[SallythePearl]

I know there should be a few of you on these boards (at least Lord Micron lol) that work with the big boys toys. The technology that is required to operate at an enterprise level is mostly unknown to your average small business IT guy.

How on earth do you educate yourself you so you understand what's possible at the cutting edge of technology? Where do you learn it? Where do you get your hands on experience?
Sometimes I feel a little overwhelmed and that my knowledge is lagging behind where the business needs to go. That the direction I take to implement a solution is a little old school or a small business technology solution and that I need to relearn and think bigger and newer. But that's hard when you don't realise or know the new things that are possible.

Can anyone give any pointers on how one should learn about new enterprise IT technology? Rather than learning about the tech on the job because it's already being implemented or suggested. I would like to be the guy that one day makes key decisions on which new direction to go for large enterprise systems.
[help]

[Oppofeescom]

Enterprise IT is not a techology. It's about a million different technologies. If you want to work at enterprise level you need to specialise in a particular field, or work on a helpdesk. Sure, all massive corporations have low level techies that can handle first line support, but the technologies that support these organisations are worlds apart from this.

You can specialise in exchange, sharepoint, cisco routing, cisco networking, RAID arrays, filesharing, content management....the list goes on and on. A company the size of IBM will have 10 people working on every smallest thing you can think of. Imagine taking your home PC and blowing it up by a billion times.

[Misiotoagodia]

I know there should be a few of you on these boards (at least Lord Micron lol) that work with the big boys toys. The technology that is required to operate at an enterprise level is mostly unknown to your average small business IT guy.

How on earth do you educate yourself you so you understand what's possible at the cutting edge of technology? Where do you learn it? Where do you get your hands on experience?
Sometimes I feel a little overwhelmed and that my knowledge is lagging behind where the business needs to go. That the direction I take to implement a solution is a little old school or a small business technology solution and that I need to relearn and think bigger and newer. But that's hard when you don't realise or know the new things that are possible.

Can anyone give any pointers on how one should learn about new enterprise IT technology? Rather than learning about the tech on the job because it's already being implemented or suggested. I would like to be the guy that one day makes key decisions on which new direction to go for large enterprise systems.
[help]

I know lots of people have specialties, but for places like mine that are just in between Large/Enterprise and Medium Size business, its much harder to specialize.

We have a very small IT team to begin with, so myself and the other network admin have a very large range of skills we have to know.

However, and LM can agree to this im sure, most of my education comes from finding a solution for a need to the customer.

IE we had a massive file management problem, and almost 0 policy regarding workflows and document control.

Bring in SharePoint 2010. I had no experience with it before I started doing the researchf or the hardware and the various modules / licenses etc.

The thing that will set you apart from other IT personnel is the ability to adapt and absorb new technology to meet the needs of your environment and customers.

It's a 2 part problem. One, you have to analyze and be familiar with what the customer is doing, and then find a solution for the customers needs, and 2 you have to learn the technology to implement it correctly.

READ, READ, READ,

Virtual Environments are key to learning new technology now-a-days IMO.

I wouldnt be where I am now if I didnt have VM's to practice install and configurations before going live.

edit - im not fixing the typos. Im on my second bottle of wine after a hellish week dealign with an antiquated AS/400 system.

[Anymnillulky]

Thing is though, many enterprise level solutions are really really bad. They buy/invest in terrible products and can't bail because they invested so much into that particular platform/technology. I have many friends who do nothing but complain about the crappy products their company keeps buying and implementing, makes me lol.

[FourEsters]

A good way to introduce yourself to new technology is to attend technology/IT seminars, trade shows or other similar events. It will give you a good idea to what's out there and what will be available in the specific areas you're interested in.

Is there a particular area of your infrastructure that you're reviewing at the moment (email, backups, crm, security etc)? Or do you just want to present ideas to management?

[uC4F0NVL]

Enterprise IT people work hard to get their IT to be more like a SMB IT. =D

The specialisation is one of the reasons why Enterprise IT does not work well, because people optimize their system and not the entire IT.


there are two things I would recommend:

Keep it simple, trading more costs for lower complexity may be hard to sell but in the long run it pays off most of the time.

And the most important thing: Talk to other people who actually implemented the stuff, a 10 minute discussion may be worth more than reading hours of marketing material.

[Oppofeescom]

Bring in SharePoint 2010. I had no experience with it before I started doing the researchf or the hardware and the various modules / licenses etc.

The thing that will set you apart from other IT personnel is the ability to adapt and absorb new technology to meet the needs of your environment and customers.

You have experience of using sharepoint now, but you are not a specialist in that software.

I did an MSTE in MOSS 2007 administration and I still wouldn't consider myself anywhere near competent enough to go for a sharepoint admin job anywhere.

For example, what kind of farm would you want for running this website? What is a web part? What is a site collection? What are your site features? What is web provisioning? Do you want MOSS or WSS? Should you use a site collection or a top-level site?

Don't google them ;-)

They are not all as they sound either. Then you get into the proper admin side of things having to set up the dns etc etc.

If you are interested in sharepoint admin though, this is quite a good starting point:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...ng=en#filelist

[Misiotoagodia]

You have experience of using sharepoint now, but you are not a specialist in that software.

I did an MSTE in MOSS 2007 administration and I still wouldn't consider myself anywhere near competent enough to go for a sharepoint admin job anywhere.

For example, what kind of farm would you want for running this website? What is a web part? What is a site collection? What are your site features? What is web provisioning? Do you want MOSS or WSS? Should you use a site collection or a top-level site?

Don't google them ;-)

They are not all as they sound either. Then you get into the proper admin side of things having to set up the dns etc etc.

If you are interested in sharepoint admin though, this is quite a good starting point:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...ng=en#filelist

Thanks for the link.

Actually for the past 6 months it has been my focus. While no, I probably would not go applying for a SharePoint administrator job anywhere either, I am fluent enough to support any of our users, and can confidently say the site and database structure I layed out will work very well for my compnaies needs - short term and long term.

I actually found the TrainSignal training videos quite helpful for getting me up to speed on much of the basic stuff very quickly. They were a little expensive for what they offer imo, but they are easy to follow and let interact with what your learning. For me being able to actually do what I'm being taught at the same time as learning it lets me absorb the information much more quickly.

[85IbLcwQ]

I'm a Network admin in an Academy

I have no qualifications further than GCSE/A-level and CLAIT.

I got my job on work placement when I was 17, I am now 26

I currently run a windows server 2003 AD domain, multimaster with 2 DC's, AD integrated DNS zones replicated, group policy, dhcp, RIS, WDS, WSUS, teamed NIC's, DFS, NTP

Cisco 4507R core switch, vlanned with several subnets, firewall statements, NTP, cctv, hybrid voice systems, full coverage wireless, ~15 cisco 2960 switches, VTP, STP, SNMP etc...

We have a Dell R710 server with Xenserver 5.6, hosting 8 guest 2003 vm's running most of our core services such as applications, MIS, web services, servicedesk, etc etc... we're buying a 2nd R710 in a few months to pool with the existing one and enable live motion, also integrating a SAN to allow centralised storage of VHD's etc, via iSCSI or fibre channel.

I run a server 2003 ISA firewall, published servers, granular firewall rules, DPI etc...

Email hosted by google, I manage the domain, but we have google apps setup and integrated for staff and students through that.

I completed the installation of ALL of this mainly by myself, with 0 experience and 0 qualifications.

I find it easy and entertaining learning about new technologies and implementing them.

We only ever spend money on hardware to support an idea, we rarely buy in any services unless it is basically impossible to do it without (3rd party hardware/software integrated solutions).

the above is a fraction of what we offer as an IT services team, excluding support for end users and their hardware (350 computers, christ knows how many software applications)

my 2c [thumbup]

[SallythePearl]

Thanks for your input guys. I guess I'm probably mostly on the right track.

I've only really truly been employed as a systems engineer for the last 6 months after a long time being held back in helpdesk due to well company BS and what not. Anyhow our company got bought out and I raised my hand to be in the systems team, which initially got knocked back but then I saved the companies ass by doing an all nighter of getting the main DB server and applications running after they were flooded with water in a storm...
So after that I demanded I'll never help the company again (which was required after this incident) if I wasn't promoted.

Anyhow since then I've been given the task of overhauling our two companies backups using Commvault. Unfortunately I haven't been given much choice on how I wanted my hardware setup as our snr systems guy basically gave me some space on a shared network drive for disk backups and then I have my tape libraries hooked up to the media agent servers via fibre channel. Honestly the network share for the disk backups is crap and I need a fibre hba in all my media agents and a nice big LUN from the SAN to help speed things up. Anyhow my next challenge is working out backing up our VMware servers without using the file agents but rather use a Virtual Server agent with VCB, or in ESX4 can use VADP. This hasn't been much of an issue so far as a lot of our critical production machines are not virtual.

Anyhow will like to learn more about managing VMware stuff, and our Compellent SAN. We also have a 120 GB RAM SAN for our major DB. We just got 2 new blade chasis each blade has 4x 6 core AMD and 72GB RAM. 12 blades total. I helped to install it, though of course I have no idea how you configure the Chasis to do what you want it to do. Mostly all these network profiles and stuff.

Oh and my boss will be sending me to seminars and stuff so all in time I suppose I'll learn things. Still I guess I feel I have been held back a little and now I feel as though I should be a lot further along than I currently am.