When Software Attacks!

More UK TechDays on System Center 2012 and Windows 8

Our good friends in the UK TechDays team have announced another raft of events in their fantastic IT Camps series. I’m hoping to be there for at least on of them and if you’re at all interested in Windows 8 or System Center 2012 I cant recommend them highly enough. No slides, no marketing – just technical content, demo driven with as much audience participation as they can manage. Everyone I’ve spoken to at previous camps has enjoyed them and learned a great deal.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, January 27, 2013

Upcoming presentations

It’s the start of a new year and my engagement diary is filling rapidly. Once again I am covering a wide range of topics for an equally broad audience which is something I really enjoy. January 15th will find me in Manchester at a Microsoft event for Fire Services. I’m giving an overview of Windows Azure PaaS and IaaS services and how they might be used to complement as well as replace existing IT systems.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, January 14, 2013

IT Camp Leeds Roundup

WP_000140 Yesterday was great fun and I was really pleased to see so many Black Marble event regulars at the IT Camp. It was great to hear so many requests for more events like it in Leeds. We’re all keen to run more, but we need people to attend and give us feedback in order to be able to do that. I hope those of you who were there took away useful knowledge from the event.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, February 29, 2012

My Boss has brought his iPad! Consumer devices in corporate networks

There’s a new term in town – Consumerisation of IT. All of us who work in IT should care about this because it’s going to have a deep impact on the approach many of us have taken when deploying services to our organisations. I don’t profess to be a thought leader on this topic, although I find it interesting that I have been dealing with the ‘problem’ here at Black Marble ever since we started up many moons ago.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Hands-on Microsoft IT Camps–we’ll be there and you should too!

Andy and I are really pleased to be able to help our friends at Microsoft with their latest idea for engaging with IT Professionals. Next week (Tuesday 28th February) sees the first in a series of new IT Camps taking place in Leeds. The idea is to run a full day event that is very light on PowerPoint and heavy on the hands-on, roll up your sleeves and install things as a group.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, February 24, 2012

See you at @media09? Tickets are still available

Lauren and I set off for London later to today. It’s @media time again and I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. As usual Patrick Griffiths has lined up a fantastic group of really inspirational speakers and, whilst smaller in the light of the current climate, I have no doubts that it will be useful. I’ve been to every @media since it started and I’ve always had a great time.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Speaking at VBUG Newcastle in July

Andy Westgarth and the guys at VBUG Newcastle very kindly invited me to speak about and demo some of what I consider to be key features in Windows 7 and Server 2008. If you read the blog and would like to see what I really look like, are interested in the topic of the talk or interested in VBUG in general, come along! The venue is Newcastle University (a campus I’ve never visited before so I’m quite looking forward to that).

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Community Launch Events

A big thanks to everybody who came to the Server 2008 launch event last week. Andy and myself had a great time presenting to such an enthusiastic crowd. In the end we ran long because of the amount of dialogue around the new features of Server 2008 and I hope everyone went away having got something useful. Now I need to reduce the two hours of material down to a perky 45 minutes for delivery at the VBug-hosted launch event on April 30th.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, April 14, 2008