and now for a change of pace

It has been a while friends, hasn't it?
Much has changed since I last wrote - I have taken a Senior Unified Communications Engineer position in San Francisco at a little company that is responsible for the great sound and video in yoru music, movies and television. They also branched out into conference phones a while back and announced a video system add on at Enterprise Connect 2018.

The last two months have been filled with a major deployment here at work while also trying to figure out how to exist in two places. You see, since my family and I have been established in the Tacoma area and with a daughter in high school, I don't want to move everyone down to the most expensive area of the left coast just yet. So I am splitting my time about 80% in the bay and then home for the rest. It is not easy, but it is becoming more familiar.

So about the work.....
   We are a major partner with BlueJeans so I jumped into the deep end of the pool right away to move all of our conference phones straight onto a new BlueJeans software and connect all of our Cisco VCS-based video infrastructure to BlueJeans and their Relay services that enable One Button To Join on almost any standards-based-endpoint.
   The Cisco infrastructure and endpoints are in need of some TLC as well so I've started learning and exploring their configurations. It's fun to do this part because sometimes there are creative things you discover but more often I learn so much by wondering why someone did something. Manual phone books in TMS for example - I will never understand how that is a good idea!
   The cowboy in me wants to fix all the things right away but I am measuring myself because My philosophy has been throughout this blog to document all the things and leave things so the next person can pick up where you left off.

Leaving things....
    With a long story made short, I did not leave everything as I wanted at my former place of work. There simply was not time and as the sole person knowing a technology, as much as I tried to share info I was never sure if that information was received.
    I think IT Organizations should place greater emphasis on some repository of information. It doesn't have to be pretty, but that helps. One place where all passwords are stored and one place where people should keep notes about the things they do. This isn't tickets or change control... let it be free-form open notepads if that works, but start somewhere.
    At my new place, we use combinations of Sharepoint for communication outside our group, Confluence and Box (and Box Notes) for internal things and even some SmartSheets. Then a common but hard to manage online password storage tool. These seem to work but I think part of that is a constant push to keep things off your computer and to share info. Frankly, the less I keep on my computer the better but that same practice makes it easier to share data with those that need it.


I will try to expand on these more and talk about my experience with BlueJeans (short take: it is nice) in the coming days. Now that I have my own little room I should have more time to myself, but I'm also going to start on a Cisco CyberOps course next month.

Meetings sucked but they don't have to anymore!

Today I attended a seminar about the modern meeting. Thank you to Logitech who sponsored the seminar, and also to Microsoft and Pexip who presented, and finally to the guest speaker, Dave Michels, who gave an excellent talk which i will borrow from and expand upon below. These are my words and ideas, but Dave reinforced them and made me want to write a little about them here.

Let's reflect on a simple truth - meetings suck.

They are an anachronism from a time of TPS reports and heavily regimented hierarchical structures incompatible with the modern American organization.

Do you come out of a weekly 60 minute status/team meeting and feel 120 minutes older?
     I know I do...

Meetings must die.
     Long live the meeting!

Just to get started, here are my recommendations for meetings:

• Never host or goto a meeting without a clear agenda or purpose
• Include the agenda in the meeting invitation and relevant documents with the meeting (or even better - links to them)
• Never schedule a meeting for something that can be handled in email or IM
• Remember that status reports and project updates should be a part of a project management system and not a meeting
• Schedule meetings for WAY less than an hour - think 15, 30 but never more than 45 minutes
• Ask yourself, "do we NEED this meeting/time?" - remember this is probably time that everyone can be more productive doing their jobs
• Ending early isn't "giving you back your time," it's just a good idea
• If you don't need to be there, then you shouldn't have the meeting
• Meeting time isn't social or complaint time so a leader should direct the conversation so the agenda/purpose of the meeting can be completed efficiently and quickly (wrap business up before the social sessions)

These simple things are a first step in making meetings better.  Notice that they also discourage meetings. I intend to preach this idea far and wide because "meetings" are evolving; the act of consciously devoting cycles to stopping work and talking about your work has been componentized and redistributed in function by a number of different tools. Decades of thought have gone into this but the changes have come very quickly and are remain is a huge state of flux as the competitive markets see who wins.

What is changing these meetings? 

In the IT world a dozen or so years of Project Management, ITIL, and many other methodologies have standardized business practices. When we all work the same way, or at least have an understanding of how we should work towards a goal, we don't need to meet as often to figure out how we will wing our way through the next week. Standardization helps!    With this, we have many tools to track projects, assign tasks, and fiddle with all kinda of levers that traditionally we had meetings for. Just look at email - it killed the memo and has been leveraged to avoid meetings for forty years now! Many other areas have seen similar standardization and tools come into regular usage and we can always use them to reduce wasted meeting time.

Video and voice conferencing has become pervasive in the workplace and in our everyday lives. We've tied these into our phone systems and added messaging and made them all work from everywhere. This rapidly changing technology is nearly commoditized such that everyone everywhere can communicate as if they were in an old-fashioned meeting but in a short ad-hoc impromptu way. This can avoid the interruptive nature of a scheduled meeting yet still allow the face to face productive benefits than single model communications cannot.

Think about communications in the different models we might use: written < verbal < documents < visual. Each model provides more information and therefore more context than the previous but also requires more attention. Retention also increases with each as well.

The coming revolution might lie in what Dave referred to as "Work Stream Apps." I like that name as it appropriately describes what Slack, Cisco Spark, Microsoft Teams and similar can do. Think  about those models I just described; each was completely separate not long ago. Talking to someone on a phone required a very separate set of infrastructure than sending them a document but how often did you have to do both at the same time? A work stream app allows you to multitask your communication (or meeting) such that textual messages exist in the same space as the documents they reference and those involved can start a voice call about the topic instantly without leaving the same app, or even add in video participants. 

When we consider Work Stream Applications, the traditional meeting does not need to exist. We have distilled it down into a concentrate that fits better into the way we work. When a team or functional group is working on something from diversa locations and times, they can keep each other up to date without ever having interrupted their work. This isn't even an EOD handover - it's an active ongoing conversation (ok, a never ending meeting). When there is a situation that the keyboard/finger combo turns to head/desk, you can push a button to start using your words OR gesticulate a little. 

As I said, these ideas are in flux right now as the pioneers see the big guns crowding the market with their different take. Everything will change in the next few years. It is possible that "work stream apps" become too monolithic and are rejected by users. It is hard to tell for certain, but having seen how componentized these things are I am confident in saying that if you are in Collaboration, Telecommunications, Unified Communications or Messaging and you are not paying attention then you are behind the ball.

Meetings? Are ya with me?

The power of Social Media and Collaboration

I was asked last week about "social media" and work and I have been thinking about it a lot since then.

Twitter, blogging, chat groups and community message boards are definitely a very powerful tool, even more so in some of the more specialized fields like collaboration, voice, telepresence and UC. I am active in attending what user groups I can, but the online social communities really give me the feeling that I am not alone in this technology.

Some of the first user groups I ever attended were the Seattle chapter of the Avaya Users Group - it's one of the largest in the country so I was lucky to experience it. There is the natural chance to commiserate with people who handle the same stuff everyday, and the opportunity to learn form their experiences. But organizing these groups is difficult and takes a different type of leadership.

I make sure to attend the Skype Users Groups here - they are usually hosted by Microsoft and run by members and sponsored by companies and vendors with a keen interest in informing and engaging with their customers. I always learn good things - a few weeks ago we had a dive into Microsoft Teams (I came away impressed).

Social Media - that is Twitter, blogs, online communities, ongoing chats and the like - really fills that gap. It keeps me from feeling like I am the only one in the world working on this stuff. I get ideas from other, keep up to date with news, but more importantly I can put out my thoughts so they organize more easily. I'm not obsessive about my social activities and I probably overshare. If I occasionally sound like an idiot then hopefully someone calls me on it.  But really it has helped me grow and so I love it.

Please share your opinions and experiences! Has being social helped you? Where do you keep social?

Toilets, Lightbulbs and TelePresence

My primary job is managing the Cisco TelePresence environment but it is never that simple. I think more than any other IT field, we have to work with other non-IT departments and deal with things that are not traditional IT all the time. When things break at work people are going to point at IT or at facilities. If the sink doesn't run, they know who to call and usually call IT for anything else that even remotely smells of technology.

Of course I'm always amazed at the technology behind a flushable toilet and it is astounding how much "technology" is involved with lighting these days.

So when you go into a conference room and push the button to turn the light on you expect the light turns on. When it doesn't you push it again. If it still doesn't work, you pretty much leave and find another room, right? But when you walk in the room and push a button to turn on a video system and ......      do I need to go on?

The truth is after a century we instinctively know there is a relation between the physical utilities like a toilet and a light and "Facilities" but even after a quarter century of use the line is blurred with "technology." Turn it off and then back on works too well for things we do but has no equivalent in anything else. When the blender doesn't work and you unplug it then plug it back it it isn't to "initialize" the blender it is to confirm you plugged it in in the first place. Then you might check another plug but that is to see if maybe the outlet is dead.

Keep pushing that button to power on the TV... just like the elevator button makes the elevator get there faster when you push it more ;)

But really, the things people look to us for help with might be simple for us but so much friction and apprehension is instilled in people that when something doesn't immediately react, doesn't react at all or just goes plain bonkers we don't always know what to do.

We as IT and technology people can always do more and do better to explain and assist.  Edison and Tesla went on big road shows and conducted grand public displays so the public could understand that the little light bulb was going to turn on and should replace their cherished whale oil lamp. The genius inventor of the toilet had a harder time demonstrating so but thankfully that work made our lives less shitty.

So what am I doing about this all?

Instructions. For now.

Getting Started instructions

When you tap the button on the main screen of a Cisco Touch Panel, you get some basic instructions. This screen is explaining the controls on the wall and I give some other helpful this. I'm trying to keep it short and simple. This is only on the main home panel so nothing in here should be needed during a meeting since it it is not nearly as discoverable during a call.

AV Controls help

No matter where you are on the Cisco Touch Panel, there is a little help button in the upper right of the screen (it's a lightbulb here but in real life it's a question mark).
I am using these panels to give the most basic of instructions to users for how to use the controls on the wall to turn screens on or off, select the different modes of the room and change volume levels.

VTC Controls help

While I find the Cisco Touch to be really simple, some people wanted more help. Again, I kept it simple and just the basics.

HELP!

After reviewing feedback and looking at support tickets I added some of the top issues here and most importantly how to get more help. A single unified service desk to call when they have issues. There are ways I could even add a button to call them, but if the system is broken then that is not a call they can make, right?

This was pretty simple to do. I utilized the Room Integration tools for Cisco endpoints. Ideally they could interface with the butt things on the wall for AV control but that is not an option yet with all of our audio video equipment. So they are just text fields  that I built in the Cisco provided tool and uploaded to every endpoint.

Hopefully they will reduce calls and let people use the rooms faster and easier.

As tie goes on, I will improve these. I will have training and maybe I'll record it. But really I'm going to try to remember that no matter how simple and easy I think it is, It still isn't that magic lever that makes it all go down the drain.

Did I forget about the lab??

Golly no! I just haven't written much lately what with life and all and things work related. But my free Office365 licenses are running up soon so I better migrate to a less Microsoft world.

First and Last thoughts on O365

Look, Microsoft is the defacto standard for many reasons and there is little to fault with this stuff. Microsoft certainly did have it's 70's Detroit era products (Vista and Millennium for example), but brought it back strongly with XP and the associated Office suite. Their back office and server products took off about then and continued to accelerate. 

Take all rough to manage server voodoo, plop it up into the cloud then give it an attractive price - you've got something magic that should be hard for any small or medium business to resist. Seriously, At $20/month per head you get something whole IT orgs normally maintain. 

OK, I am not going to get any money trying to sell this so I'll move onto what i know more. and that's Skype4B and the collaboration tools provided. The hardest part about my trial and Skype is not in the configuration. It wasn't in the testing. No, everything went so incredibly easy! 

Without going into the not-gory detail review, after signing up, I had to insert a string into my DNS records for nosaturn.com to prove it's my domain and then follow the instructions to update the SRV records for Skype federation. I also had to setup some email redirection but again, everything was simple and I was up and running in a couple hours at most. Read Starting a business (or setting up an IT Department)  where I cover it more but that was about the size of it.

Back to the hardest part - why shouldn't everyone use Skype4B then? If you don't laugh after reading that then just do it and be very happy with great and easy to manage complete authentication, email, messaging, internal webpage, file sharing, and so much more IT organization that Microsoft is selling for a pretty amazing price. For a few extra bucks they will even let you call regular old phone numbers and accept incoming phone calls.

Office365 and Skype for Business are a bad choice

With that extreme statement I plant the flag down and boldly declare something that is actually pretty true. You see for every reason this O365 business is wonderful, the actual use might have different needs or objectives in mind. While O365 is amazingly flexible, it simply isn't everything everyone always needs. Every IT org and the software they use varies a little and so do their needs whether it is legacy choices or whatever. 

I could dive deep on the Skype4B is cheating with SIP bandwagon or i could leave it at it takes work for Skype4B to talk to things that are not Skype4B. There is good about that but having a background in voice and networking makes me see Skype4B as an interesting product but not a real telecommunications system. 

While VoIP and WebRTC are very different from their analog and TDM forbearers, you can get down in them and see their evolution. Skype4B grew out of a media streaming toy tossed into Windows 95 back in the days of dial up modems. Use a tidy little codec to slice up your noises and another to pixelate your good looks then sling across the information articles and boom! NetMeeting! It diverged some to and fro within Microsoft picking up new features and names along the way, but also changing the core bit that made it work (those little codecs). What we have ended up with is something that outwardly works and acts like a phone and a video conference application but doesn't use any of the fundamental "systems" that make those work for every other system sold. So you end up adding more and more bits and bling to make it work.......

/rant

What are your alternatives?

If you are small and need to stay in the cloud because you can't handle even the smallest data center your choices are quite abundant. Vonage, ShoreTel, and so many others offer out of the box solutions or you can roll your own quite easily in your pillowy AWS space with a little Asterisk punctuation*     (*must love Linux).    Ward Mundy's blog NerdVittles  has even better info for the roll your own crowd. 

Eventually an organization has to grow up and look at something grown ups choose from big industry players like Avaya and Cisco, right? Rght?      NO!     You be a tiny fish in the big pond of standards=based telecommunications and collaboration tools! 

Spark this fire, get things burning!

Cisco offers a cloud based communications and collaboration package that is flexible in sizing and powerful in it's reach. The basic package lets you make SIP standards-based calls and have persistent chat communications with anyone in the world for free. (for companies of one). Their option levels and pricing are reasonable for larger companies and that's when you get the more important administrator tools. When you fully option a user out, they will be able to host meetings in Spark or even in WebEx, can join from a PC or phone or tablet or regular phone as a voice call or get a desk phone that works directly on it or from any of Cisco's modern TelePresence endpoints or from any other standards-based endpoint and even from Skype. That's like 9 ways to connect without counting variants of each (Windows vs MacOS vs a web browser on Linux). 

Again, I shouldn't try to be selling these things. But I will be fair and remind you I am a Cisco Champion for Collaboration so I am a little biased to Cisco products. But I like Spark and Ive been using it for months now

Its late Brian.... wrap this up.

I opened this window and started typing about how I was moving my perfectly functioning IT department from Skype4B to Cisco Spark. 1000 words later and I haven't moved a thing. Let's see how this goes because I finally got my Spark trial pack :)

Whatcha doing tomorrow?
What are your thoughts?

Expertise is an illusion; A motivational essay about how you don’t know crap.

Many years ago, when I started at Microsoft in the ramp up to support Windows Millennium, they asked us “on a scale of 1 to 10, how well do you know windows?” My answer was 7-8. I reasoned that “5” must be the average and i knew way more than that; and since Microsoft hired me to support this amazing revolutionary new Windows, i must know *way more than that*. Everyone else rated themselves as 2-3 and the instructor chastised me for giving myself such a high score. “You see,” he explained, “the developer who worked on the exit button can explain everything about that button: the down click, the up click, every API it uses and all the implications of using it. But they probably can't tell you a single thing about the button next to it.”

Expertise *is* an illusion just like any technology sufficiently advanced enough is magic. No-one can know everything out of hand, but they can be pretty good at many things. More importantly they can learn and socialize. I’ve frequently told people whom I’ve helped so quickly that “i’m just a couple pages further in the manual than they are.”

How you attack issues and problems matter. Consistent strategies and knowing when it is the right time to stop the self research and call in the big dogs is important. (the big dogs being escalation in your org, mentors, coworkers, your vendors, manufacturers support or sacrificing goats). I know I’ve spent hours and hours exploring and trying to teach myself new things simply because there was a small issue. All that time wasn’t completely wasted, but small issues usually have simple solutions so those hours could have been avoided by asking around or calling support.     Of course i can tell you that learning the things I did paid off in other ways and sometimes I have called in support only for the answer to be worthless or so slow coming that I should have just worked it on my own.

So what is the best if expertise isn’t?

Fundamentals; solid understanding of core concepts and technology behind them. 
In collaboration I see these:

• Fundamentals of networks - what the OSI is and Isn’t, how to packet capture and recognize parts of it
• Fundamentals of communications protocols: SIP messaging (and to some extent h323), the common codecs involved (like 264, 265, g711 etc)
• Explain what modular architecture is - that everywhere different components have to work together but those components are often changeable. Be able to understand and map these components
• How audio video and all those physical layer components work - audio feedback, hdcp on hdmi, what is avc vs svc
• Security practises - (this should be core to every IT job) - good security practises (service accounts and unique passwords, social engineering, certificates and etc

If you have these fundamentals then you have a core that can be worked with… but what about the intangibles:

• Research - how well do you google and how well can you find documentation?
• Retention - can you recall things you researched later even if it didn't help or did you just forget it because it wasn't important (why get deep in research if you don't retain it)
• Communication - nobody ever tells you what the problem is; they just tell you the symptoms they experienced. Of that “It's broken” you also have to be able to talk to “non-technical” people, talk to other teams and talk to higher pay grades. Can you identify who is important (an admin is usually the most important contact you have)
• Documentation - look, this is the ugly part of the job and i’ve blogged about it already read here
• Knowing when to quit - will you call for help because you can't know everything? When?

We can build things in labs and classes a dozen times. 
We can deploy and migrate a hundred systems. 
None of that makes you an expert, does it? 
                  It just shows you've been doing your job.

But it’s ok to be an expert.

Ok, so I’ve used eight hundred words debunking the idea of an expert and I should probably rebuild it. 
If sufficiently advanced technology is magic, then someone who knows more is reasonably an expert. Or a wizard. At least from your perspective, for the question at hand and in the time needed. And the same is true for everyone coming to you. 

YOU CAN BE THE EXPERT THEY NEED. 

So be the expert they deserve! Help them solve the problem, learn a little so you both can move on better for the experience. They might be a new hire in a grunt position, the CEO, or someone outside; they came to you and you represent something so you might as well be an “expert” for them. 
Then later on you get to be just pretty good at something again ;)

Know your environment - Diagram All The Things!

If you're thinking about UC media encryption it helps to do detailed flow diagrams for voice, video and content. #ciscocollab

— Josh Warcop (@Warcop) August 2, 2017

Yesterday Josh Warcop mentioned that diagramming is important and as an example we should check out Microsoft's Protocol Workload Posters for Skype4B/Lync/OCS/NetMeeting 👀  

I have to agree and point out how beautifully simple Microsoft has made some of their documentation. From magic Excel spreadsheets where you input a couple of parameters and spit out huge maps and configuration guides to the always stellar MSDN, MSIT, Channel 9, Microsoft puts a lot of useful and easy tools right front and center.

The documentation for Cisco is quite extensive, but so is it's distribution. Recently I pointed out Cisco's Collaboration Solutions Analyser; it was something I only found last week yet I have been working on Cisco TelePresence for a few years now. While it is always fun to find new things, it is frustrating when that was something you really needed weeks, months or years ago! I think Cisco Is getting better but so is the socialization of knowledge (we share things we find).

Josh was right though, do not let your environment languish in your head. Write it down and often in that process you will understand it better - possibly pinpointing problems in the process! My own documents are not perfect but I decided to share a sanitized version so I could share my work. You could use these as an example, I'll even share the Visio if you ask me, but I already see they need much improvement.

Is Diagramming Different Than Documentation?

Yes. Documentation includes diagrams, but a diagram is a visual thing and that sometimes is more effective than just using words. Diagrams can show flow and motion and relationship that words just cannot.

But What Should I Diagram?

Make sure to include important details. You can see I include names, FQDN and IP addresses. It might be important to include version numbers but when you do that you have to update them too! I have experimented with linking diagrams to spreadsheets that may or may not have referenced some db of SNMP queries and that really shows the power of MS Office collaboration (and the hell that happens when you move files).

But I Don't Plan On Getting Hit By A Bus!

Nobody does. But we are supposed to remember that we should document as if it will. More than likely your efforts to do this will help you learn so much that you get a promotion because you are truly awesome.

Here are some diagrams

Overview

This is obviously just an overview. We have multiple offices with stuff and things, then our datacenter has everything important; clusters of nuts and stuff.

Protocols

There are more protocols involved but the big SIP/h323 and then the backchannel management things happen here. I can already tell I should pile in a bunch or zone information and where transforms and transversals happen but that really would be whole other diagrams. Try not to overload too much information into one screen!

Dial Plan

My background is more telephony and networking whereas most Skype people usually came from server and messaging. Understanding dial plans is something drilled into telephony kids from day one. It is the basis of life and from it grew IP planning. Skypers are so Layer7. But seriously folks; The meat is knowing how you are going to route and direct calls. If you cannot master that then you will not have a working communications system. This diagram shows all the e.164 extension dialing we got going on with the 33xxx range dedicated for video, 72xxx range dedicated to a sister company for voice or video, and 73xxx  range for voice at a remote office (they could use it for video too but they do not).

I'm going to wrap this up and think about how I'm going to make this better now!

Don't Complain - EXPLAIN! a Twitter moment from @SwiftOnSecurity

Don't Complain - EXPLAIN!

Blogging, Tweeting, Linked Inning, Sparking and IFTTTing

Confession; I have never blogged before. 

Since joining Twitter 10 years ago I have tweeted 16.2k times. Twitter has always been more my style because brevity befits my balderdash (ooh i like that). Extending my posts may not be as much a problem as learning the practical mechanics of starting and maintaining something like this.

So this is how I'm proceeding:

1. Bought the NOSaturn.com domain via Domains.Google.com 
2. Tried to connect my new domain to a new Blogger blog, but had to figure out first how to delete some blog I made a dozen years ago about nothing (I only posted twice) (that doesn't really count as blogging does it?)
3.  OK, really setting up the Blogger blog and choose the URL http://blog.NOSaturn.com because I might someday want a real front page
4. Set Blogger to redirect http://NOSaturn.com to the blog because I don't have that real landing page 
5. Much Much playing and experimenting with Blogger and layouts and formats and discovering what holes I have in the configurations

That was a whole lot of fun and I see some neat features about the domain tools offered. The SRV tools could allow me to connect potential future lab to real world communication abilities. 😎  But I have to admit a real annoyance that Blogger does not allow HTTPS: redirects with custom domains. regular HTTP needs to die.

Now that I have a blog with a a couple of entries, I ought to connect it to some of the socials I use. I'm not going to connect to Facebook since that's entirely a personal social thing whereas I mix personal and professional in Twitter. You'll find me on LinkedIn too because I hear that I should be there.

My professional presence on social media is encouraged as I am a 2017 Cisco Champion for Collaboration. I'll talk about that another time.

Ah, yes; back to connecting this blog to social media.... IFTTT, or IF This Then That, is a super useful and pretty easy way to make a "trigger" in one thing do "something". In this case I setup an applet that would post to Twitter and LinkedIn whenever I made a blog entry. The post would include the hashtag #Collaboration because that is what hashtags are for. This was real neat right up to the point that I got way too smart and built an applet that would take any of my tweets with #Collab and post that as a blog entry. 

    Don't do that.

Thankfully I stopped all that nonsense because a blog post triggered a tweet which then triggered a blog post of the tweet and on and on. This is like aiming a video camera right at a screen showing the camera's feed. 

I still wanted some of that same functionality but figuring that Blogger should easily be able to tweet or LinkedIn for me I started exploring again. Blogger's Help forums pointed me to some tool that has shut down, then on to DLVR.it which seems to suite me right now. We will see...

Speaking of applets, the new hotness is of course BOTS! There really isn't much difference between applets, apps, bots or all these things except who is using whatever term at any one time. (right?) One of the collaboration tools I'm enjoying lately is Cisco's Spark. It's a mashup of messaging, chat, voice, video, email, file sharing and other general goodness but I will cover that later. Spark has bots and integrations that really enhance and extend it's functionality. I setup a connection in Spark to Twitter so I could Tweet directly from Spark. That worked. Of course if I included the #Collab hashtag the Twitter post then rolled on up into a blog post. NEAT. I cleaned it up even more with another IFTTT applet that would take something I say in a designated Spark room would post directly to my blog. EVEN NEATER.

This is all a very long winded explanation for today's previous posts and a couple I deleted last night from the recursive posting debacle. 

(Remember that "brevity befits my balderdash"? )

This blog really is an extension of my ongoing professional development. There are so many tools and communication modes available now. I really believe understanding their strengths and weaknesses is central to collaboration. 

Let's get things started!

I have decided that some of my thoughts may exceed the 140 characters that Twitter allows so I find myself here wanting to collect thoughts, journal my activities and generally talk about the technology that I love and have built my career around.

Hello there!

Those two words are just one of the many ways we greet each other. But how often do you hear them in the workplace just as a meeting gets started? Probably not much. I find people start a meeting or a conversation with frustration - they do not want to be there, do not have a clear agenda, and might be frustrated actually getting the meeting started. 

There are so many things that make working together hard, and I find it to be my job to make working together easier. I have many years experience working on networks, with phone systems, video conferencing, instant messaging, chat, file sharing, email and oh so many other technologies, but I never loose sight of what it is like to actually do these things.

In the coming months I will share my quest to pass certifications, build a home lab, learn and expand my skills and share what I have learned.
Let's blend technology, psychology, philosophy and a little bit of reckless experimentation.
Are you in?