2012 was, simply stated, a year that kicked my butt.  When I wasn't struggling professionally, I was struggling personally.  Health issues, culminating in a diagnosis of Type II diabetes, and the passing of my father soon after Thanksgiving marked my biggest struggles.  I apologize to those of you who are normally on my Christmas ...

(Last updated on 01/15/2013) With such a large platform, Windows Azure has a lot of moving parts. We’ve done our best to keep the interface as simple as possible, while giving you the most control and visibility we can. However, as with most Microsoft products, there are multiple ways to do something – and I’ve always found that ...

Operations Manager Management Pack Development KitI just recently told you about some cool new things happening with System Center - before I stumbled across this tidbit.  Hey, if I could, I'd go back in time and add this entry to the previous one --- yeah, and totally NOT play the stock market to make a fortune through time travel. ...

I hope you've taken a few minutes to peek in on the nice refresh that's happened on a bunch of the System Center engineering blogs.  Good things are afoot there.  And if you haven't checked in, avail yourself of these great resources:System Center: Service ManagerSystem Center: Operations ManagerSystem Center: Virtual Machine ...

Microsoft is a big company – and of course we have a lot of IT infrastructure that we have to manage. It might surprise you to learn that we have an IT group, just like at your company. We have a networking team, a server hardware team, software teams, DBA’s, the whole bit. In fact, we have more Mac computers than just about anyone (other than ...