Introduction:

Hello and welcome to the Analysts International Microsoft Practice Blog! I am Jay Lendl, a member of AIC’s Microsoft National Practice.  I have been with Analysts for about six months.  I am excited to launch this blog and look forward to discussing our thoughts and best practices with you.  This blog will be hosted by AIC’s Microsoft Practice and will include information regarding  events we are participating in, key trends in the market, interesting use of technologies and just great topics that I hear discussed around the soda machine.  We look forward to your participation and hope you stop by often and put your two cents in. Our team is passionate about Microsoft and we look forward to hearing from you.

The Microsoft Platform:

As I look back over the last 20 years of working with Microsoft technologies, it has been a very interesting journey.  My early days were spent trying to establish OS/2 LAN Manager and then Windows NT Server as a viable replacement to Novell NetWare for core file and print services.  Now a days we spend a lot more time discussing what applications and services should run on premise and what should run in the cloud.  We used to get a pat on the back when shared printing worked most of the time or we could get an email to move from one company to another.  Now if an email takes more than about 10 seconds to arrive from Australia with a 10MB attachment, people are hiding under their desks.

During the last 10 years Microsoft architecture has truly developed into the most robust, cost effective business application platform available in the industry.  The pillars that have supported this are Windows Server, SQL, .NET and SharePoint.  No longer do we spend time having heated debates over whether SQL can scale or do we need to schedule for “reboot” weekends for all the servers.   With the more recent extension of the UC platform, Microsoft has become even more impactful on the daily productivity of many employees.  This combination of technologies is being adopted broadly by ISV’s and IT shops everywhere.

Through this Blog we intend to explore these critical pillars and share “from the trenches” the good and the bad, what works and doesn’t work.  Our perspective is one of practical implementation.  We get very little time to pontificate on the greater virtues of Boolean logic.  We tend to get paid to get things to work quickly and efficiently.

I will be leveraging some of our architecture level folks so assist with these topics as we move forward.  If there are specific topics or questions that you would like to be covered sooner rather than later please let me know and we will do our best.