Authors and members of the year 2021

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Michael Pietroforte

Michael Pietroforte is the founder and editor in chief of 4sysops. He has more than 35 years of experience in IT management and system administration.

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Author of the year is again Leos Marek, who also won our author competition last year. To be fair, Leos published only seven articles, which makes it a bit easier to win because the ranking is based on the average number of page views for all articles during the year. Sometimes, one blockbuster article is enough to get a good ranking. This year Leo's blockbuster article was about installing PowerShell 7.1.

Interestingly, this was not the best-performing article. Paul Middleton's article about Microsoft LAPS performed even better. Paul didn't make it into the top three because we require a minimum of six articles to take part in the author competition.

Tim Warner is the runner-up in our author competition. Like Leos, he only published seven articles, one of which was the blockbuster article that secured him second place. This is the shift of interest mentioned in the introduction—this is the first time that an article about Azure has made the top five. Tim's article covered the difference between Azure AD registration and Azure AD join.

In general, articles about cloud computing performed better than in previous years. It appears that more and more small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) have started to move at least parts of their IT to the cloud. The number of admins working for SMBs outweighs the number of IT pros in larger organizations simply because, in general, all SMBs together employ many more people than large companies.

Distribution of private sector employees in Canada. Source: Statistics Canada

Thus, even though cloud providers have grown rapidly in recent years, this has little impact on the average admin because all that growth mostly comes from large enterprises. If the trend for SMBs continues, then we can expect that Azure might outpace Amazon in the near future simply because most SMBs are Windows shops.

Needless to say, classical on-premises topics still dominate the IT landscape. This is one of the reasons why Wolfgang Sommergut reached third place in our competition. Wolfgang posted 55 articles, and the majority of his posts are top performers.

By the way, we are always looking for new authors. If you are interested, please read this first.

There is little change in our member competition. Paolo Maffezzoli was once again the most active 4sysops member in 2021. He posts the latest news for IT pros almost daily. You won't miss any news relevant for IT admins if you follow his news updates.

The second-place member goes to our author of the year, Leos Marek. He received most of his points for answering reader questions in blog comments and in the 4sysops forums.

Vignesh Mudliar secured third place in our member competition. He occasionally posted news, but many of his member points also came from blog comments. I should mention that Vignesh made fourth place in our author competition. He mostly writes about Microsoft 365, which has been one of the most popular cloud topics this year.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all 4sysops authors and members for their contributions in 2021. And for 2022, I wish everyone reading this post a Happy New Year!