Jason's Blog

A couple of months ago I set up an inbox rule to send the notification mails from my website monitoring service direct to my mail client’s deleted items folder.  From the alerts it was obvious that the www.WITPro.ca website was offline and not responding. Of course I needed a rule in place to keep my mobile device from buzzing every 15 minutes, and I guess there could have been other ways to solve that particular problem.

The system that powered our public website was a shared system; the server issue also affected some other Canadian IT Pro and/or Developer groups (who will remain unnamed).  While the outage was inconvenient, it didn’t represent a mission critical or catastrophic loss – the group has had infrastructure problems in the past as is common on shoestring IT budgets, but in this case it wasn’t really an important item that needed immediate resolution.  The vendor supplying our website services did a change, the change affected our service, and unfortunately, without direct contract or engagement with provider Support, resolution wasn’t very prompt.  It was my one and only negative experience with the entire setup.

Fast forward to last weekend, on the first of March, I set up an Office 365 account for the group to use for this purpose, and within an hour or so, the web services were restored to SharePoint Online, along with migration (but it’s not perfect)!

It will take a while to get our group calendar function back online.  SharePoint and public websites don’t behave as I would like but from a reliability perspective, we’re a long way ahead of where we used to be folks! 

So we’re back online! Drop by www.witpro.ca for a look at the site, and check out the www.witpro.ca/blog page for event information and other info.  If you have info about an event coming up in the IT Pro community let us know (email addy is on our contact-us page).  Updated RSS and Feedburner links this week. 

If you’d like to help out the Winnipeg IT Professionals group with some web content or contributions in design your input would be really appreciated!

​Microsoft presents a Server 2012 Deep Dive camp this week in Winnipeg!  It’s happening at the Microsoft offices on March 7, 2013, it is free to attend, and trainers are coming in to deliver content from Toronto.

The announcement: http://blogs.technet.com/b/cdnitmanagers/archive/2013/01/29/more-it-camps-windows-server-2012-and-windows-8.aspx

Registration Link: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032541812&culture=en-CA

Hope to see you there!

I’ve been asked a lot about WITPro events recently… when’s the next event? … what are the topics we’re bringing to the group next?  … these are the most common questions I hear.  And in discussions with folks, there has been universal agreement that Hyper-V and Lync are the hot topics that IT pros in this community are interested in!

I don’t have any official announcements to make yet, but I can tell you that we’re investing in a Microsoft program that will bring a Hyper-V lab day 6 hour session (actually, two days!  one weekend event, and a weekday event) to Winnipeg, and we are also working with Winnipeg sponsors to have a Lync focused presentation at an evening event in the near future!

For those who want to make sure that they get the notifications about our upcoming events, register to receive the WITPro newsletter here.

Cheers,

Jason