In 1994 I installed Pegasus Mail (Mercury) on a Netware server. It didn't scale to the requirements of the telecommunications company at which I was working. So... In 1995 I migrated to Exchange.
Exchange 5.0 had very poor standards compliance. I started complaining and haven't stopped complaining to the Exchange team since. :-) In order to give my complaints substance, I had to learn everything about how the product worked and what the RFCs said. Then I started answering questions on BIX, CompuServe, and Usenet - and then here, starting around 1998/1999. I did my first hosted Exchange deployment in 1999 (for a dot-com company long since defunct). I took a couple of years off in the very early 2000's to build a new business, but then came back and started blogging and answering questions and building ASPs and doing hosted Exchange, hosted IIS, and hosted Windows Server. Before the release of Exchange 2003, it was obvious that Exchange could be a HUGE drain on AD. So I got up to a very advanced level on AD (although I had more than a passing familiarity with it before then, since AD was based on the Exchange LDAP engine). No installation of Exchange stands alone - so you have to know how to measure performance and deploy servers quickly and take service tickets. That leads to Operations Manager and Configuration Manager and Service Manager. Of course, doing all that stuff manually is error prone so you have to automate it - first via VBScript and now with PowerShell. And thus: those define my primary skill sets. :-P Regards, Michael B. Smith Consultant and Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com -----Original Message----- From: Webster [mailto:webs...@carlwebster.com] Sent: Monday, February 06, 2012 9:55 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: OT - ugh! In 2007 I was doing so much AD and Exchange work, I seriously considered dropping Citrix from my skill set. I probably did 50% AD, 49% Exchange and 1% Citrix. Now it is 50% AD and 50% Citrix and my last production Exchange project was June 2008. My Exchange skills are so rusty, I am embarrassed that from 2004 to 2007 I did around 90 Exchange migrations and installs (which is where MBS and I formed our friendship) and now I do no Exchange. In 2007 and 2008 I did a few small Citrix projects (very small, like 1 server each). In July 2008, I asked to be taken off the road after traveling 27 days a month for 18 months. I literally did nothing from July until late October. That is when I started listening to MBS about writing. I had 3 skills: AD, Exchange and Citrix. I found there was a LOT of blogs and other sites dealing with both AD and Exchange and nothing for learning Citrix. So I decided to start writing about Citrix stuff. I got an Experts Exchange and started answering questions. Most of the questions, I couldn't answer right off hand so I had to lab the answers and then started writing articles on my learning experiences. That is why all my articles are "Learning the Basics of ..." or "How Do I Do ..." type articles. I actually did not know how to do a lot of the Citrix stuff I was writing about so I had to read, read, read, study, lab, lab, lab and hooked up with some Citrix employees who could answer some of my questions. Believe it or not, but I had never customized Web Interface, never used CSG, never installed multiple servers, never used a SQL data store, never never never etc etc etc. Now I travel the country working on some of the largest Citrix installs for some of the largest enterprises in the world. Read, study, lab: rinse, lather, repeat You can do the same. Carl Webster Consultant and Citrix Technology Professional http://www.CarlWebster.com <http://www.carlwebster.com/> On 2/6/12 4:19 PM, "Kurt Buff" <kurt.b...@gmail.com> wrote: >You can look at it in one of two ways: > >Either you and MBS got very lucky, or you got very smart. > >The niches you've chosen are specialised enough that you aren't doing >daily grunt work (punching down patchpanels, patching workstations, >applying antivirus, replacing burnt-out video cards, etc.), but not so >specialised that your only place to land is in a Fortune 100 company >on its staff doing something that only applies to 3 other companies in >the world. > >The lesson is to place yourself at some sort of sweet spot on the IT >foodchain - and then exploit the hell out of it. > >The difficulty always lies in finding that sweet spot. > >And being willing to travel... > >Kurt > >On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 14:49, Webster <webs...@carlwebster.com> wrote: >> I can only speak for me, and it has been feast since I went out on my >>own >> Feb 1st last year. So far this year, the feast is even better as there >>is >> very little agency work so I get 100% of the billables. :) Yes, I am >> complaining all the way to the bank. If it gets any better, MBS is >>going to >> want a referral fee or commission! >> >> >> Carl Webster >> >> Consultant and Citrix Technology Professional >> >> http://www.CarlWebster.com >> ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
