I caught a peek at myself in the mirror at work yesterday and thought, what is the matter with my trousers?!? Something seemed wrong and I asked my co-worker, what is wrong here?  My co-worker laughed and laughed so I started laughing too, “No, really, tell me, what is the matter?”

My co-worker replied, “You have a new dog, you walk miles a day with him, don’t you?”

Me, “Well, yeah, he is a German Shepherd, he needs a lot of exercise!”

Co-worker, “Have you been having fun on those walks?”

Me, “Oh yeah, I listen to audio books, we run together. I feel great.”

Co-worker, “Welcome to a new body”

Did you miss me? I have missed blogging! Suffice it to say that I lost my way to such mundane things as raising a teenager who was offended when I mentioned her in a post (she doesn’t even remember telling me this now), nearly finalizing a divorce and health issues that have included a healthy dose of depression. That last item has been the fight of my life…for my life. So, here are some of the incredible people along the way that have been true highlights and have sustained me to get back here:

Family

My sisters, daughter and Terry and his daughters became extended family to me. Their affection is a healing balm.

My pets

Cassie & Sarge are endless sources of fun

And my dear friends who support me constantly

Maryam, Rob and so many others!

I am so lucky! Thank you for helping me find my voice again. And oh my goodness, I have at least 25,000 words to get out, so you know, brace yourself.

I am online and alive! I plan to lurk less on Twitter and post more as I dive deeper into SharePoint. This mosaic is just fun though!

Get your twitter mosaic here.

Just like gapingvoid, I have been stung also by that nasty site quechup.com. To quote Hugh:

If you’ve received an e-mail from them, on mine or anyone else’s behalf, please delete immediately.

I’m really sorry about that, Folks. Not to mention, mortified and embarrassed.

I am sure everyone has heard about Forbes report on the World’s most powerful women that was published today. It is of interest always to all working women how other women fare; one of the follow up articles pointed out how these women often use humor to assist them in breaking through barriers.

My favorite quotation came from Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of Britain and a leader on the 2004 list: “I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end,” she said. Indeed!

Oh my goodness, how is it that we forget keyboard shortcuts? They can make life so much easier than always mousing. F2 for renaming for example. Read on here: Keyboard shortcuts

 And in happier news! I start a fun new position in a couple of weeks and I can’t wait! Admittedly, I am one of those folks who gets all scared when starting a new assignment, so much to learn about a new environment. But this is a good kind of scared! Appreciate the support SO MUCH. Thank you.

The decision was made by the executive team at the tiny firm where I work to abandon the infrastructure and m0ve to 100% hosted services. Here are some of the ‘gotcha’s’ if you have an existing Active Directory infrastructure and you move to a hosted provider:

1) Don’t forget to export your old profile in Outlook to an archive file before you create your new profile. You will long to see that history in, oh, about five minutes after you see a shiny bright (but empty) new mailbox.

2) Your migrated calendar items will not allow you to edit them. Outlook (correctly) thinks you are a new user. You will have to destroy and recreate the item if you need to change it.

3) Your mobile phone profile must be recreated (same reason as above)

4) Shared resources should not have their items moved, rather, they should be recreated all together

Of course, it goes without saying that you should research your vendor thoroughly in advance to understand:

1) Support. I mean like, do you get to talk to a live person if you need it? The selected vendor in this example prefers that you do NOT call; rather, post your issue on the support site and wait for an answer. While this is expensive in terms of your time, with this particular vendor it proved valuable in the sense that the extremely poor advice they were giving was documented.

2) SLA’s. Yes, yes, everyone claims 99.999% uptime. But what recourse do you have when the provider posts a message on their website apologizing for Exchange 2007 being down, we are working with Microsoft now, check back later please?

3) What services are they actually providing? Using the vendor that my soon to be former employer chose as an example, while their website states things like, “standard 14 day deleted items retention for Exchange 2007 subscribers”, this translated to eight hour deleted item retention unless you ‘upgraded’ for a ‘nominal fee’.

Michael Osterman, a leading analyst in the messaging and collaboration space, I wish we could have retained you to help choose a vendor rather than the ‘Picked the top Google search vendor’ approach.

Technorati Tags: Corporate Life

PostSecret is one of the best ways to spend a Sunday morning in my humble opinion.

ENT news wrote this evening that “Some have even wondered if Microsoft’s various Update services have made service packs obsolete.”

I hope not!

Let me just state for the record now that there are instances when “hotfixes” cause more trouble than the issue itself. 85% of my user population of consultants are client facing and not getting their updates from me, rather, they use Automatic Updates. It can be a real challenge to straighten out issues when you have remote clients.

I try to provide the best support for my folks as possible and test everything that I can in advance including service packs. Inevitably, they are using specialized tools from large vendors like IBM and the like and I can let them know of any ‘gotchas’.

Microsoft, please don’t roll service packs into Automatic Updates.