Category Archives: Work

Preparing to speak…for the very first time O.o

Many of you would be aware that I was brave enough (and I do feel I was brave!) to put my name forward to speak at Microsoft Ignite Australia this year (2015) and I was lucky enough to be picked as a speaker. This was an entirely new challenge for me, and something that I got an immense amount out… Read more »

Microsoft Ignite – Day 3 (Thursday) & Day 4 (Friday)

Combining these two because I was slack and didn’t get a chance to post Thursdays (or even Fridays!) the morning after…so here goes! Thursday Thursday was a slightly late start for me, as I wanted to a) get a decent amount of sleep in preparation for the party and b) do a practice run through of my mini-Hack talk as… Read more »

Microsoft Ignite – Day 2 (Wednesday)

Wednesday So I was going to start this day off with the Diversity breakfast…but due to getting in so late, unfortunately sleep won out so I could get an extra hour. Was told it was great, bit disappointed I missed it! 🙁 Got up, had my morning cup of tea (no tea = no me…*need* tea! And I will totally… Read more »

Microsoft Ignite – Day 0 (Monday) & Day 1 (Tuesday)

Monday Got down Monday afternoon – checked into hotel, took husband out for lunch. The giantest schnitzel I’ve ever seen, at Koi. Once he’d bailed back to Brisbane, unpacked (I don’t travel light >.>) and then decided to head over to go through registration before the hoards descended. Registered, got my bag, got to the traffic lights to head to… Read more »

AGPM aka change management for GPO’s

AGPM (Advance Group Policy Management) is pretty much a change management tool for group policy – it assists in deploying new policies, modifying existing policies and being able to roll-back to older versions if something has gone wrong! I’m a big fan of AGPM simply from the point of view of being able to see a) who’s done what and… Read more »

Documentation & Planning – the sneaky skills

One of the biggest issues I’ve come across with the places I’ve worked (and the people I’ve worked with!) is lack of ability to document and to plan. It seems that this is a much maligned and skipped skill that many just don’t have. This post is about how I do my documentation and planning, which I hope could help… Read more »

Take-away from leadership summit – be the best YOU you can be

Let me just give you a bit of back story, before I get into this – I’m not sure how I got to be this lucky, but recently I was insanely lucky enough to be approached to attend a Women in Leadership conference/summit that was being held here in Brisbane. I was initially reluctant to go, as I’m not really… Read more »

Pearls of Wisdom from my 2003 Decommissioning

For those who follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you would have undoubtedly seen the posts regarding Server 2003 EoL and my battles with my organisation (primarily the service and business owners of the servers) about getting off this out-dated OS and onto something more recent – or in a number of cases, just getting rid of a no-longer-required server… Read more »

Taking on higher duties – being the manager of your own team…

For those who don’t know the back-story – my manager was lucky enough to get 6-7 weeks of leave and buggered off to Europe. Yay for him, boo for us poor sods left behind. Because he was going away for such a significant period of time, he figured the team *should* have a manager – so he kindly asked me… Read more »

Do you need formal qualifications to be a sysadmin?

Thought I’d write this to get my two-cents out there. As someone who has been on both sides of the fence, I feel like I’m in a good place to put this out for discussion. I see a number of sysadmins who feel they aren’t “good enough” because they have no formal qualifications. They feel “less than” because they don’t… Read more »