- Poll: How reliable are ChatGPT and Bing Chat? - Tue, May 23 2023
- Pip install Boto3 - Thu, Mar 24 2022
- Install Boto3 (AWS SDK for Python) in Visual Studio Code (VS Code) on Windows - Wed, Feb 23 2022
Member of the Year
Last year's year Member of the Year is also the undisputed 4sysops Member of the Year 2019. Paolo Maffezzoli has contributed in the forums and the wiki, and he posted the most news. The runner up is Luc Fullenwarth, who led the member competition at the beginning of the year. You can find last year's member leader board here.
According to our stats, many 4sysops readers like these news updates because we counted quite a few clicks. It is great way to stay up to date in a fast-changing IT world.
IT pros are facing an increasing need to specialize because the complexity of IT systems is growing rapidly. However, I believe it is important not to lose sight of the bigger picture because it will offer new opportunities in the future. The higher you climb the career ladder, the broader your IT knowledge needs to be.
The links to IT news we post on 4sysops give you an overview of what is happing in the entire IT administration world. The best way to follow this news is to simply visit the 4sysops IT Administration News page regularly. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed of all 4sysops activity.
If you like our news, I suggest you occasionally "like" the update or post a comment (after signing in), so we know what kind news you want to see more often on 4sysops.
Paolo Maffezzoli Luc Fullenwarth Mike Kanakos Wolfgang Sommergut
Author of the Year
This year's Author of the Year is Mike Kanakos, who published one block buster article. You will never guess the topic. It is not about PowerShell and not about Azure. It is not about any of the topics that are hyped at the big IT conferences. This is the most popular 4sysops article of the year 2019:
Deploying printers using Group Policy
That's a wow, huh? If you visited a Microsoft conference recently, you might have heard that Group Policy is a dead end and all automation is now done with PowerShell anyway. You could object that one well performing article doesn't say much. But can you guess the topic of the second most popular article in 2019?
New GPO settings in Windows 10 1903: enforce updates, Storage Sense, and logon
This is kind of amazing because we published A LOT about PowerShell and Azure in 2019 and only very little about Group Policy. However, the most popular PowerShell article is only ranked #5 and the most popular Azure article is ranked #17!
In fact, many of the old Group Policy articles we published years ago are still very popular because admins are searching for these kinds of topics on Google. How is this possible? Microsoft keeps telling us that today, it's all about DevOps, the cloud, and automation (where "automation" is just another word for "scripting").
To be honest, it is nothing new for me that Microsoft is hyping certain topics that don't really reflect reality in the IT world. We have lots of data on 4sysops, and of course, I always keep an eye on it. I can tell you that all Azure topics perform badly.
However, there is no doubt that Microsoft earns a lot with Azure. Redmond doesn't really have a choice but to push Azure because the old cash cow, Windows, gives less and less cash. Nobody is willing to pay for an operating system that has nothing really new to offer and is full of bugs.
So how is it possible that Azure is doing so well in terms of cash for Microsoft if articles about Azure find little interest among IT pros? The answer is simple. Cloud computing is mostly of interest for very large organizations or for businesses of the new digital economy. The latter are in Amazon's cloud (like 4sysops). The large brick-and-mortar businesses, which have always been married to Redmond, run their stuff in Azure. Naturally, very large organizations have lots of cash and this flows now into Azure.
However, the vast majority of IT pros do not work for these large organizations. Large businesses only employ a tiny fraction of all workers; most employees are hired by small and mid-sized brick-and-mortar businesses. And these small organizations don't need any kind of DevOps culture simply because they don't have any kind of dev. They just run a couple of Windows PCs with standard software and if they do any cloud computing, they have perhaps an Office 365 subscription.
Of course, these small and mid-sized brick and mortar businesses still need to deploy printers with Group Policy—which explains why Mike is the 4sysops Author of the Year.
By the way, the author of the second most popular article is Wolfgang Sommergut. He is also the runner up in our author competition. To be fair, Wolfgang published 37 articles in 2019 on 4sysops, whereas Mike only published 6. It is much harder to rank well with many articles because for the competition we calculate the average number of page views.
Finding good topics that are of interest to a large number of IT pros is very difficult, and finding many relevant topics requires a lot of expertise and experience. Wolfgang has several articles in the top 20 and almost all of his articles perform above average. If you understand German, you might want to check out his own website, windowspro.de.
You can find the entire member leader board of 2019 here.
Contributing on 4sysosps
If you want to contribute as a member to 4sysops, please read this article, which explains all the options.
We are also always looking for new authors. If you are a conventional Windows admin who loves Group Policy and GUIs in general, you are very much welcome to publish on 4sysops. Don't think that you have nothing to contribute because your field of expertise is not so sexy as the topics of your DevOps colleagues.
Despite what you hear in Microsoft conferences, GUI administration still rules the IT world. And if you still believe that IT is now all about DevOps and the cloud, feel free to bash my view in a comment below. 😉
Subscribe to 4sysops newsletter!
I want to take this opportunity to thank all members, authors, and readers who contributed to 4sysops in 2019. Happy New Year!
Congrats to Wolfgang Sommergut for a great year of work! 37 articles are a huge volume of writing.
I should also note it that Wolfgang, Adam Bertam, Vladan Seget combined for 120 articles this year. Congrats on all the writing! Quality work from an outstanding group of writers.
Mike, you are right. However, you have to take into account that all three are pro bloggers which means they blog for their living whereas the other authors are IT pros who don't have that much time for blogging. Needless to say that I hope you have more time for blogging in 2020. 🙂
Good job everyone 🙂
Michael you got a point there with the corp vs. SMB business. I was working in corporations for 15 years and it was always a position focussing pretty much on small area, or with just a little reach to other areas. Whereas when I left 2 months ago and started to work for SMB companies, suddenly I have to deal with multiple areas. It is also a good source now for article topics hehe 🙂
I would be also nice to see a bit more traffic on the forums here on 4sysops.
Great year 2020 to all.
Yeah, admins in SMBs have to wear many hats and therefore usually don't have the time to "automate." Instead they need an OS and management tools where everything is already automated.