Introduction and First Blog Post

Who am I and what do I want to do with my blog.

First, my name is Doug Gabbard and I am a Senior Premier Field Engineer working at Microsoft focusing on directory services.  I been working in the field with our customers seeing both small and very large enterprise environments.   I Enjoy working with customer environments (big and small) and appreciate the connections I get to make with talented engineers I meet on a weekly basis.

I have been toying with posting a blog for some time and today is the day.  There are many blogs, so why another one.  Couple of reasons.  I have made many connections to engineers at various customers and often we reproduce how something works or create a lab to troubleshoot an issue - I want to share some of that with you (don't worry - I won't be putting your names in any of my posts for obvious reasons).  Another reason is I love to learn and it is through "doing it" when I learn the most.

Since I am about "doing it" to learn, my blog post will be mainly focused on labs to reproduce an issue or to understand the inner workings of some aspect of directory services.  Many classes we attend have labs that instruct us how to complete the lab.  However, those labs typically start with "click start, all programs, administrative tools, ……"  So, the labs I am going to post are going to assume you know how to do basic tasks.  If for example the lab requires RSAT tools on a Windows 7 client, you will see a step that states "install RSAT on the Windows 7 client."   If you don't know how to perform the step you can search on www.bing.com to find out how.

I will struggle with the formatting of how I share the labs, but it will improve with comments from you.  You will find that my grammar will falter at times, please be kind.  My goal is to publish useful labs.

In the next week or two I will publish my first lab blog.  The lab will be how to create a lab environment from a production environment running Windows 2003 to prepare for an upgrade to Windows 2008 or Windows 2008R2.  This will give you a lab that you can then use for other testing and for future labs I post.  I will never recommend that you practice my labs in your production environment.  Test Test Test!