An interesting session for a couple of reasons. First, hearing about how exisiting customers are working around product limitations is a great way to find out the 'real' product limitations. Second, there was a discussion about 'best practice' application packaging and deployment which is as relevant to our current environment as it is to Microsoft System Center customers.
The slides are pretty good so I won't go into too much detail here, but some things we should think about are Desired Configuration Management (DCM) and a consistent hardware decommissioning process. Our process and organisation actually map fairly well to best practice with the noticeable exception of our insistence on 'bundling' the applications into monolithic updates, but it seems to me this stems from a lack of automation at the site end, so we should carefully consider what can be done to reduce the burden on our local infrastructure teams.
Showing posts with label Documentation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Documentation. Show all posts
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Content as a Service (CaaS)
Way behind on my blogging so I'll keep this one relatively brief
My first session of the week was all about the documentation that MS provides for the System Center suite. Pretty dry stuff, but some interesting nuggets could be found
"SuperFlows" offer a much more interactive way of understanding how the product should/could work, and is being integrated with the troubleshooting tools - If this type of documentation takes off then I see a lot of benefit for GTS style solutions here. Also nice is the ability to extract the documentation (e.g. visio docs) and annotate it with our own specific configuration information (server names etc).
see http://www.myITforum.com/absolutevc/?v=834 for more info and an interview with Mr. SuperFlow
I guess the only problem I see here is that this kind of in-depth documentation takes time, and we'll increasingly see product functionality released with limited (or no) documentation. I guess we may need to seek out the developer blogs more and more just to understand how to use products we've bought! The cynic in me is thinking about how this drives consultancy revenue
My first session of the week was all about the documentation that MS provides for the System Center suite. Pretty dry stuff, but some interesting nuggets could be found
"SuperFlows" offer a much more interactive way of understanding how the product should/could work, and is being integrated with the troubleshooting tools - If this type of documentation takes off then I see a lot of benefit for GTS style solutions here. Also nice is the ability to extract the documentation (e.g. visio docs) and annotate it with our own specific configuration information (server names etc).
see http://www.myITforum.com/absolutevc/?v=834 for more info and an interview with Mr. SuperFlow
I guess the only problem I see here is that this kind of in-depth documentation takes time, and we'll increasingly see product functionality released with limited (or no) documentation. I guess we may need to seek out the developer blogs more and more just to understand how to use products we've bought! The cynic in me is thinking about how this drives consultancy revenue
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