I did the relatively quick flight to Charlotte on Friday afternoon, arriving just before 2 pm, grabbed lunch to go from a bbq place in the food court and waited for the hotel shuttle. About a 20 minute wait, not much more than the time it would have taken to go through the rental car process. Off to the Hampton Inn, which was right off the interstate, and in an area with more hotels in one area than almost any place I’ve seen…except Orlando!

Took time to check email, then headed off to the nearby Hyatt where I was to meet the other speakers for the trip to the speaker party. I was really early and had time to chat with Denny Cherry about his recent SAN training (good stuff), and then finally we departed for the party about 5:15 along with his wife – turns out all the over speakers went direct or had not arrived yet, so there was plenty of room.

Next stop was the SQLSentry office and most all the speakers were there, so we spent at least an hour just chatting before going to the actual party. Great dinner, I was between Allen White and Geoff Hiten, and we had a lot of fun. Finally finished up about 10 pm and I rode back with Allen, we usually only see each other once a year so we enjoyed the chance to talk in person more than usual!

Saturday morning I was up early and took the hotel shuttle over to the Microsoft office (about 1/2 mile) and only a few people there when I arrived about 7:10 or so. They finally let us in and it was just a bit disorganized, sponsors not sure where to set up, but that worked itself out and by 7:40 all was flowing smoothly. Blythe Morrow was there so I sat with her for a while to talk about the logistics phase of the event.

The keynote was scheduled for 8:15, but with a steady stream of attendees still arriving we delayed the start, probably to about 8:40. As I mentioned last week the keynote was largely unrehearsed, starting off with an intro from Peter Shire (SQL Sentry/Charlotte Chapter Leader/SQLSaturday leader), then Steve Jones with a quick story about the formation of the SQLSaturday concept (he didn’t think it would work!), and then I ran through six or seven slides, talking about how and why we started and our early goals, some lessons learned, and where we hope it goes under the guidance of PASS. Rushabh Mehta finished up with just a few quick words, focusing on the message that the main goal for PASS right now was to keep things running and not to break anything. We finished up with a ceremonial turning over of the key from Steve & I to Rushabh, a styrofoam key about 3 feet long. Good theater I guess!

My presentation wasn’t until 10:15, so I wandered some, shared some more thoughts with Blythe, and had some more coffee. Finally found my room, signs were mildly confusing, track 5 was in room 4. One interesting part of the day was that because this is a large MS office, they had a lot of people on hand to open what would be otherwise locked doors and make sure attendees stayed in designated areas. Took a lot of people – I’d guess 10-15 between MS and their on site security – kudos to them for providing that level of support.

I did my presentation without any problems to a crowd of about 25, good questions, and from the brief survey I did all were having a good day. For most it was their first SQLSaturday and it seemed to be meeting or exceeding their expectations – always good!

Then back over to the cafeteria area, chatted with David Waugh from Confio, then spent some time with Kevin Kline, that morphed into lunch (sandwiches and chips), and then a couple hours with Blythe where others came and went (Patrick Leblanc, Jessica Moss, Steve Jones, etc), mostly talking about SQLSaturday.

I left a little earlier than planned, around 4 pm, riding to the airport with Steve and lucking out to get an earlier flight than the original 8 pm, leaving us just enough time for a quick dinner before the flights left.

Attendance was somewhere around 220 and it looked to me like all went well. Congrats to the SQLSaturday #33 team for a great event!

I’m flying up Friday afternoon for SQLSaturday #33. Looking forward to the trip, Charlotte is a great area and I know a lot of the speakers presenting this time, so the Friday night get together should be a lot of fun. This will be more of a working trip than usual, Blythe Morrow from PASS HQ is also attending and I’ll be spending most of Fri and Sat trying to transfer as much knowledge as I can about how and why we do things at SQLSaturday, alternatives, pain points, and where we can do better.

I’m also doing part of the keynote with Steve Jones and Rushabh Mehta, talking about the history of SQLSaturday so far and where I hope it goes over the next couple years. Not often I do a keynote and this isn’t a presentation I’ll be able to practice much, but that’s offset by the small amount of time – about 10 minutes – and it being a topic I know pretty well, so we’ll hope it works out.

Time to update you again on all things PASS. First, I haven’t made a lot of progress on the speaker bureau. Rushabh supports the plan to build what we need and I’ve sent an outline to the Board for comment (one received so far), and I’m waiting on results of the survey that went out to Chapters to make sure we’re getting input from our community leaders. Then we have to figure out who will do the actual work – internal, external, volunteers, all of the above. Have to admit I’m tempted to do just build v1 myself, if only to feel like I’ve accomplished something!

Thought about that some more after the first draft, and it points out to me visibly why we (PASS) often make such slow progress. I get busy at a work and lose a few days, email Rushabh (or whoever) and the same thing there. Add a request for something to HQ and maybe it adds a day or two. Then a con call to make sure we have shared understanding. And then trying to get some sort of general buy in from external stakeholders (and/or those interested) and you’ve got a recipe for slow. Same thing happens to most businesses. How do you make sure time and money is spent wisely, but still go fast? I don’t have a magic answer to that, but I think one way is to compress the decision cycle, which means putting the idea people in the same room for with the decision people to nail down a plan, and time boxing the next steps. Not without its own risks, but given a choice of failing quick or slow, I’ll go for quick.

How do we do that? Say another board member poses a plan that will cost $50k. Do I accept that we had the right people involved and say that worst case is we waste $50k? Or make them go back through more diligence?

Not fully though through, but I like the idea of grants. Allocate money, put the project up in board strokes, and take the chance that someone can make it happen. As I said, definitely needs more thought.

If you recall from last time I mentioned a proposal to hire more staff. This went up for a vote and it passed, a budget exception of about $120,000, or to put it different terms, we have to pull in another 175 Summit attendees to pay for it. I voted against it, for a few reasons:

• We pared our budget to the bone to get through the year, taking away almost every bit of discretionary spending. I think we could have considered putting some of that money back before hiring staff.
• I don’t feel like we’ve done a good enough analysis on how we spend our time. As I’ve written previously, efficiency is complex. The question I don’t think we answered was whether we (the Board) feel like we’re spending an appropriate amount of time in certain areas. I asked this back in January, and essentially got no answer because we don’t have the data.

Voting against it was not easy. We need full time staff to get things done, and I want our staff to work reasonable hours. We need to add support for things like SQLSaturday. Part of the increase is for a second IT person. We’ve never been good at technology, and if we can use the second person to implement our own Summit speaker management system, it should be self funding. That makes sense to go that far, but I’m far from convinced that we should have someone on permanent staff as a developer, mainly because we don’t have someone with IT management skills to manage them. In the end I voted no because it felt like a rushed decision.

For those of you that are considering running for the Board, this is a good example – consider how you want to participate and how well you take losing an argument!

Changing topics, we also voted on what to do about moving the Summit to the East Coast. The results of the survey we went out last month were interesting, and showed a mix of responses – obviously everyone would prefer it close to them, but there was a definite interest in moving the event around. I’ve asked for the data to be posted on sqlpass.org, so far we haven’t managed that, hopefully soon. I also requested that we release the full detail records scrubbed of identifying data, but it was determined that doing so was too complicated! I don’t know that we would have arrived at a different decision, but given that we are data people, I thought it would be nice to get some smart people looking at it, and maybe see if there were interesting follow up questions to be asked.

Going in to the call I really expected to move the Summit back to the East Coast every 2nd or 3rd year. Part of it was what model did we want to be? One model was Oracle World, held every year in San Franscisco. My preferred model is the Super Bowl, where we move from city to city each year, but with a bias towards Seattle to acknowledge our close ties with Microsoft. For those of you who have been with PASS for a while, we used to move around quite a bit. Chicago, Denver, Orlando, and Dallas, and I really liked that model.

Note: I’ve revised this post to remove the results of the vote. By convention PASS announces the location of the next Summit during the current year Summit.

Changing topics once more, I’ve been working on the transfer of SQLSaturday to PASS. It’s gone slower than I hoped on the technology side, but right now we should be done by March 15th. Blythe is really taking ownership of the community side, including heading to Charlotte for the upcoming SQLSaturday there so she can watch, and we’ll be putting a lot of time into transferring knowledge. She’s been joining me on the ‘get acquainted’ calls we do with those interested in hosting an event and that’s been an effective way to transfer knowledge too.

The biggest hurdle we’ve hit so far is handling money – or how to do it that is. In the past we collected money on behalf of events at no charge, and then sent them the money when requested. Good stuff, except sending the money required a social security number or tax id, making it a taxable event. We advised event leaders to hold back some of the money to cover the tax burden. Not a great system, but at least we had the ability to take credit card payments and hold cash securely until needed.

PASS is a not for profit, we do an annual audit, and one of the things that didn’t get adequate attention during the diligence was the money side of things. I didn’t see it as risk because our CPA was fine with our process, but it’s taking some time to iron out on the PASS side. Not cause for panic, but it’s definitely been painful to get it figured out. I expect that to be resolved shortly, and hoping we end up with a better solution than we had before.

While I didn’t expect that particular problem, I always expected pain at some point, that’s the nature of any acquisition (even when you get it for free!). I feel like so far we’re doing an ok job of moving things forward and I still remain confident that we can move SQLSaturday forward in a way completely inline with it’s grass roots philosophy.

Next time I’ll take about the upcoming election!

Final schedule for the Charlotte event and it is impressive – 9 tracks, 54 sessions!

The title of this post illustrates my own ambiguity on the topic. It’s fair and necessary to let others know about your accomplishments (marketing), but it’s easy to descend into ‘hey look at me’ (promotion). Not sure how well I can show the distinction. Self marketing is an essential skill though, and it is worth the effort to build a technique that fits you.

The starting point for this is that many good employees feel under appreciated, under paid, and are often passed over for interesting assignments and promotions. Why? Their boss just doesn’t know what they have done for the company.

How can that be you ask?

Most managers are busy, and they have an expectation that when a task is assigned it will get done. They may see you working late or through lunch (and appreciate it), but even with a small team it’s easy to lose track of who is working hard and effectively versus those that just work hard, and then again those that just spend a lot of hours at the office.

Now you may think that isn’t fair. Perhaps not, but it is the reality. That leaves you with a fork in the road:

• Work hard and do things that need to be done without being asked, and hope someone notices
• Do the above, but make sure you track it and share it with your manager at some point.

Assuming that you are taking the latter option, how do you do it? I’ve seen three main strategies:

• Log your accomplishments, times you came in on a weekend, extra hours, great ideas, etc, and share them at review time (note that sounds a lot like a private blog!). Sound technique, the only downside is that you only get to alter perception once a year.
• Do somewhat the same, but in less formal fashion – perhaps dropping in to see the boss once a week to ‘check-in’ and casually mention any extra effort. This often goes along the lines of ‘I had a heckuva time getting up Saturday morning for stuff with the kids after leaving here at 2 am’. Or you can be more direct, as fits you.
• Letting everyone know that you did something extra – lunch with colleagues, team meetings, chance encounters with others

You can combine those as you want, and many use all three. You might see those as pushy, or even devious, but it all comes down to how you deliver it AND how it’s perceived. This often depends on the person you’re working for – do they get and appreciate the value of you sharing your accomplishments, or do they see it as sucking up or worse?

As a manager, I like to hear about times when an employee has done something well, because I don’t always know and I want to make sure to keep the rankings of who delivers up to date in my head. At the same time, as soon as it starts to feel like they over emphasizing every line of code they did, I start to apply a filter, which comes close to zeroing out the value. The same if I see it as taking credit for work or ideas that weren’t really theirs (and that does happen – especially if the ‘other guy’ isn’t speaking up).

As a manager, I want the insight, within these rules:

• Never exaggerate
• If all I hear is good stuff, then you’ve moved into self serving. Share some missteps too.
• Never take credit for work done by others
• Plus points for making sure I know about good work done by someone else on the team
• Don’t try to manipulate me, but do learn what I value and what I don’t

Maybe you start to see that how you deliver is as important as what you deliver, and for those that are just giving up on the idea that the boss is all knowing, the first attempts are usually painful and awkward. Remember that it’s to be expected. Just keep working on it until you find a method that works (and remember to adjust when you get a new boss).

It’s amazing to me how much difference being good at this can make. Many years ago I worked for a company with many offices, most staffed about the same and doing about the same work for their area. There was a manager at a nearby office that was seen as being very, very good, but I had seen him and my own manager work, and in my view my boss was as good, if not better. Why was he perceived as so much better, when in fact the tasks were either done or not done? It came down to two things:

• He was co-located with the next level manager, giving him plenty of ‘hallway opportunities’ to share that he had just completed a task a couple days ahead of schedule, etc, etc
• He made it a point to make sure people knew when he did anything ahead of schedule

Said differently, he was the only one talking, so the assumption was that no one else was going anything exciting or trying to excel. That was far from the case, but most of those others dismissed it as ‘politics’ – and that was my own view as well. Looking back now I see that he was just playing the game better than the rest (which is mildly negative, but it is a competition), and that the people he worked for weren’t very good managers or they would have done more to compensate.

Some managers will work hard at seeing accomplishments (good ones), and many think (different ones) that if you don’t get it and do your own marketing that you truly don’t get it, and that in itself moves you down the list of good to great employees.

Changing focus some, as a reader/consumer of content I tend to look at it exactly the same way as I would as a manager. If every post and tweet is a ‘look what I did’, I will probably filter you out. On the other hand, if you take time to post about stuff that is just interesting and not about you, I read that and appreciate your effort (and by implication, your knowledge and skill that let you write it) and then I’ll also read with interest/patience about things you do that you want to share.

For example, yesterday I posted some notes from the South Florida Code Camp. Part of that was to share that I did a couple presentations – demonstrating competence and participation. But instead of just writing that, I tried to share more thoughts about the trip. Arguably that just means more about me, but for me blogging is first person. I could write it as more of a report, but I think that is less interesting to most people, and definitely less fun to write. Think about that for a minute – was it useful, did you find it interesting to hear about the trip, or did it just smack of shameless self promotion?

I prefer a low key approach, others tend to more aggressive (blatant?), and it’s interesting to me that people often accept a style of marketing from some people that they wouldn’t from others, in effect adjusting for the personality of the one doing the messaging. I can’t say that one is right and the other is wrong, but can say that the more conservative strategy is to err on the side of caution. Hard to undo the damage if you cross that line (which you can’t see).

Have you found a way to effectively market yourself at work?   Or seen a technique that really worked well? Or a technique that just seemed over the top?

Andrew Karcher and Marlon Ribunal are heading up SQLSaturday #44 scheduled for April 24, 2010 at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, CA. It’s definitely an aggressive schedule, but they have the date locked in and a good plan. This is our first SQLSaturday in California and the first one set up since the transfer of SQLSaturday to PASS. Call for speakers is now open.

Drove down with the family Friday afternoon, not much traffic and a smooth trip. Checked into the Residence Inn just down the street from the event, caught up on some email, and then walked across 2 blocks of not yet build hotel space to La Carreta, a local Cuban restaurant and the site of the speaker gathering.

Started the speaker party at 5:30 pm and it ran until almost 9 pm, with about 20-25 people there at any one time. Lots of interesting conversations, including one about a book swap they are trying out at the event; bring a book, swap it for any other book, or buy one for a dollar with the proceeds going toward needs in Haiti. All the books were donated by attendees or members of the local user group. Interesting idea if it works. Dinner was very good (strips of filet mignon in a sauce with rice), for dessert I had bread pudding (nice to have something different), but just couldn’t quite manage the Cuban coffee – too much for me, that’s intense coffee.

Saturday I arrived on site about 9 am after breakfast at the hotel, did a quick check in at the speaker room and then off to do  my first presentation on statistics. On the way I had someone stop me and introduce himself, turned out last year he had attended this same presentation and it had opened a lot of doors to what was possible with SQL, which in turn resulted in some serious growth in skills. Not often this happens (to me at least), and it made my day. Nice to know that the investment of time and money to drive down to Miramar was making a difference.

The statistics presentation went well, and as always at a developer focus event (38 devs, 2 DBA’s in the room) I’m reminded of their thirst for more information about SQL. Very common for them to have no DBA/sql person on staff, so they want to learn things that will help them, or help them understand why things happen at least. Tons of good questions.

Immediately after the stats presentation I had to change rooms to do my talk on social and not so social networking. Smaller crowd for this one, only about 10, but good conversation and about the usual adoption pattern – most on LinkedIn, few on Twitter, one blogger. Finished up by doing a drawing for a autographed copy of How to Start a Conversation and Make Friends.

Then it was time for lunch, the standard pizza, soda, and salad. Caught up with a few friends at lunch, had a few other conversations, and then headed up to see Scott Kline do a presentation on  SQL Azure. About 20 attendees. A lot of questions about backup/restore and service level agreements. Lots of questions about does this work or not? Lots of restrictions, some that make more sense than other to me. Pricing is confusing. Seemed to me that most were taken aback by the number of limitations and that will hurt adoption.

Next went to the data mining presentation, but the speaker didn’t make it, so offered to do Q&A for the hour, and had about 40 people stay for that. Good conversation, and we should try at all events to have room for Q&A. Note that for whatever reason 2 of 6 speakers on the SQL track didn’t show, someone from the audience filled in on the other missing one. Disappointing, but whether they were truly lost or had cancelled in advance I don’t know. Still, a shame to disappoint attendees.

Just before leaving checked on the book swap, and there had 15 true swaps, but $150 in cash – at $1/per book!

Finally left for the long, rainy ride home. Good day and good event, thanks for Dave Noderer and team for a really nice event.

Saw the announcement by accident while doing some browsing on Amazon. Thought I’d try it out just to see. Download and install easy enough, connected to Amazon via the app and downloaded a free book – Sherlock Holmes. Paging works by hitting the space bar or moving the track bar, and the text is very readable. The downside? You can read about 2 sentences on the display, so reading the book will require a lot of paging. In a pinch it would work, and probably work better if it was article length rather than book length, but I can’t see me paying for books to read on this particular phone.

I’ve written about a few ‘worst practices’ over the years to call attention to some things that are bad (or just annoy me), but for the most part they aren’t things that really cause me a lot of pain. So, thinking ahead to April 1st, it has me wondering – how would you really drive your DBA mad for a day?

Here’s my suggestion; you know that users hate uneven performance, when it’s fast at 9 am and really slow at 10 am. One way to fix that is to just force it to always run slow, capture the execution time and if less than 10 seconds or whatever, just do a WAITFOR DELAY to make up the difference.

Got your attention?

I’m thinking of things that go beyond well meaning developers/users who don’t get the quirks of SQL Server, the ones that invent brand new wheels to replace the ones that already work. Technical solutions that seem really cool, until you realize just what they’ve done.

Post your examples!

Just finished re-reading Orbit ($15 or less at Amazon) after picking it up for a $1 at Books a Million on a trip, had read it just after it was first released. The main character is Kip Dawson who wins a free trip into Orbit, and winds up alone and doomed when the pilot is killed – leaving him alone to figure things out because the radio doesn’t work any longer either and only a few days of oxygen.

He panics and gives up, then realizes that he may as well do something with his last few days.  He starts writing the story of his life, good, bad, and ugly, on a computer on the ship. Unknown to him, it’s being sent back to Earth, and it doesn’t take long before everyone is reading his story. He does this for a couple days, then erases it all, and tries to write what he wishes his life would have been.

A little contrived maybe, but if you’re a blogger (or read blogs), I think you may get the power that something like that might have. All the defenses down, and in doing so people realize that they aren’t so very different – all the same hopes, fears, compromises, and frustrations.

It’s a good read, and it might make you think about where you’re at in life and where you want to be. Let me know what you think of it.

I’m driving down tomorrow for the sixth annual South Florida Code Camp. This will be my third time attending and I’m doing two presentations this time, and as usually SQLShare is sponsoring the speaker event on Friday night. It’s a huge event, typically about 600 attendees, and well worth the three hour drive from Orlando for me. Copy of the most recent schedule below.

About a week ago I wrote Part 1, and got some interesting feedback (which I appreciate). Today I want to try to think about some of those comments and try to evolve the idea some. I want to defend my ideas a little, but not sink into defensiveness. I definitely expect my own thinking to change as I go, but hoping maybe I get yours to change some too!

Overall what I heard was a few different challenges to look at:

• Opposition to requiring speakers at the Summit to take a year off here and there (and note, I have no say in that – just my idea)
• How to qualify who gets help in terms of funding to speak
• Whether there is really a speaker shortage

On the first one about speakers at the Summit, my first thought was that I should have just left that out. We haven’t done badly so far and so far there have been few complaints, so why bring it up? Why not just focus on new speakers and worry about the rest later?

Tempting.

But I like to think long term, and I think the problem will arrive within 2-3 years that will require the program committee to do something. Last year it was 400 abstracts that lead to perhaps a 100 speakers. What do we do when we get 1000 abstracts from 250 speakers, all who have done at least a chapter meeting and a SQLSaturday? If six people want to talk about XML in SQL, how do we pick the best one? Is it the speaker we had last year on the same topic?

Yes, we can do scoring, and in most cases that leads to people speaking that have already been at the Summit. They are a known quantity and certainly should get some karma for having done it and succeeded. That in turn can easily lead to stagnation, as those on the island get to stay on the island.

Now if you’re on the bottom trying to work your way up, my plan probably sounds good! But if you’ve invested the sweat to finally make it to the top, the idea of sitting out a year doesn’t sound good at all – dues have been paid, time to enjoy the fruits of the labor. I get that. I deliberately didn’t submit a session last year, the first time since 2000. Right thing for me to do, but definitely missed having the chance to speak. Undecided about this year so far.

So…I don’t care so much about how we get there, whether it’s scoring, volunteering to just be an attendee for a year, or something else – as long as it’s not waiting on someone to retire to open up a slot for someone new (but not a newbie speaker). I want to see tons of friendly competition, some new faces, and to make sure that if you’re willing to invest the time, you’re not locked out of the top row because you weren’t a first mover (or old enough to have been one).

For now I’m hoping that you’ll just think about it, and as we get closer to that point, we’ll see what happens. What’s best for the community?

Next week I’ll continue with thoughts on the other two points (and maybe more), and we’ll see if I get clobbered for not giving up on this part of it!

If you’ve been around SQL for any length of time it’s hard not to have heard of Brad McGehee, the blogger DBA behind Aloha DBA. Brad ran SQL-Server-Performance.com for many years and now works for Red Gate, spending a lot more time on the road than I’d want to going to events and user group meetings.

He’s been a fairly consistent blogger, and lately he’s come to terms with maintenance plans, realizing that maybe they aren’t entirely evil after all. Seriously, he has some good stuff, usually grounded in things that happen to him or that he observes first hand.

I’m in the early stages of a book on managing and I’m starting to look for situations that might trigger ideas on areas I want to cover, and for situations that serve as good what would you do (WWYD) scenarios for potential managers. Scenarios give you a chance to practice without pain, and a chance to start to see the world through the eyes of manager. I’d also say that a scenario is a story with the answer withheld!

The Intro

Joe SQL has been in the hospital for some performance tuning. A couple days into his stay he is moved to a different room on a different floor. Upon arrival at the new room he notes that the door has a sticker across it (ala a crime scene) indicating the room has been cleaned for the next patient – kinda cool! Upon entering the room is  noticeably warm and the air conditioner doesn’t seem to be working, so his significant other (Mrs. SQL) asks the assigned nurse to see if can be fixed, as Joe is used to server room temperatures.. Mrs. SQL leaves to backup the databases.

Phase Two

Several hours later Mrs. SQL returns and the room is still warm, no news from the nurse. Calls and asks again for someone to fix it, or to see if another room is available. Hard to tell if the nurse is interested.

Almost There

An hour passes and no action and no update, so on the way out the Mrs SQL visits the executive office of the hospital and is told that the problem will be corrected quickly. Within 10 minutes:

• Very senior nurse visits Joe to let him know that they are working on another room ready and on getting the AC in his current room fixed. Seems motivated to get it fixed, mildly irritated about the call from the big office downstairs
• Building maintenance dude arrives, spends 5 minutes investigating and announces it is fixed, turns out the cold water supply to it had been turned off
• Senior nurse returns to say an alternate room is available. Joe can move now, or wait half an hour to see if the current room cools down enough. Joes figures one cube is as good as the next, elects to delay the move and hope the AC works.

The Conclusion

Senior nurse returns in about 45 minutes and the room is cool enough, seems mildly happy to have it resolved and to get back to business.

Most us look at this and call it bad customer service. Sure! But that’s the view from the customer. What do we see as a manager? If we looked at it from the perspective of each of the people on the hospital staff, who did well and who did not? As managers we often look at these in terms of blame – whose fault was it? I’m not advocating that approach, but it’s important to identify the failure point and reason to see if it’s possible to prevent a repeat of the problem, or of bad handling of a problem.

I know you don’t have all the details, it’s often that way in real life. But there’s enough there to see what you think about the role of a manager and how you think it should be executed. Tell me who did well and who didn’t, and why. Who’s the villain here?

This happened earlier in the year, finally getting around to writing some notes on it – you can read more here. The numbers I found were that they were to save about $230k a year, mainly by reducing the need for two administrators.

I’ve used Outlook and Exchange for years, and about all I can say is that it was better than Lotus Notes. That’s not a knock, it works well enough and I’m used to it (the Outlook part). The admin side has always seemed (saying this with no Exchange experience) complicated, and when you combine virus scanning, email archiving, and all the rest I can see that it might keep someone busy. And of course if it takes one person, you need a backup person for illness and vacation times.

Saving $230k a year is definitely a nice win in the current economy. But what about in a better economy? Is this one of the things you do during lean times like eating at  home instead of going out to dinner? Or is it really a lifestyle change that just makes sense regardless of whether business is booming (or tax dollars are flowing).

As long as it all works, it’s a smart move. But…it’s when it doesn’t work that you start to sweat. It’s the same ‘in the cloud’ discussion we’ve been having for a while, what happens when the cloud fails? When you own the hardware and pay the team you have a sense of control, and can at least see what is going on. If it happens to a hosted solution you’re betting that because they are big, they’ve invested in triple redundancy and have a robust DR plan in place. Even if they tell you that though, you still worry about the rainy day.

I have no reason to think Google can’t provide the uptime, but if something happens, what happens to the city government? Shut down for a day? Running a local copy using Gears (and is that a good plan if so?).

I’d be curious if the Google price was fair, or just the winning bid to get the business. If they really can provide the same services at less than half the cost, I think that’s a challenge for Exchange.

I think they made the best choice they could and I’m fine with that, definitely interesting to watch to see what evolves.

Ran across this in Make Magazine, http://www.bigkidbike.com/, these are totally custom bikes, with names like Bigger Wheel, Lizard, and Kitten. They’ve got a short video of each on the site, worth looking at!

My friend Jack posted a nice aggregate of comments so far about the transfer of SQLSaturday to PASS, and added his own thoughts – worth reading.

http://wiseman-wiseguy.blogspot.com/2010/02/sqlsaturday-acquired-by-pass-reactions.html

Found The Adversity Index while browsing and thought I’d share. It’s interesting to see the economic trends and I’ll let you dig in to see what you think. I was more interesting in thinking about it from a reporting perspective. It’s not enough to capture data, you have to do something with it, and doing something with it isn’t always easy. Here they make a good try at taking a lot of underlying data and presenting it a way that is more useful than a red/yellow/green indicator, and not as mind numbing as endless rows of data.

Perhaps I’m the optimist, but I think the economy is slowly growing again and it will be interesting to revisit this later in the year.

Joe Healy is doing a four hour Azure training event on March 6, 2010 in Orlando, details and free registration at http://www.devfish.net/fullblogitemview.aspx?blogid=728. I’m already booked for that day, will go if plans change. I like the four hour single topic format, lets you see something fairly deep, but not so long that you start to lose interest.

I’m in Chicago for a couple days next week, flying in on Sunday. Anyone in the area available for dinner Sunday night?