Collaboration has been and will continue to be one of the important business advantages that the Cloud can deliver to an organisation. Collaboration can be thought of as not just connecting people to one another and improving their day to day working practices, but also enabling and encouraging collaboration between people and data.
Black Marble can support your move to the cloud for collaboration services between people and data. We can help your organisation realise the full potential of people to people collaboration using services such as SharePoint and, in particular for this white paper, Microsoft Teams. Our approach will help you identify how Microsoft’s collaboration solutions can improve your ways of working, whilst helping you visualise your end goal.
Positively Impacting your Organisation with Collaborative Working.
SPWakeUp version 1.2.0 has been released. This version includes the ability to import a list of additional URLs to be woken from a file instead of providing a series of URLs to be included individually on the command line.
Use the ‘-IncludeFile:’ command line parameter to specify the full path to the file containing URLs to be imported.
The file specified should contain a list of URLs one per line.
You can do this by hand within the Pipeline UI, with a lot of cut and pasting, but much easier is to use the excellent Yamlizr – Azure DevOps Classic-to-YAML Pipelines CLI from Alex Vincent. A single CLI command exports everything with a Team project into a neat folder structure of template base YAML.
With DevOps best practices and Microsoft’s DevOps tooling, Black Marble can deliver agile planning, source code control, package management, build, testing and release automation to continuously integrate, test, deliver and monitor your application.
It is crucial to not only have the right people in place for your cloud adoption journey, but also to use the right processes and the right tools. A typical DevOps approach consists of cross-functional teams provisioning their own infrastructure, with high degrees of automation using templates, codified rules for security controls and cloud-native architecture.
This is where the core aspects of continuous value delivery meet the demands currently driving companies; an integrated team approach including enterprise agile and cloud computing.
Over the last few years, I’ve spent a great deal of time working with police forces in the UK, and regularly have conversations with them about AI, and the potential impact on policing. More and more police forces are looking at AI in order to take advantage of the services available to drive insights from existing data, to produce the next generation of artificial intelligent applications. AI can be thought of as the pinnacle of data comprehension, analysis and insight, as a destination and a focused target for police forces to maintain their responsibility for huge amount of personal data which they hold. It needs quality and connected data and relies on solid governance and best practices to achieve reliable and good quality outcomes.
The new Police Digital and Data Strategy supports Policing Vision 2025 (the strategic direction of policing) and a key arm of that strategy includes how best to manage, analyse and share police data. AI offers unparalleled opportunities to police forces to make best use of their data.
For more information on Delivering AI in Policing, get in touch for a copy of my white paper.
There have been some major paradigm shifts in the history of computing with some of the most notable being marked, not only by changes in technology, but by changes in staffing that technology. When the computing standard for mainframe shifted to client/server, the staff model moved from computer operator to system administrator.
The same is true with a move to the cloud.
The cloud fundamentally changes how businesses procure and use technology resources. Traditionally, having had ownership and responsibility of all aspects of technology from infrastructure to software with the cloud, this allows businesses to provision and to consume resources only as needed. Moving to the cloud can bring increased business, agility, and significant costs benefits.
However, the journey to the cloud needs to be managed carefully at each stage; not just for delivery but for expectations and ROI. Even more significantly, the cloud opens up access to a range of on-demand cloud services, unavailable just 10 years previously. These include hyper-scaling, AI services and computing power; short-term consumption providing significant benefits.
All these services combined, provide business realisations that only the cloud can offer.
Transforming your business into a cloud-business is more than simply moving your systems and infrastructure into the cloud – your organisation needs a Cloud Operating Model (COM) to adopt a cloud-first mentality. It is important to guide your people away from traditional IT thinking, to ensure they realise business benefits and harness the true potential of the cloud, where adoption drives innovation. This white paper will cover how this can be achieved with the assistance of Black Marble.
For more information on Delivering an Enterprise Cloud Operating Model, get in touch for a copy of the white paper I put together with our CCO, Rik Hepworth.
Delivering an Enterprise Cloud Operating Model White Paper, 2nd Edition.
Due to the unusual circumstances of 2020, the 15th Developer!Developer!Developer! Daywill take place virtually. That means no catering or venue costs to meet, costs that are usually met via sponsorship, as we keep the cost of entry free. And I’ll be covering any incidental costs incurred.
However, we are still looking for support and sponsors, with the aim of using the funds to support TNMOC (The National Museum of Computing) – it’s a tough time for TNMOC right now, and they do such great work preserving our industry’s heritage, we wanted to make sure we put something back. So if your organisation would normally sponsor DDD, please consider making a donation, it would be deeply appreciated. Or if you are a member of our community who wants to support the museum, please do so here: TNMOC.
We had planned to run a DDD in October, but due to illness, this didn’t happen (we are all well now, phew!). With Christmas so close, hadn’t expected to have time to run a DDD, but with the world being as it is, we wanted to do something to bring some cheer to the Dev and IT community.
Therefore we are running DDD (virtually) on 12th December! We are still formalising the details, but wanted to get the message out there, and looking forward to all the submissions!
Since opening up the Call for Papers on Sessionizeyesterday, we already have 12 sessions from 9 speakers! Thank you all so much 😀
I have been wanting to return to this blog for some time, but a combination of things kept me busy. Not least of which, was a period of illness for me at the beginning of Spring, and for family at the start of September. All good now, and glad to be OK!
Plus, I’ve been keeping myself busy producing articles over on LinkedIn, as well writing a series of White Papers (6 down, more to come!), but I’ll blog more about those over the next few days.
It’s been an interesting year all around, Black Marble still busy, on-boarding new staff, and many new customers, a vast improvement to the start of the year!
I have had a ThinkPad Active Pen (model SD60G957200) ever since I got my Lenovo X1 Carbon Extreme.
The pen, when it works, has worked well. However, the problem has been that whether the pen and PC detected each other seemed very hit and miss.
Today I found the root cause. It was not drivers or dodgy Bluetooth as I had thought, but a weak spring inside the pen. It was not so weak that the battery rattled, but weak enough that the electrical circuit was not being closed reliably on the battery.
The fix was to replace the weak spring with new one out of an old ball point pen. Once this was done the pen became instantly reliable.
Wish I had spotted that sooner.
Updated 11 Nov 2020: I may have spoken too soon, it is back to it’s old behaviour today 🙁
However, I think it could just be the AAAA battery. Seems it is not a good idea to leave a battery in when the pen is not is use given the pen has no power switch.
