Establishing an IT Budget is not an easy process, and depending on the scope of your resource oversight, it can easily multiply in complexity. Before we dive into the particulars of establishing the budget, we need to know our client, our client being the staff and infrastructure that makes the company run on a daily basis.
2017 led to many new areas of leadership and discovery. One area I got to play an active role in was IT infrastructure planning and execution. As part of the many activities I performed and lead, none was more interesting than IT Budget planning. IT budget planning has so many dimensions that need to be considered to establish a reliable budget figure, especially in regards to software development companies. In this series, I will discuss many of the lessons learned, how I designed the budget file, what implications I needed to consider for various roles in the company, and tricks I used in Excel for my final report.
The process all begins with a general assessment of where the company is today, what is the company’s mission/source of revenue, and company target in the near and far term. In my case, when I joined the company they have been in operation for over a year, but no budget has been established previously, so I almost was starting with a clean slate. As the Chief Product Owner (official title: Director of Product Management) I had already a solid idea of what the company’s short and long-term goals and the tools needed to succeed. But if you are not wearing many hats (roles) as I did, your first step is to perform interviews with key stakeholders. Your objective is to answer the following questions:
Above is just a start of the questions you want to answer before beginning to develop your budget. My final recommendation is to identify how long you want to forecast your budget. Why do you want to forecast? Well if you come into a young startup (especially in the domain of Software Development) the operating costs can provide a real shell shock to management (get the oxygen tank ready before hitting the send button). Forecasting budget for at least the 2 years that follow will help show how the costs trend south (if team headcount remains constant of course).
In my next couple of posts, I will share
Look forward to your thoughts along the way!
I have used Azure for past year, mainly to manage VMs for my employer but I never set up my own account. This was mainly because I did not want to lose the $200 first month trial offer. However, I am now spending the time to learn new things and that began with opening an Azure account.
Starting an Azure account can be a very confusing experience. This can be said for many of Microsoft Cloud services and programs (I am glaring at you Microsoft Partner program! more on that in a different blog…). The confusion all begins with an account to login. In Microsoft’s world, there are 2 types of accounts: Personal and Work or School (think of it as organization account). If you have one of these you can begin to create an Azure account (yup another account but to login to this account, you use the associated Personal or Organization account). How are they completely separate you may ask? You see, my personal Microsoft account, which is well established as a long term O365 Home user, is based in US, but as you see below, MS Azure does not recognize your account history (even billing) and my Azure account ended up in Vietnam… for life….(so sad)
Before you begin the process, it should be known that you will be required to have a credit card as part of the registration process for Azure, even if you plan to only use their 200$ trial option. This is where I made the mistake and did not have it (think of storing your credit card in ice at home).
When you register a new Azure account (begin here) it will begin with asking what account you would like to login (here is MS fancy new sign-in experience)
If you are familiar with MS sign-in, after you enter the email, if more than one account relates to the email, it will ask which account you want to use (Personal or Work and School). After successful sign-in, and you have not signed up for an Azure account previously, your registration experience will differ based on the account used. This step is important because it will determine what country your account will be associated with and in turn what region your Azure subscription will run in. For example, if your account is registered in Vietnam, your Azure subscriptions will be hosted in likely India but if you associate your account with the United States, your subscriptions will be hosted in America. This is for life of your account and cannot be changed (appears no plans either per discussion with MS support).
Case 1: Work or School Account
A Work or School account is typically issued by organizations that have an Azure Active Directory Service subscription, the simplest case is organizations that use O365 for email management but there are many other cases as well which an AADS can be invoked within an organization. In this case, the location of the Azure Subscription which your work email is associated with defines what country you are in automatically. As a result, you cannot specify what country you want your subscription to reside.
In this case you jump right to step 2 (to be shared below)
Case 2: Personal Account
Unlike case above with Work or School account, with personal account you can enter your country as shown below. By default, country is set to the country you are in based on IP detection:
Here is where there is, what I feel, a bug. In my original sign-up for an Azure account, I did not have my Credit Card (on ice, remember?). I distinctly remember selecting US and clicked next but that was when I remember I did not have CC with me so I closed the window.
Coming back on a later date, I found out the system would no longer present me step 1, just jump to step 2 (verify identify by phone). I could no longer say I am in US. When I moved to verification by card, it would not let me enter a US address as my account is fixed to Vietnam and no option to change it (even though I did not finish the full registration process).
I then contacted support and after discussion with 2 support members (my case was escalated to account services) I was told the sad news… my long-held MS Personal account is now locked to Vietnam for life! Noooooo 😦
The only option is to create another personal account and make sure I select United States This I did (reluctantly) and set my contact email to my original personal email account for improved monitoring. i was then able to successfully create a Azure account.
This, however, was not the only hurdle I had. Right after successful created an account and attempted to create the free subscription, I got stopped again as my account was flagged for possible fraud. I had to send several details to MS to get my account reviewed and unlocked, which questions included:
Then wait 24 hours. Then got word my account was marked as active again… wohoo! I successfully created the subscription for a whole 2 days before, surprise surprise, my account was flagged again (I did not even get a chance to use my fancy 200$ subscription yet as I was too busy with work).
Again, I had to send answers to the questions above and wait 24 hours for my account to open again. MS could not tell me why I was so special with 2 account flags but it is what it is and I now have successful account and subscirption with Azure.
Have you experience similar behavior in your sign-up exprience?
Are you an informationholic? Do you wish you can share interesting stories with your teams to help extend their knowledge as well? Well now there is! After much trial and error, I figured out how to push articles from Feedly (my most favorite digital media aggregation tool) to Microsoft Teams (Microsoft’s answer to Slack with Office 365 subscriptions). For this solution we will use the following services:
The general concept is, when you see an article you are interested in, you can add notes and highlights to the article, then finally save the article to a personal board. These features are actually new to Feedly and you can read more about them here (this is actually what finally got me to buy a subscription to Feedly Pro) – https://blog.feedly.com/boards/
Once the article is saved to a personal board, the IFTTT service will automatically pick it up, then POST a message immediately to the Microsoft Teams channel of your choosing. An important note: In IFTTT we will be using Applets which are much easier to build compared to a full recipe which IFTTT provides support for as well. This means we will be limited to creating one applet per channel. If you want a single article to push to many channels, you will need to create separate applets or create a recipe without using the GUI (i.e. developer method, and beyond my current skill :-P)
Ok, let’s dive in and see what we have.
Today I received a pleasant surprise. Atlassian now provides their popular project management and document management tools for free*!
* Ok ok, free is a very lose term. Up to 5 active users, but still what a great offer!
If you are a mobile UI/UX designer, life in the old’in days was fairly simple, you only had to concern yourself with a handful of screen sizes all around the 3-4″ size. Today is a different story. First with the Samsung Galaxy/Note series of phones, we were introduced to the phenomenon of Phablets, the merging of what were mini tablets and the smartphones, and Apple finally caught on to this trend 2 years ago with the iPhone 6 and 6S. Me, however, is slow to jump in so I am still sporting my iPhone 5.
So why am I writing this, yesterday I was on LinkedIn app ifor iOS which I am still working on accepting the more Facebook like and less career focus, but we cannot really blame the app, the trend of the service has moved that way, no I will not answer that math problem for the 1000th time, thank you very much, and the answer is always Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally!!!! Sorry, lost train of thought for a second there. Anyway, I was looking at a job advertisement, when I was trying to scroll through the page but the sucker would not move!
I could not understand why. First, I thought it was just slow (I noticed this in their recent updates, especially on the Me tab), but even after waiting, still screen would not scroll. I then Discovered what was going on… See the tab bar Highlights and Details? This is coded to stay at the top of the screen when you scroll past it.
You have to actually tap, hold and drag the small area between the page tabs and that app navigation bar –
If I were using a Phablet, This area would be larger, and probably closer in line with a more natural position, center of the screen, but due to the abnormal position, it is difficult to reach or even know that more information exists below.
So to my fellow UI/UX experts, remember that although Phablet is the new trend setter (particularly around 4.7″) we lonely 4″ and smaller folks are here to stay (thanks iPhone SE).
I’m a technology hobbyist; love to follow everything related to technology, especially in relation to mobility. That is probably what attracts me to Apple so much. Anyway, I was on a search for latest news about Apple Watch as rumors are now swirling of an event in March. Anyway, long story short, I came across an article from a blog I don’t commonly follow, Macworld.co.uk. But as I was reading an article about latest rumors, I immediately noticed I was having a terrible time reading it. Here is a snapshot of what I am talking about –
This brings us to the topic of today, selecting a web font, but what is more important UI (user interface) vs UX (user experience)? In my example above Macwrold chose to use a lightweight font called Aktiv Grotesk, a very pretty font, I must say BUT only if used correctly. Like any font, there are many ways to manipulate it, including Font Weight and Font Height. Macworld is using it not only for first heading but subsequent headings. In the example above, h2, has the settings of:
Font Weight: 200
Font Size: 1.5em
Font Weight 200 turns the font into lightweight giving it the modern clean simple look. If we increase font weight to 300, we lose the goal of the font.
That leaves us with Font Size. If you play with the Adobe Typekit or even better, codepen.io, you can fine-tune the CSS settings. After a few trial and error, I discovered that Font Size is best read at 3.1em or 50px as shown below while maintaining the preferred Font Weight:
So what is your thoughts? When should UI be sacrificed for UI in regards to font? Any other tricky fonts out there?
With recent acceptance from Adobe with Creative Suite 2016 parting ways with Adobe Flash, more and more signs point to the final bow (goodbye) to flash in next 2 years. Per a report from Encoding.com, as referenced in The Verge article (http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/27/10840480/flash-dead-in-two-years-webm), Flash makes up only 6% of multimedia for mobile and Web today, down from 14% in 2014. The article points out some interesting observations of what is actually replacing Flash today, with what appears to be a final battle between the royalty-free codec WebM (http://www.webmproject.org/) commonly found in HTML5 and H.264 with its eventual successor H.265 to support 4K video.
A feature that has been around for a while now in Chrome and Safari, Firefox now has jumped on the Push Notification bandwagon. Push notifications with desktop browsers brings the benefit of content providers push information to the user without requiring them to have their site open in the tabs. If you are an active user of Chrome for instance and use Gmail/Facebook, you might have noticed popup notices in the bottom of your screen, these are push notifications (of course, if you allowed such services). Why is this important? This opens new possibilities in ecommerce for example. Cart Abandonment results in large potential revenue losses. Instead of sending a traditional email which results in loss of valuable time, we can now push a notice to a customer to complete their order in a timely fashion.
Read More here:
Support in Microsoft Edge browser is still classified as “under consideration”
Chrome on iOS has just released a new update (v48). The biggest change is that they trashed their own rendering engine in favor of iOS 9’s extendable engine WKWebView, resulting in significant drop in crash rate and faster JavaScript execution (i.e. it is super fast, putting it on par with Safari).
http://9to5mac.com/2016/01/27/chrome-ios-stability-speed-wkwebview/
Chrome v48 (for Desktop), released yesterday, has a new security panel in the browser’s DevTools (F12). This will help clarify content origin, certificate validity and other items related to your browsing safety. Read more here – http://blog.chromium.org/2016/01/introducing-security-panel-in-devtools.html
Microsoft has a feature in Visual Studio that helps developers port existing iOS app code to the UWP to help close the app gap between Windows 10 mobile platform and well-established iOS. To support this effort, Microsoft has been releasing a series of articles, all of which is introduced here – http://www.winbeta.org/news/ios-developers-get-introduced-to-visual-studios-for-developing-universal-windows-10-apps.
UPDATE: Appears that the Check for Updates in the Skype app is not pushing version 7.18 automatically (i.e. it is not marked as a “recommended update” yet from MS), you have to manually download the update from Skype.com for now.
So I forgot to post a notice a month ago (shame on me) but at the time, Skype version 7.17.X (for Windows) had 2 crippling issues:
Personally, I saw issue #2, not so much issue #1, but many saw one or the other (or both). At the time, the best solution was to download an older build and go back to 7.16.X.
Recently I have been on a kick with creating GIFs to help provide visual reproduction at work, but did not want to deal with MP4s. I originally used SnagIt desktop app to create the video (I LOVE SnagIt, and Camtasia at that) then I used an online tool to convert. This worked but, way too many steps. But what if I could do it with SnagIt directly?
I did some searching on SnagIt community site and came across this blog Techsmith has a free (YES FREE) extension for Google Chrome browser that lets you capture either screen grabs or videos (more details here). And now (well back in November 2014), one of the export options is GIF (if video is recorded under 20 seconds).
Sadly, this feature is not built into SnagIt Desktop or Camtasia, too bad… hopefully in future release it will be added. At least there is a workaround. 🙂
Everything about Nothing in a world about Everything 