Congrats you almost have your own AD

A curious thing happened as we wanted to leverage more of the Microsoft stack in the development process. We determined that we could use Exchange rules, SharePoint and Dynamics CRM as platforms for application development. Just as we were discovering this our infrastructure group for all the right reasons didn’t want us developing on top of our production Exchange, AD and SharePoint boxes.

We made a courageous decision to isolate our development environment from the rest of our environments and empowering the development group with configuration, administration and troubleshooting responsibilities for their new environments. We wound up with our own child domain, a DNS server and a whole bunch of issues.

For those of you trying to isolate your own development environment, I strongly suggest negotiating with your infrastructure team exactly what your requirements are. We deferred many of the decisions off to them as it is their area of expertise. What we wound up with is troubleshooting the infrastructure (with their assistance) while trying to install our first application. Now in all fairness our first application is Dynamics CRM and it can be a beast, but I’ve installed this thing on single and multiple box installs a few times now and I’ve never been this frustrated.

For those developers out there who would like their own little slice of Heaven, I strongly suggest working side by side with your infrastructure team and be specific about the type of environment you require. If necessary get an outside mediator to assist you. Perhaps you will not spend a week of your iteration debugging DNS and Kerberos issues and avoid the temptation to point fingers.

Convergence 2008

Definably not a techie conference, but then again I thought TechEd was missing hard core technical content, so perhaps I’m in the minority, or it’s just been so long since I wasn’t technical that I can’t tell the difference any more. Nobody here at the conference is talking about threading, garbage collection, kernels and other real techie topics. Instead they are discussing the configuration and deployment of business solutions. This got me to thinking. Perhaps this IS the new technical. I wonder if the guys who wrote operating systems for a living would think PDC wasn’t technical enough….

As I begin to network with folks here I realized that the people here don’t have a big dev team. Some have PMs, some have BAs, and some have developers. I met a number of mid-sized companies that had a 2-4 techies per 100 business people. I was curious how this works. It turns out that many of the tasks we would consider internal staff tasks, they depend on external vendors for support. Many of the customers run Dynamics GP and from time to time they have a vendor come in and help them out. I spoke with a controller who knew how to open GP and run a custom report, there was no IT process involved, he showed me how he knew what was going on inside his accounts.

This got me thinking….

What if the IS department I worked for cut its size in half, or better yet what if it was a goal of our organization to significantly reduce the staff of IT. Instead of cutting a position or two here or there, how could we fundamentally change how we are structured? If we could find a way to cut our staff in half, could we push that half staff back into the business? I’m meeting many folks here at Convergence that have made an enterprise commitment in Microsoft technology and have a satisfied customer base.