AMD Tech Tour 2012 - Miami

Welcome to :  AMD Tech Tour 2012 - Miami. 

The Westin Diplomat Golf Resort
501 Diplomat Parkway
Hallandale Beach, Florida 33009

This was a real nice presentation by AMD of their computer processors and various attributes.  You didn't make it?  Maybe you missed out on a XBox 360!  Anyways, real great show, excellent facilities and nourishment.  Check out the photo's by clicking HERE  .

Palm Beach IT Mtg, 10 Jul 12

During this evening's meeting of the Palm Beach IT group, Dave Simpson of Windstream presented Windstream's new offering, Allworx Systems.  Our colleague, Bret Bennet has summarized most of the presentation much more eloquently than I can:

"CPE Specialist David Simpson and Lynne gave a great presentation. Windstream now has a new “IP Simple” all-in-one VOIP/DATA/HARDWARE/TECHsupport bundle based on their own “Allworx” hardware platform. Given that Windstream owns Allworx, they can get very competitive with their bundles. From their site:

“ Windstream's IP Simple Solution provides network service and a state-of-the-art IP Phone System in an all-in-one communication powerhouse integrating feature-rich phone systems, advanced IP phones and powerful software features that can substantially improve your company's productivity and cost-savings. “

A few photo's and screen shots of the presentation (Click Here) will give you more technical and contact information.

Word Press MeetUp, Duncan Donuts, Davie Fl, 5 Jul 12

South Florida WordPress Meetup Group  Meeting at Duncan Donuts in Davie, Fl, 06:30 pm, 5 Jul 12.  A great meetup with lots of useful info.  First a reminder and instructions on how to apply the latest security upgrades to your WordPress site.  This is important - don't skip it!
2nd, the evenings main theme, application of the Facebook plugin on your site.  This is an important aspect of delivering more traffic to your site.  Touched on was the management of the plugin results, once enabled.  Hopefully, we'll get more feedback in this area as time goes on. 
In all a very worth the time experience.  Please check out photo essay and a few screen shots HERE .

This evening's fare:
Deerfield Beach Coders Cafe - 07/03/2012 - 6:30 - Casa May - Developing HTTP Services with ASP.NET Web API - Cecil Phillip

Interested in learning about building HTTP services? Want to know how you can easily leverage HTTP in your .NET projects? Come out and see how the ASP.NET Web API allows you to work with HTTP in interesting ways to create rich services that are easily accessible from various clients. Along the way, we’ll take a look at where Web API fits into the ASP.NET Web Stack and address topics such as Content Negotiation, Validation, and more...

Cecil Phillip is currently a Programmer Analyst at Nova Southeastern University. For over 5 years, his primary role has been developing web based solutions for both internal and also external clients using the .NET Framework. His current tool-set of choice comprises of C#, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, Entity Framework and SQL Server.. 

Please check out the screen shots and photo's by clicking HERE.

The South Florida WordPress Meetup Group  has been active lately. I was curious and wanted to enhance my Word Press background, so I attended a couple of Meetups.  I gotta say that it was time well spent.  Click HERE for more information and  details.

Palm Beach IT Group mtg at Christopher & Weisberg, P.A.

This month's meeting was hosted and presented by Karin Kennedy of Christopher & Weisberg, P.A.  The primary subject of the presentation was Service Management Agreement Contracts between IT service providers and their clients.  (Managed Services)

This story actually starts back several years ago when the Broward IT group was meeting at Citrix Hq in Ft Lauderdale.  Organizer, Scott brought in a presenter (I think from New Jersey) who had written a book promoting the concept of Managed Services for IT service providers.  Here we were introduced to concepts of service level agrements, menu of services available and bringing this together in the form of a contract.  I believe that there is also a gentleman in California that has written a similar book.

One important theme that is presented is that these contract concepts have to be modified / adapted to local city / county / state legal requirements.  One should not expect that templates for Sacramento, Ca. or Newton, NJ. to be legally sufficient in other areas.

Since that time, at locally hosted Microsoft Events, MS presenter J. J. Aquino has also given a Microsoft position talk on Microsoft's concept of IT Managed Services which (at least at that time) was highly encourage by Microsoft.

This meeting represents the first time that our groups (Broward & Palm) have reached out in a meeting to further develop the concept of Managed Services with a legal entity to address that portion of the concept.

One of the first things that we found out at this presentation was that presenters, Karin Kennedy and John Christopher are extremely technically knowledgeable.  They were quite comfortable discussing technical issues at our (tech) level.  There was a lot of education on both sides.  Among the subjects discussed were writing the contract for 'worst case scenarios' , setting of (client / vendor) expectations.  Precisely where is off-site back-up data physically stored - no cloudy answers - Shanghai may not be acceptable; how does one define the level of '(un)hackability' that is acceptable at what price level etc.

Got the drift?  Yes, if you didn't make it, you blew it again.  (Darn that ball game)  Regardless, I'm hoping that there will be follow-ups to this presentation, as ground seems to be just being broken and there is much more to learn.  Our thanks to John Vighetto (PBIT), Karin Kennedy and John Christopher (Christopher & Weisberg, P.A.) for this presentation.  See the photo's by clicking HERE  .

Deerfield Beach Coders' Cafe

 This month's Presenter was Barkha Herman.

Barkha has over 20 years of experience on mostly the Microsoft Stack. She currently owns two software companies - My-Guides.com - produces Touring software for mobile devices; Sweetleets.com create mostly Orchard based websites. Her "pet" project - Living-vegan.com; promotes a vegan lifestyle and hopes to be the premier destination for Vegans on the web.

Please click HERE to see the screen shots & group photo's.