Andrew Hale: IT Talk & Other Topics

By the time this is posted, she'll have said yes. I proposed to my girlfriend and the proposal has required a bit of planning. I wanted it to be something thoughtful and have a story worth telling later on. I know too many couples who's story of "How'd he propose?" go something like "I dunno; I just asked her one day and she said yes. The rest is history." Fair enough but I wanted to do something a bit more.

A non-techy friend of mine asked me how to get into IT. She's smart, articulate and could likely be molded into a great IT gal. We were texting each other, mostly just catching up. I hadn't seen her for a while and we recently got back in touch. The usual questions were in order; We got to talking about work and that's when she asked me. I didn't answer it for 2 reasons; Firstly, the answer was longer than my thumbs and the tiny keyboard on my iPhone could reasonably handle. Secondly, I didn't have a straight answer for her. I myself asked the same question years ago. I had this long write-up on how I came to get into IT but I recently watched a great video that explained it better than I could have. It was by  Eli The Computer Guy  and was very thorough. I've linked the video below for your convenience so I suggest giving it a watch if you're thinking about an IT career but aren't sure where to start.

What? Manage contact lists in Lync? Why would you do that? I understand both arguments to this. One one hand, adding contacts isn't that hard to do. Despite being buddy-buddy with Exchange and being very feature packed, Lync is still just an IM client for many organizations. From the end-user perspective, it's as easy to manage as Google Chat, AIM, or Pidgin is (which are all more or less easy to use). So if it's so easy to use, why would you manage contact lists for your users? Because this is a company communication method and all of the other company communication methods are managed by IT. Email, phone system... That's about it. One could argue that it's about providing an efficient way to contact colleagues within your organization. We manage contact lists in Lync for our users (Lync Server 2010) but we're looking to move to Lync Server 2013 and our custom script won't work. I was asked by one of our Admins a while ago to look into a couple tools we...

I don't have any projects in my new Jr Admin role but my new boss gave me access to and documentation for our Data Protection Manager, or DPM server. I don't necessarily have to memorize how to do everything with it: Just get a decent grasp for how it works and the rest will come. Before jumping head first into DPM, I wanted to refresh on traditional backups and how they work.