Thursday, October 20, 2011
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Monday, October 17, 2011
Educause bound
I am heading out tomorrow for the Educause conference in Philadelphia. I am looking forward to picking up information in lot of different areas. The area that tops the list is Google Apps for Education and it looks like there will be lots of opportunities to gather information and talk to people who are ahead of us in implementing it.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Final list of vendors and sessions attended at Interop
Here's the final list that was emailed to me of exhibitors who scanned my badge and sessions that I attended. I know I visited way more than 43 booths, so I'm not sure what happened. The session list seems fairly accurate. Feel free to ask me about anything you see that peeks your interest.
| Exhibitor Booth Scans: | 43 |
|---|---|
| Sessions Attended: | 19 |
Exhibitor Booth Scans
Sessions/Activity Scans
|
Netflix Passes Piracy in U.S. Net Traffic
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/05/netflix-traffic/
Monday, May 16, 2011
Both sides of a cloud
Sunday, May 15, 2011
iPad wrap-up
I thought I should do a wrap-up post on how the iPad worked for the trip. To be brief, I would say it worked very well. I would not hesitate in taking one again. The combination of the iPad and the Bluetooth keyboard worked very well, especially when there was a table.
The battery life of the iPad was great and I never had to change the batteries in the keyboard. The lightness of my bag was also wonderful, especially at the end of the day. In short, all of the advantages I hoped for before I left were borne out.
The iPad was wonderful on the plane flights, which is something I hadn't though of. It worked well for blogging. The slides posted to my blog were done by downloading the presentation slides on the iPad, taking a screen shot of the one I wanted and then posting the resulting jpeg by sending it to a secret email address. The photos, by the way, all came from my iPhone and were posted using the same secret email address.
I'm having a hard time thinking of any time I wished I had a laptop. I had to think about different ways to do some things and I did download a couple of apps to do some things that I hadn't thought about ahead of time. My typing skills with the virtual keyboard did improve as there were many times that the bluetooth keyboard was not convenient. This post is being done with just the virtual keyboard.
Having the 3G iPad was important. There were a number of times when I didn't have wi-fi and even more times when the wi-fi was either very slow or not working at all. When that happened, I simply turned off the wi-fi an kept going. That said, I will say that having a wireless access point in my hotel room worked out nicely.
All in all, it was a great experience!
The battery life of the iPad was great and I never had to change the batteries in the keyboard. The lightness of my bag was also wonderful, especially at the end of the day. In short, all of the advantages I hoped for before I left were borne out.
The iPad was wonderful on the plane flights, which is something I hadn't though of. It worked well for blogging. The slides posted to my blog were done by downloading the presentation slides on the iPad, taking a screen shot of the one I wanted and then posting the resulting jpeg by sending it to a secret email address. The photos, by the way, all came from my iPhone and were posted using the same secret email address.
I'm having a hard time thinking of any time I wished I had a laptop. I had to think about different ways to do some things and I did download a couple of apps to do some things that I hadn't thought about ahead of time. My typing skills with the virtual keyboard did improve as there were many times that the bluetooth keyboard was not convenient. This post is being done with just the virtual keyboard.
Having the 3G iPad was important. There were a number of times when I didn't have wi-fi and even more times when the wi-fi was either very slow or not working at all. When that happened, I simply turned off the wi-fi an kept going. That said, I will say that having a wireless access point in my hotel room worked out nicely.
All in all, it was a great experience!
The benefits of attending a conference
It would be easy to say that conferences are not as useful as they once were, given the huge amount of information that is available on the web. All the web sites, online documents, webinars, etc. do provide a lot of useful information.
There is a difference though. That has become painfully obvious to me in attending Interop this week. I have so much in this past week, and it's information I wish I had known before I made some of the decisions that I have made over the last year or so.
Why is going to a conference so different? Let me tell you.
Face-to-face interaction with other attendees can be priceless. Just talking with other people while sitting around the lunch table to find out what they have tried and whether it worked or not. Finding out what they thought about a presentation. It's instant feedback on the worth of the information that is being presented to me. I don't get that with a webpage or a webinar.
Having time with no distractions to let complex topics percolate in your head is important. The complexity of IT is increasing at an exponential rate, so this time become even more important. Sitting in on 3 sessions listening to 10 or more presenters talk about the same basic topic from different perspectives leads to the "ah ha" moments to get a more fundamental understanding of a topic.
The other side of the coin is hearing presentations on a bunch of different topics and seeing how they work together together to create a paradigm shift in the industry. The biggest example from this conference was cloud computing and mobile computing. The two together create a whole new world in which it is quite conceivable that neither the client or the server are on your network. So what good does a firewall do you in that case?
Seeing and hearing someone speak provides a lot of subliminal information about a topic. Inflection and body language convey a lot of extra information that helps you understand how the person you are listening to feels about the information they are conveying to you. Do they really believe what they are saying, or is it just marketing? Does this person really know what they are talking about? Questions that are much easier to answer if you can see and hear them and interact with them.
As I said in the first paragraph, there is a lot of information available on the Internet. The problem is that it is too much information and there is very little filtering of the information that is out there. At a conference, there is a filtering process that provides sessions that someone who is expert in the area feel are worthwhile and are presented by experts in the field.
So here I am more than 3 days after the conference is over, and I'm still processing all the information that I was exposed to during the conference. It's information that will effect the planning and decisions I will make for years to come. Decisions that will involve spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of man-hours. Spending a few thousand going to a conference to help make sure that those decisions are good ones seems like a pretty good idea to me.
There is a difference though. That has become painfully obvious to me in attending Interop this week. I have so much in this past week, and it's information I wish I had known before I made some of the decisions that I have made over the last year or so.
Why is going to a conference so different? Let me tell you.
Face-to-face interaction with other attendees can be priceless. Just talking with other people while sitting around the lunch table to find out what they have tried and whether it worked or not. Finding out what they thought about a presentation. It's instant feedback on the worth of the information that is being presented to me. I don't get that with a webpage or a webinar.
Having time with no distractions to let complex topics percolate in your head is important. The complexity of IT is increasing at an exponential rate, so this time become even more important. Sitting in on 3 sessions listening to 10 or more presenters talk about the same basic topic from different perspectives leads to the "ah ha" moments to get a more fundamental understanding of a topic.
The other side of the coin is hearing presentations on a bunch of different topics and seeing how they work together together to create a paradigm shift in the industry. The biggest example from this conference was cloud computing and mobile computing. The two together create a whole new world in which it is quite conceivable that neither the client or the server are on your network. So what good does a firewall do you in that case?
Seeing and hearing someone speak provides a lot of subliminal information about a topic. Inflection and body language convey a lot of extra information that helps you understand how the person you are listening to feels about the information they are conveying to you. Do they really believe what they are saying, or is it just marketing? Does this person really know what they are talking about? Questions that are much easier to answer if you can see and hear them and interact with them.
As I said in the first paragraph, there is a lot of information available on the Internet. The problem is that it is too much information and there is very little filtering of the information that is out there. At a conference, there is a filtering process that provides sessions that someone who is expert in the area feel are worthwhile and are presented by experts in the field.
So here I am more than 3 days after the conference is over, and I'm still processing all the information that I was exposed to during the conference. It's information that will effect the planning and decisions I will make for years to come. Decisions that will involve spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of man-hours. Spending a few thousand going to a conference to help make sure that those decisions are good ones seems like a pretty good idea to me.
Getting our heads out of the sand and into the clouds
One of the underlying themes I've been sensing is that we have been spending way too much time on keeping existing systems going and not nearly enough time on looking to the future. It's the 80/20 rule that one of my blog posts talked about. I feel like, in some ways, we've had our heads in the sand for the last few years. We make changes to our infrastructure, but we don't spend a lot of time talking and planning for how the changes we make will effect our clients and what their needs are and will be.
At this conference, it's all about mobile devices and services in the cloud. We really need to take a hard look at our network design keeping in mind that both our clients and our services won't be on our physical network a lot of the time. I keep hearing terms like "fundamental shift in the industry" being thrown around. I know there is a lot of hype about this, but there are early adopters who are already there.
The cloud is more than just technology. It's about a change in the mindset for what we provide to our clients. It's about about providing services instead of hardware and software.
I see this in the frustration even other groups inside of IT express in trying to make their projects a reality. It's about being more agile. Several presenters talked about how corporate IT didn't even know how much other departments were just going out and using the software as a service offerings as islands, because they didn't want to wait for IT. Then IT is blind-sided when there is data stolen or something stops working and they didn't know anything about it. That's the challenge. How does IT provide solutions that are up to the standards needed by the corporation, but in a timely fashion.
We need to lead the charge, or we'll get run over by our clients.
At this conference, it's all about mobile devices and services in the cloud. We really need to take a hard look at our network design keeping in mind that both our clients and our services won't be on our physical network a lot of the time. I keep hearing terms like "fundamental shift in the industry" being thrown around. I know there is a lot of hype about this, but there are early adopters who are already there.
The cloud is more than just technology. It's about a change in the mindset for what we provide to our clients. It's about about providing services instead of hardware and software.
I see this in the frustration even other groups inside of IT express in trying to make their projects a reality. It's about being more agile. Several presenters talked about how corporate IT didn't even know how much other departments were just going out and using the software as a service offerings as islands, because they didn't want to wait for IT. Then IT is blind-sided when there is data stolen or something stops working and they didn't know anything about it. That's the challenge. How does IT provide solutions that are up to the standards needed by the corporation, but in a timely fashion.
We need to lead the charge, or we'll get run over by our clients.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)