One day left in 2004, and I'm very excitingly looking forward to 2005. I've talked to many people lately about that, and not everybody is sharing my enthusiasm. Here are the reasons (in no specific order) why I'm very sure that 2005 will be a great year for the IT:
- Year 2000 is history: In my eyes we had a lot of issues with the year 2000: first of all, companies tended to invest every 3-4 years in new computers (they are written of by the tax and applications needed more performance anyways) and they also invested in new infrastructures when exchanging a lot of computers. The Y2k broke that cycle, they had to invest in new computers and infrastructure to meet the Y2k requirements and they didn't need to invest a lot of money in those areas for the next couple years. Additional some "institutes" announced in 99 that in 2000 the IT-Companies will make up to 10% more money than in 99 and some fools bought this xxx. So there were investments made in 99 to prepare for the flood of work in 2000 - which wasn't coming and those companies had major issues.
- I have seen in the last 12 month that companies are lurking out again to ask how to make their infrastructures more modern and how to perform better. They are interested in improvements again - last time I've seen this was in 99 (and early 2000 before they realized the market going down).
- There are still companies migrating to Windows Server 2003 and realizing what great OS platform it provides. We'll have to migrate those in 2005 too.
- There are more and more companies who have the potential in their infrastructure to use everything a .NET-Platform provides. Web Services are great - and the companies have the potential to use them (they are using current OSs with the .NET Framework) but many haven't done that yet.
- Security: IT-Security is in it's baby-shoes. More and more people start to be concerned and understand what IT-Security is about. There are a lot of interesting solutions out there, and I'm sure there will be a lot of security-projects in 2005.
- Windows Server 2003 SP1 and R2 are both due next year and provide additional features.
- Directory Services, administrative roles, administrative processes: Many unused opportunities for a lot of companies I've seen - let's use those potentials in 2005 too.
I don't think I'm too unrealistic, I agree that not every point will be true with every company, but I'm very sure that we'll still have a lot of work and many interesting projects. Feedback is welcome.
So Happy New Year to everyone!
I was asked yesterday to jump in to deliver a WebCast for TechNet on Thursday. There is no german material available yet, and the US PPTs I received were for a slightly off-topic event, so I'm working like crazy to get things done and deliver a great WebCast with interesting demos on Thursday. If you understand german and you are interested in the topic, join in:
TechNet: Integration von Active Directory in einer DNS Infrastruktur
I'll be delivering another WebCast about troubleshooting and recovering Active Directory for TechNet in January. Stay tuned.
So after my last blog Reflections of Trainings I went to Hanover to deliver a two-day class on Windows Server 2003. I was just asked to take over that Training one week earlier and unfortunately I wasn't able to travel on the day prior to the training. So I had to get up at 3am to catch my flight.
I got in to the location of the training at 8am, class was supposed to start at 10. The staff that was in charge setting up the classroom equipment did a good job, everything was set up and the images were installed. Good so far? Not! I figured that one machine was looking like one of the machines at the end of the last class. After figuring out what password the student was using I checked the machine which was supposed to be a plain Windows Server 2003 in a workgroup and set to DHCP. But instead it was a DC which was member of a forest of 6 other domains, set to static IP, DNS and multiple other components were configured. I checked some other computers, and they were all the same, even same network-name and IP. And the other five domains of the forest (as well as DNS and everything else) didn't exist. Then I checked the baseimage which is used to set up the computers. Somehow it was cleanly overwritten by the image of one of the machines of the last class, and so it got duplicated to eleven machines.
OK - I had less than two hours to clean up the mess, and no "good" base image left to reinstall (this process is fairly automated using RIS and WinPE - if there is a base image I could use - but there wasn't any). Not to mention that we have a Windows XP VMWare-Image on each machine as well. So I used dcpromo /forceremoval to get rid of AD (had to force, the forest root and other trusted domains were not there anymore), deinstalled the additional windows components, cleaned up the network interfaces, changed the primary network settings, verified services (especially NTFRS) and cleaned up additional files on every machine. Since I had issues with networking (same network-name and IP) I copied NewSid from SysInternals on a memory stick and used it to change SID and network name. I was finished with the whole procedure just a few minutes before 10, and we were able to start the class right in time. And for some reasons we had less issues during the class as last time where we had minor issues with the machines.
The class was great - very interested students, and we covered a lot of DNS, AD, and other features of Windows Server 2003. And all of the labs just worked great - no issues there. I had a great time, and from the feedback I received the students had a great experience as well. We had loads of interesting scenarious and discussions.
On the evening of the first class I took one of the machines we didn't use during the day (2 students were missing) and cleaned up the rest: reinstalled VMWare since it wasn't happy, cleaned up the eventlog (got rid of the additional eventlogs which are just on a DC) and rechecked services. Then I syspreped, uploaded and tested the new image: there is a new class with the same hardware and in the same classroom so I didn't want the trainer of the next week running into the same issue. And actually I was pretty happy about the kick fixing the machines in the morning, the adrenaline woke me up, I didn't remember that I was up since 3am and I wasn't feeling sleepy until late at night (actually I was in the newsgroups that night until 1am).
So sorry Training-God - I didn't intend to upset you - but thanks for that great class after that kick/warning.