Welcome to my blog

I'm Michael J. Murphy, a TechNet Presenter on Microsoft's SST team. That means I'm one of the guys you see on TechNet Webcasts, chats and delivering live *FREE* TechNet seminars. Recently, I executed the Active Directory Inside Out! webcast series, 11 webcasts over 11 weeks designed to cover the key components and the relationships among those components in Active Directory.

If you're looking for resources on Active Directory, from fundamental concepts to DNS dependencies to the What's New In AD 2003, check out the archived webcasts accesible from https://www.microsoft.com/seminar/events/series/adaug.mspx .

In conjunction with that series we hosted 10 live chats that brought together AD experts from Microsoft Consulting Services, Product Support Services and the Active Directory Product Group to answer questions from IT pros around the world, regarding their AD infrastructures. The transcripts from these chats can be found at https://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/trans/default.mspx#ECAA under the Windows Server 2003 heading.

While projects like this provide exceptional value for our customers and a technical resource for literally thousands of IT pros they are only one component of my job here at Microsoft. Our mission on the TechNet team is to engage with the IT pro community, providing useful "how to" information and serve as a resource for our customers.

*FREE* live technical seminars delivered in over 250 cities in the US each year gives the technical experts on our team the opportunity to meet face to face with you, the IT pro community, in your hometowns, discuss the day to day real world problems you face and assist you with real solutions to those problems. 

My principal focus is the execution of those live events. You can find information on when we'll be in your city at www.TechNetBriefings.com . Though I could be asked to travel anywhere in the US, I generally cover the New York and New Jersey markets. Next Tuesday January 25th I'll be in Bergen, NJ and on Thursday the 27th Manhattan.

With support for NT 4 having ended 12/31/04 (see the article at https://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/productinfo/availability/retiring.asp) we're offering sessions on Migrating from NT 4 to Active Directory, Migrating Line of Business Applications to Server 2003 and Migrating Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003; all very timely issues for some 40,000 customers. I encourage you to come out and see us, speak with our presenters and spend some of your valuable time getting ready for the big move! Oh, you get a t-shirt too.

That's a little bit about my job and what I do for Microsoft. What about me personally? I live on a lake in Northeast Pennsylvania. It's snowing outside now, fresh powder covering the layers of ice and snow from previous storms. I can barely see the mountains in the distance beyond the stand of pines that ring the opposite shore of the frozen lake. Frozen, that is, except in one spot by the outlet that the ducks have managed to keep open through sheer determination.

There's a sunroom attached to the house that I use as an office, there's a fire burning in the grate now and my son, Jack is sleeping soundly, I can hear the steady rhythm of his breathing on the baby monitor.

I grew up on this lake, my folks still live in the house I was raised in. It sits on a hill overlooking a cove at the far end of the lake, it's many windows ablaze with light at night and staring blankly out by day. Across the street from there is a 350 acre farm with as many again acres of woods I used to roam freely and securely as a child, eating my fill of blackberries, blueberries and raspberries in the summer, stealing apples and pears from the neighboring orchard in the fall and sledding in the winter.

Much of the farm land around here has disappeared to make room for tract housing, field becoming neighborhoods in the midst of still more fields. There's still a lot of open land though, so I know Jack will have the same advantages when he's a little older.

I was first introduced to micro computers in the 8th grade, that's almost 25 years ago now, mainframes the summer before freshman year of high school and they’ve been part of my life ever since. I love what I do and hope to keep doing it for a while.

Give me your feedback, ask me questions, I'll be happy to help if I can.

And now the disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.