Every once in a while, we all come across a magazine, newspaper or web article that we can personally don a perfect "toilet read". Not too long, not boring and relatively informative. It's been a while since I've found a good toilet read, but MCPMag has published 5 articles in one issue that meet my qualifications. Apparently, MCPMag is going to cover "Taking Control of Your Environment" articles throughout the year starting with the January issue that is at newsstands now. In the January issue, there are 5 articles that were written with taking control of your environment in mind. They are:

• Take Control of Your Network
  
• Take Control of Your Security
  
• Take Control of Your Users
  
• Take Control of Your Vendors
  
• Take Control of Your Career
  

If they keep pushing the subject all year like they said they are going to, it will be refreshing to see MCPMag going this direction. (We'll have to see how resilient they are... I know their customer support sucks... I've been an MCSE for over 7 years and the damn magazine still has never been delivered to my house even though I've tried and tried to make it happen and I've even been willing to pay for it).

One of my goals with this blog was never to reveal that I'm a Windows guy because people tend to get all caught up in that. Yes, some of my roots are with Windows, but I'm not and will never be a Windows bigot. I'm open to anything. Windows environments, however, are where I have the most experience and I refer to them on various occasions. My point with the blog, however, is that computer people are a special breed whether they are all Windows all the time or whether they worship the Linux movement. It doesn't matter. We all have users that want to print pretty documents, send emails to their friends and play solitare whenever they are bored. This blog is dedicated to supporting your network environment regardless of the chosen hardware and software.

Having said that, the 5 articles that I'm referring to are very Windows specific, but they do touch on ways to do things whether you're dealing with Windows environments or not. What's important here is that MCPMag is trying to get people to take a more proactive approach to their networks in lieu of the normal everyday reactive approach that we are all so attached to. There's not enough of this in big publications.

MCPMag gets things rolling, but the articles fail to acknowledge one glaring piece missing from the utopian network environment pie. They sidestep the HOW. We, as professionals, know that we need to be proactive. We can shove policies and rules up our users' asses until we are blue in the face, but there will always be a cute sectretary batting her eyes in exchange for the Local Administrator's password on her machine (I avoided the word "box" there on purpose). There also will always be a dorky developer type that you can't stand dealing with so much that you give him a non-standard dual monitor configuration so he'll leave you alone. And don't forget about the special treatment the high-level too dangerous for their own good executive types get from day to day. These things happen. Coming up with rules and policies and different ways of saying "no" are useless. We've been trying for over 2 decades. Give up.

What we as technical professionals need to do is build our support environment as the foundation of our existence. Rather than building our network and then supporting it, we need to build it with supporting it in mind. How we do this is the next step in how our networks will be managed now and in the future.

To that end, I'm going to spend the rest of the week publishing a 3-part article based on the aforementioned MCPMag articles. Rather than this being my critical response to these articles, I'd like to agree with most of what they say and then build on them. Add the HOW if you will. Part 1 will be published late tomorrow, so your job until then is to read the articles from the MCPMag. Keep them close to your heart and then prepare to learn how to use the advice in the real world.