create. How? My original thought was to organize this in folders, one for each vendor and with subfolders for each products and/or feature. The scripts will be published to the Powershell Gallery for easy and convenient access for everyone...

Happy new year!  Ages since I blogged about DSC and found a little topic that might be something others also are wondering about. I reached out to Chris Hunt ( @ LogicalDiagram ) on twitter. If I understand him correctly, he was wondering about capturing the verbose stream during a system invoked (Consistency Scheduled task) check. DSC has a scheduled task called Consistency (full Task Schedule path is \Microsoft\Windows\Desired State Configuration) which launch every 30 minutes. This task does the equivalent of running the Start-DSCconfiguration cmdlet and making sure that the configuration does not drift from the desired state. Did this a long time ago, however I had forgotten how I could do it. The scheduled task As you already probably guessed, this is just a task that executes an powershell command using the cmdet Invoke-CIMmethod with some parameters: The task starts an hidden powershell window and executes the following command: I have copied the comman...

This is part 2 of a multi post around topics discussed in Part1 . Next up is Hybrid Cloud and how it will impact us and why it is the way of the future. Hybrid cloud Microsoft changed their focus a couple of years ago, from the primary solution provider for enterprise software running in datacenters to a Mobile/Cloud first strategy. Their bet was that the cloud would be more important and that the economic growth would be created in the emerging cloud market. Needless to say that it looks like their bet is paying of tenfold. Azure Over the last year there have been a significant number of announcements that connect Azure to your datacenter, thus enabling enterprise to utilize cloud resources with enterprise On-Prem datasources or local hybrid runbook workers. It should not come as any surprise that this trend is accelerating in preparation for the next big shift in hybrid technology, that is expected to be released with Windows Server 2016 – Microsoft Azure Stack. Before we ...

After spending last week at the IT Dev Connections conference, I thought I should share some insight. This was the first time I attended the conference, and I must admit it was a nice substitute for Microsoft Ignite which I was not able to attend. Key take away from the sessions and content presented is: Automation and integration – do more work with less effort Hybrid cloud is here to stay Azure is removing dependencies (System Center) ASR OnPrem presence is still substantial Containers – Docker and Docker for Windows IT Dev Connections – A great conference IT Dev Connections First off, this was held in a great place (Las Vegas). The venue (Aria) was perfect with nice auditoriums (not to big) and very good internet connection (Aruba rules). By my estimates, there were around 1500 participants (I do not have an exact figure). Compared to Ignite, which is around 20.000, it is more personal than those big conferences. They also managed to mix the agenda with a nice blen...