Time management is a key skill for work and life.  I’ve posted my collection of Time Management Quotes on Sources of Insight.   While organizing my collection of quotes, I got clarity on a handful of lessons for time management:

• Time is what you make of it. 
• You don’t have time, you make it. 
• It’s your most valuable resource. 
• Invest time.  Investing in your time is investing in your life. 
• Don’t dwell on the train you missed.  Catch the next train.  
• Time changes what’s important. You can’t buy time. 
• Time is all we have.  
• Time is a teacher.
• Time is a judge. 
• Time is a healer. 
• Time is a friend.

I posted a draft of our Cloud Security Frame at Shaping Software.  This frame is especially important because we’re using it to help us map out the Cloud security space for our patterns & practices Cloud Security Guidance project.  It’s helps us scope our project.  The frame is basically a set of Hot Spots.  We use the Hot Spots to find, organize, and share principles, patterns, and practices.  We also use the Hot Spots to find pain points and opportunity or to organize key engineering decisions.  Here is our current set of Hot Spots:

• Auditing and Logging
• Authentication
• Authorization
• Communication
• Configuration Management
• Cryptography
• Exception Management
• Sensitive Data
• Session Management
• Validation

In this case, since it’s a security frame, we’re using the Hot Spots to organize threats, attacks, vulnerabilities and countermeasures.  This helps make the information more actionable and relevant.  We’re sharing this early and often so that you can give feedback and help us shape it as we go.

If you’re familiar with any of the following guides, this Hot Spot approach should look familiar:

• App Arch Guide 2.0
• WCF Security Guide
• Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability
• Improving Web Application Security: Threats and Countermeasures

Check out our evolving Cloud Security Frame and provide your feedback in the comments.

Have you thought about your default thinking patterns?   I wrote a post on 3 Thinking Techniques to Improve Your Intellectual Horsepower at Sources of Insight.    I use these 3 techniques fairly regularly.  If you think about thinking as simply asking and answering questions, then improving your questions, can improve your answers.  That’s the power of these 3 techniques; they are simple ways to improve your questions to improve you results.

What’s your favorite thinking technique?

As a follow up to our earlier patterns & practices Cloud Security Survey, here is a quick summary of the results.  Note that the the bulk of our respondents said they spend most of their time in architect roles.  The next biggest buckets were developers and testers.

Key Take Aways
Here are some highlights from the survey:

• As far as cloud adoption, there is fairly even spread in adoption from evaluation to testing to engaged migrations, with a slightly heavier emphasis on testing.
• There is significant interest in data handling within the cloud, such as confining data to geographic regions.
• There is significant interest in infrastructure and process related security issues such as SLA’s, policies, and intellectual property.
• There is significant interest in threats and countermeasures.
• There is some interest in OpenID as an authentication / authorization approach.
• There is some interest in ingress/IP filtering.
• There is some interest in eDiscovery.
• There is some interest in HIPPA.

App Scenarios in Rank Order
Here are the top application scenarios in rank order based on respondents:

• A cloud-based service used by different Enterprises (federated scenario).
• An internet facing web application, deployed on the cloud.
• An enterprise specific web application, deployed on the cloud.
• An enterprise specific web application, deployed on premises using cloud-based services.
• An enterprise specific web application, deployed on-premises using cloud-based services and cloud storage.

Authentication in Rank Order
Here is are the top authentication mechanisms in rank order based on respondents:

• Windows Authentication
• Forms Authentication
• Cert Authentication
• Windows Live

I think one of the most interesting things we've done as a result of the survey is we started to collect and organize relevant industry standards.  We'll try to find any relevant technical intersections (our focus is on technical guidance.)

I wrote a post on how Poor Communication isn’t the Source of Most Conflicts at Sources of Insight.  The gist is this: rather than blame communication as the source of conflict, explore other sources as well.  For example, conflict can also stem from how your group is organized, to personality conflicts, or conflicts in values.  When you know what the source is, you can use the right tool for the job.

If you take our patterns & practices satisfaction survey, you can let us know which patterns & practices assets you use and how satisfied you are with the assets, as well as how satisfied you are with overall patterns & practices results. 

To browse patterns & practices, here are some key links:

• patterns & practices Dev Center (MSDN)
• patterns & practices MSDN Library Node (Browse the tree on the left)

patterns & practices Catalog
For easy reference, I’ve shared a simplified view of how I look at our patterns & practices catalog:

My Related Posts

• Cheat Sheet: patterns & practices Catalog
• My Projects on MSDN
• patterns & practices Complete Catalog

I wrote a post on A Language for Strengths on Sources of Insight.  It's my attempt to consolidate and share the best information I've found for learning and talking about strengths and talents.  I'm a big believer in focusing on your strengths.  I know that when I spend more time in my strengths, I have more energy, I get more done, and I improve my impact.  It's about giving my best where I have my best to give.  It sounds simple and obvious, yet, before I had a lens for strengths and talents it was more hit or miss.  Now, I can more effectively zoom in on my strengths because I have a vocabulary for them.

As I've been helping people find jobs, write their resumes, find their passions, and unleash their best, I've been relying heavily on first helping them find their natural strengths and talents.  This gives them the drive and the staying power to deal with whatever life throws at them, as well as gives them a competitive edge.  The key in today's landscape, is to bring your unique combination of strengths to the table.  I think that while it's a skills-for-hire economy for the short-term, it's a play-to-your-strengths life for the long term.

To learn the map of the 34 strengths and get started on your strengths quest, read my post, A Language for Strengths.

I'm inviting you to take our survey at http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB229GHH4CD36 for our Microsoft patterns & practices Cloud Security guidance project.  It's brief (11 questions on one page), and it gives you a chance to influence our priorities and focus for building prescriptive guidance.

We’re in the early stages of planning and exploration.  During exploration, we do the following:

• Survey customers for their pain points.
• Frame out the hot spots and opportunities.
• Build a prioritized backlog based on customer input.
• Map out end-to-end application scenarios.
• Identify the key technical challenges and tasks.
• Identify the key technical questions.
• Identify the key risks for arch spikes and prototyping.

Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts.