Atlanta Network and Systems Management Technical User Group
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January Meeting Announcement
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Wondering what’s going on with NerveCenter? OpenService has a new President, Mike Schmitt, who brings renewed interest in NerveCenter. Come find out what Mike and OpenService have in mind for NerveCenter at the January ANSMTUG meeting. OpenService will present its new and expanded vision for event correlation and how NerveCenter is at the center of enterprise event management. This vision includes additional inputs to include applications, databases, SOAP, WMI along with network/systems management and security devices. AutoTrader will host.

OpenService (http://www.openservice.com) is sponsoring the food and drink for the meeting. Please help us out by RSVPing (see link below) by Monday, January 15th, if you intend to attend so we can provide a headcount to order the food and drink.

What is the ANSMTUG all about?
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The Atlanta Network and Systems Management Technical User Group was created to foster collaboration between administrators, architects, engineers, and operators of applications and tools used to manage and monitor networks, systems, applications, services, and business activities.

There are numerous enterprise and service provider companies in the Atlanta area who use best of breed applications and tools from companies such as IBM Tivoli/Micromuse (Netcool), OpenService (NerveCenter), Quest Software (Foglight), Hewlett-Packard (OpenView), EMC/SMARTS (InCharge), Concord Communications, InfoVista, etc. The intent of the group is not to be completely aligned with any particular vendor or solution, but rather focus on network and systems management applications and tools in general. There will likely be more focus on a select handful of vendor solutions than others, but this will be driven by the users and not the vendors.

Meeting Details
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Cost: Free!
Date: Wednesday, January 17th, 2007
Time: 7:00PM to 9:00(ish) PM
Host: AutoTrader
Location: 5775 Peachtree Dunwoody Rd., Bldg C, Atlanta, GA 30342

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=5775+Peachtree+Dunwoody+Rd+Atlanta,+GA+30342&ie=UTF8&z=15&om=1

Parking: Free

Refreshments: Food and drinks provided by OpenService.

Please RSVP by Monday, January 15th, 2007 to rsvp@ansmtug.org

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Scott W. Parker | James 1:19
scottwparker@gmail.com |
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I guess it’s time to contribute a traditional new year look back / look ahead type post to the blog here. It’s been about a year now since I started this and overall I’m relatively pleased with how it’s gone. My goals for this blog were to serve as an outlet to get stuff out of my head, diaries, yellow stickies and hundreds of .txt file memos and mash them all up into something usable by anyone working on similar engagements, projects or problems in IT and Business Service Management.

In the beginning, when my time was more openly available, I spent considerable time getting thoughts out in original content postings. As time became scarcer, I found the del.iciio.us tagging plug in for Firefox and daily links posting feature very useful for sharing links to content of interest for those reading my blog. I enjoy writing the original content, offering commentary and opinions where I feel I can contribute usefully and sharing what I’m working on professionally. I look forward to continuing series based topical postings and a focus on sharing best practices and methodologies for success in IT and Business Service Management. Critiquing myself, I’ve got to find a way to say more with less and keep the post size to a more consumable length. At least that’s what the blogging best practices say. Brevity in anything has never been a strong suit for me, especially with technical things I’ve got a passion for. 🙂

Something that disappoints many technical bloggers is the lack of collaborative communication. Technical blogs, and ones like mine that specialize in a niche area like IT and Business Service Management, are very much one way communication still. I wish more would join in the conversations and share their own thoughts, ideas, criticisms, etc. I really wanted to learn from a broader audience and find out what works and doesn’t work in a multitude of industries, verticals and scenarios. I hope more people will comment and share in 2007.

Blog statistics and search engine key words landing on my blog are interesting to review and many conclusions can be drawn.

• Since I started this blog almost one year ago, I’ve seen over 300K hits from over 16K unique visitors.
• I’ve had just over 200 postings and over 80 comments.
• Technorati says I’m ranked 265,343rd and I have 31 links to my blog from 14 different blogs.
• Google search queries landing on my blog indicate there’s a strong desire for the things I’m posting about or could be posting about.
• Based on the volumes of search queries I see coming to my blog, why don’t people ask for stuff? Why aren’t they communicating? I’d be happy to point people in the right direction or post content in a certain area if enough people see value in it. Is it easier to hope that a Goooooooogle result many pages down will be the golden nugget they desire? Wish more people would join in the conversation, comment, ask for help, etc.
• People searching for things related to vendor products, technology, how to’s, troubleshooting problems, etc. makes me believe vendors don’t do a good enough job making this kind of stuff available internally for their customers. (poor documentation, poor support, poor training, poor knowledge bases, poor internal search, etc.)
• Search queries can give insight into M&A activities

I hope you’ve enjoyed what I’ve done in the past year and I look forward to continuing to blog on business and IT topics in 2007.