Responsibilities, title, and focus

In keeping with my commitment to add some personality to my posts, and flesh-out details that might not be solely technical in nature, I wanted to start by providing some specifics about my current position.

I work for a technology company, and provide IT infrastructure and integration services in support of our core business. Our core business provides what I’ll generically refer to as custom application design servicing a niche market of enterprise customers.

Over time the IT needs of our core business have grown, and we’ve expanded our IT staff and competencies to support these evolving business needs. The result of this staff build-out has lead us to start offering IT services to SMB customers to fill the gaps between project work.

As far as titles go, the IT profession tends to have quite a bit of variation when it comes to titles and responsibilities. Technically, I’m a “Senior Systems Engineer, and Operations lead”. Practically, what this means is that I’m a Server Analyst and consultant who is responsible for anything and everything that might be related to “IT”, including our IT operations staff.

Key focus areas for me right now are expanding the technical aspects of our “managed services model” for the growing SMB customer base, while continuing to provide technical ownership and direction for the IT projects in our core business.

Needless to say, I’ve got a lot on my plate right now.

Why the blog you ask? Well, first and foremost to provide something interesting and useful to other sysadmins out there who might benefit from some of what I’m doing. But also because it forces me to do something that’s not entirely technical in nature, and that stands to improve my written communications.

Introduction and Random Musings

A little dry, eh? I know these first few postings have been more like documentation than the traditional blog fare. But right now, I’m trying to figure out what direction I should take with the blog, and what my focus should be. There’s a limit to how many times in one day that I can read different iterations of the exact the same story, so I don’t imagine anyone wants yet another mirror of what is already available in terms of news.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy the great stuff that’s coming out of places like blogs.msdn.com. It’s very interesting to be able to follow the individual teams and personalities… but at the same time, I need a break! After all, I know that WSUS was just released! Thanks for the thought, but hey - what I really want to know is… have you tested it? Have you deployed it into a production environment? Show me the screen-captures of your deployments! Did you run into any problems? Did you use SQL Server 2000? Why (or why not)… it’s these types of questions that I want to help answer.

I’m planning to round out my SSL Overview series this week. Hopefully at some point, it will help someone new to the process to grasp key concepts quickly, or to act as a quick-reference. But even if it doesn’t and no one besides me ever looks at it, having it on hand, and having forced myself to test and understand the process more fully will payoff down the road.