Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Announcing a new whitepaper!

Hi everyone!

It has been quite quiet here on this blog since last month, but there’s of course some reasons for that.
I would like to use this opportunity to give you a heads-up on an upcoming whitepaper that I have been working on together with a few other subject matter experts.

This blog post is not about the specific whitepaper itself, but the goal is rather to give you an explanation of why we are having this approach – putting a lot of effort into a whitepaper instead of publishing books.

I have personally been authoring books myself, and also together with other authors. The experience was interesting to say the least, and also required a lot of my time. Not just to do the research, testing and writing, but also to meet the deadlines, engage with reviewers and much more.
In short, the flexibility you have to modify – or even change the subject, is very very limited when working with books.

The limited flexibility is a showstopper in a business where drastic changes (as in new features and releases) happens at a much faster cadence than ever before.
In order to be able to adopt, learn and apply all what’s happening, – writing whitepapers seems like a better idea than doing books.

At least this is what we think. When discussing this with some of our peers, we often get questions around royalties etc. to be honest, you will never ever get rich by writing a book, unless you are writing some fiction about some magic wizard with glasses, or a girl describing her fantasies of a rich man.

So jokes aside, we do this because of the following reasons:

·         We enjoy doing it

This is not a secret at all. Of course we will spend some massive amount of time on these projects, and probably our significant others would have a grin every now and then. But we enjoy so much, that it is worth the risk and potential penalty we might get.

·         For our own learning and knowledge

Let us be honest. We dive deep into this to learn it by heart. There’s no secret that the technology we will cover will be our bread and butter, so we better know what we are doing.

·         To share it with the community

Do it once –and do it right. We spend a lot of our time in forums, conferences, etc and engage with the community. Being able to point towards a rather comprehensive guide that many can benefit from, instead of supporting 1:1 is beneficial for all of us

·         Recognition

If you do something good and useful, I can ensure you that many people – regardless whether they know you or not, will appreciate it and give you credits. We’ve heard several times from our previous whitepaper (Hybrid Cloud with NVGRE (Cloud OS) ) that it helped peers, IT-pro’s, engineers, students and CxO’s to make a real difference. This is probably worth the effort all alone.

So let me introduce you to the upcoming whitepaper that will hit the internet very shortly:

“Cloud Consistency with Azure Resource Manager”

This whitepaper will focus on cloud consistency using Azure Resource Manager in both the public cloud with Azure, as well as the private and hosted clouds with Azure Stack.

I won’t disclose more about the content, structure or the initial thoughts right now, but I encourage you to stay tuned and download it once it is available on the TechNet Gallery.

Thanks for reading!