People Talking Tech

In this weeks episode of People Talking Tech which was recorded at SQL Saturday 145, I’m joined by Thomas LaRock and Joey D’Antoni.  Thomas is the Happy Maker and provider of Afternoon Ignite at Confio Software and Joey is the Principal Architect at Comcast Cable.  In this episode we talk about the fact that Database Administrators as a whole will need expand their careers more towards being a data professional instead of a hard core database administrator.  It turned into a pretty interesting conversation I think, hopefully you’ll think so as well.

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In todays episode I’m joined by Jonathan Gardner who is a Sr. Systems Architect for GEOCENT.  In this episode, which was recorded at SQL Saturday 145, we talk about Office 365 which I’m quite impressed with from the features that Jonathan talks about.  It seems that Office 365 has really come a long way from the service that I saw being released when it first came out.

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This week for episode 11 I’m joined by fellow MVP Chris Ross.  Chris is a Managing Consultant with Catapult Systems and runs the Service Manager User Group of North America.  Chris and I discussed a couple of Microsoft products today which I knew of, but didn’t really know anything about; Service Manager and Orchestrator.  Service Manager ended up being the bulk of our conversation as when the conversation started I thought that it was just a help desk ticketing tool, but it turns out that it’s much more than that.  It is really a systems management automation tool that seems like it can really help a lot of customers with managing permissions and systems access to both native Microsoft systems as well as various third party systems.

Like all good conversations about technology there is a bit of complaining about the technology, specifically how the installations aren’t quite as cut and try and there’s a lot of design decisions that need to be made and depending on your perspective those decisions could be different.  Chris mentions a specific blog post by Cameron Fuller, which you’ll find here.

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This week in episode 010 I’m joined by Stephen Rose who is the Sr. Product Marketing Manager for the Windows commercial team at Microsoft.  As a part of his job at Microsoft Stephen works on the Springboard website and writes the Springboard newsletter.  Stephen and I have been friends for several years now going back to before he worked for Microsoft when we first met at our local Southern California Code Camps.  During the episode today we talked about something which is near and dear to Stephen right now, Windows 8 having just released and the Surface RT which released just a couple of weeks ago.

Stephen and I talked about some of the resources which are available for IT Professionals that are looking to deploy Windows 8 such as the Windows 8 Jump Start which is 6 1/2 hours of videos which Stephen and Joey Snow have put together.  We also talk through some of the great new features in Windows 8 such as Windows To Go which allows you to install the entire Windows 8 OS on a USB drive running the computer from the thumb drive on any computer which is Windows 8 certified without having to actually install Windows on that piece of hardware.  There are some great use cases for this technology and we talk about a few of them in the recording.

Stephen also gives an overview of how you’ll be able to install Windows 8 native applications through a private app store even when the machines aren’t members of the Active Directory domain.  We also touch on some of the new features of Windows 2012 Server’s Direct Access feature, the changes to Bit Locker in Windows 8 as well as the new Client HyperVisor which is available in Windows 8.  There is lots more good stuff in here, so listen in.

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In episode 9 this week I’m joined by Jorge Segarra (also known as SQL Chicken), SQL Consultant for Pragmatic Works.  Jorge and I chat about the Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse and SQL Server 2012 Licensing.  We also talk about Oracle’s Java, Adobe and plenty of more things that need complaining about.  We ended up finishing by talking about all the fun travel.

This weeks episode is a little longer than normal at almost 32 minutes.  Consider yourself warned.

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In this weeks episode I’m joined by Robert Davis, Senior SQL Server Evangelist for Idera Software who joins me from Seattle, Washington.  Robert who is also a Microsoft Certified Master for SQL Server 2008 and I take a lighter less technical approach and talk this week all about conferences and the challenges that people can have in picking a conference to attend.  We also talk a little about some of the challenges for the sponsors of these conferences when it comes to picking a conference to sponsor.

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