Generally speaking, companies must weigh the pros and cons of upgrading or updating any system.  It is accepted that physical assets such as machinery or equipment must be maintained at specific intervals.  

Furthermore, the projected end of life date is typically established at the time of purchase.  Equipment kept in use past its projected EOL requires additional maintenance and upkeep and often hampers productivity or increases risk and most companies would not dispute this fact. 

Software systems are no less critical. Software applications and operating systems also have a projected EOL, but often the temptation to extend the service life of these assets is greater than for a piece of equipment that you can touch and feel. 

In the crowded space of Systems Monitoring Solutions, Microsoft has released a much-needed series of improvements to its Operations Manager (a.k.a SCOM) platform for 2016. The continued adoption of Hybrid Cloud scenarios which require 24/7 monitoring for both on-premise and cloud workloads using one tool is in high demand. Operations Manager 2016 has delivered a platform that can monitor you on-premise and cloud workloads from one pane of glass.

Are you a cowboy riding an ostrich?

If your collection of software applications running your business looks like The Island of Misfit Toys, then it’s worth considering some new alternatives.

Can your data be more secure in the cloud?

Let’s look at how Microsoft Azure is helping you to ensure your data and services are protected against current and future cyber threats in the cloud.

One of my favorite toys as a kid was Legos. It was that awesome feeling I got from creating something out of nothing. Usually, I would make some monster truck – it was the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, and Big Foot was a big deal. But I digress. So we weren’t building something out of “nothing”. We were starting with some building blocks that the Lego company provided.

No question there is a lot of thought, planning and precision engineering put into manufacturing those pieces so that they all fit together perfectly. As smart as we were, building a plastic Big Foot replica without those building blocks would have been beyond our ability. So we start with a pile of seemingly unrelated plastic blocks, wheels, people (with and without heads), shrubs, chimneys, car parts, etc. and create something entirely new from the seemingly random pieces. Fun!

Microsoft has embraced the “Internet of Things”, IoT for short, with two services offered by Microsoft Azure: Azure IoT Suite and Azure IoT Hubs.

The Azure IoT Suite is set of pre-assembled Azure Services which help you quickly get started with pre-configured IoT solutions such as predictive maintenance and remote monitoring.  With these pre-configured solutions, you can quickly connect your “things” to Azure and easily have access to all of the rich services that Azure provides, without the time it takes to configure each specific service.

CRM & SharePoint Integration 

If you are familiar with the very powerful interface which allows a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) user to attach seamlessly documents to a given entity (account, contact, opportunity, etc.) using the CRM/SharePoint integration, you may also be aware of a potentially dangerous gap in the security model.


I have found that the out-of-box integration is well designed, intuitive, and easy to use. I can take any document and with a few clicks of the mouse, associate it to a CRM entity while saving it in a SharePoint library. This interface gives users the best of both worlds: CRM for field level data and SharePoint for document management. The possibilities are seemingly endless.