Archives : Mike Lazar

Catch the (Google) Wave!

published on 2009/06/03 by Mike Lazar

I know there's been buzz about it for a while, but I only recently watched the demo for Google Wave. To say I was blown away would be an understatement. I sat there for the majority of the 1:20 video in stunned silence. For those of you who do not know me, I have been preaching about knowledge management for the better part of this decade. I've even preached about it in previous blog entries. While my dream of true knowledge networks and collaboration has yet to be realized, it wasn't due to a lack of effort on anyone's part.......

Catch the (Google) Wave!

More on Exchange 2010 -- Cloud or Premise?

published on 2009/05/20 by Mike Lazar

Well, why not both? Exchange 2010 will allow customers to run a hybrid approach between cloud and premise based services. This is another feature that I find very intriguing. Microsoft has obviously made a huge splash wit BPOS (Microsoft Online). They have announced a few very large customers, and many smaller enterprises are moving to it or kicking the tires. Microsoft is looking to find a new source of annuity revenue to guard against the possibility of a major drop in their core Office and Server revenue streams. As Microsoft drives customers to BPOS, they know that many will be......

More on Exchange 2010 -- Cloud or Premise?

Will Exchange 2010 be a game changer?

published on 2009/05/05 by Mike Lazar

I recently had a few of my consultants attend training on the upcoming release of Microsoft Exchange. They came back very impressed (not surprising), but what they told me actually impressed me a lot (fairly surprising). Over the next few weeks I plan on highlighting a few of the key feature enhancements. Now that Exchange 2010 is in beta and a lot of the performance metrics are known, it's time to discuss them.Today's featured improvement, and frankly the one that really caught me by surprise, is the MASSIVE improvement in I/O. Microsoft is claiming up to 50% better IOPS than......

The hidden cost of losing talent

published on 2009/03/31 by Mike Lazar

Well, perhaps it's not completely hidden, but it is one that is not fully appreciated in my view. The cost I am talking about is the loss of knowledge. I'm not just talking about the knowledge of doing the job and what it takes to train the replacement. That matters, but that usually is a quick ramp up of a few weeks to a few months. What concerns me is the loss of true knowledge that only exists in that former employee's brain. The ability to take that information and convey it in a logical and engaging fashion to a......

The hidden cost of losing talent

The Social Media Explosion - I'm Now a Believer!

published on 2009/01/24 by Mike Lazar

First, let me tell you that while I am fairly technical and usually right on the edge of the technology curve, I've been a bit slow to embrace certain aspects of social media. One reason is that I simply can't do anything halfway. I was afraid that if I got into a social network, I would become consumed by it and spend every waking moment updating my status, reading about others, and making snarky comments to my friends. My family would think I had disappeared, and I would slowly morph into the people from Wall-E...never leaving my chair and ever......