DiegumZone. Who Wanna Be An Architect? : Aspiring Architects

ASAP: Messaging Services

diegumzone — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:26:00 GMT

Resuming our training for Aspiring Architects, here we got from MS India a third series, this time focused on the Messaging Infrastructure, its planning, constraints, scalability, etc

I want to thank Ramnish Singh (Infrastructure MCA in MS India) for this contribution, that I'm confident that will help a lot IT Pros raise the bar, start thinking on computing environments in a different manner and get the necessary background and skills

The remaining ingredients in the Architecture Career prescription is up to you, guys: experience, dedication and passion! Enjoy!

Introduction to Designing a Messaging Infrastructure
The Architecture Series is intended for those involved in planning, designing, and implementing an enterprise-class infrastructure project, including consultants, system architects, and IT professionals who are responsible for messaging infrastructure deployment. The series is aimed at empowering systems integrators and IT professionals with validated architectural guidance for Messaging.

Designing and planning messaging services
This session will cover the first major design decisions when creating an Messaging infrastructure - Directory Services. The session will highlight recommend Active Directory configurations, server deployment based on best practices, budget, and other business factors, network topology and provide technical recommendations and discuss new Exchange 2007 features.

Designing and planning high availability
This session will cover high availability solution based on client types and client loads. It will also cover design of policies to handle unsolicited e-mail and virus outbreaks, disaster recovery, backup, and restore solution. The presenter will also recommend a strategy for dependent services that impact high availability.

Designing and planning coexistence and migration
This session will cover the plan for migration of messaging systems. The presenter will also discuss various migration and coexistence strategies.

Defining policies and security procedures
This session will cover how to address regulatory and legal requirements. The presenter will also discuss message content filtering and how to design a secure messaging environment.

Notes from Field and Contest Case Study
This session will showcase the best practices followed for Messaging Architecture and will have panel of experts discuss their Enterprise (Messaging) Architecture experiences.

ASAP: The Network

diegumzone — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:00:00 GMT

After the initial success of the original Aspiring Software Architects Program, there was a second series focused on Infrastructure Architecture, especially related to Identity and Group Management, network planning, availability and so on

The program was a complete success so I asked Ramnish Singh (Infrastructure MCA in MS India) for the chance of making all these available for any aspiring architect all over the world (session language is English in all cases). I want to thank Ramnish for this contribution, that I'm confident that will help a lot IT Pros raise the bar, start thinking on computing environments in a different manner and get the necessary background and skills

The remaining ingredients in the Architecture Career prescription is up to you, guys: experience, dedication and passion! Enjoy!

Introduction to Designing an Active Directory Infrastructure
The Architecture Series is intended for those involved in planning, designing, and implementing an enterprise-class infrastructure project, including consultants, system architects, and IT professionals who are responsible for directory services infrastructure development and deployment. The series is aimed at empowering systems integrators and IT professionals with validated architectural guidance for Active Directory.

Designing a Forest and Domain Infrastructure
This session will cover the first major design decisions when creating an Active Directory infrastructure - Active Directory logical structure and the design of forests and domains.

Designing a Site Infrastructure
This session explains how to design a site topology to organize the network in your organization and optimize the exchange of data and directory information.

Designing the Administrative Structure
This session explains how to design administrative structure to delegate authority and simplify administrative overhead and design an organizational unit structure.

Designing for Group Policy
This session describes how to gather and analyze business requirements and other data and then use that data to design a Group Policy structure and integrate the structure into an organizational unit design. It describes the role of Group Policy in the Active Directory infrastructure and factors in choosing particular implementations, such as security, software deployment, and administrative requirements. The session also covers why and how to design a change management structure.

Designing the Physical Network
This session describes how to gather business requirements and other data and then analyze and use that data to design the physical network. It explains how to design a connectivity infrastructure, with considerations for intrasite and intersite connectivity, router placement, connection types, and virtual private networks (VPNs).

Designing a Name Resolution Strategy
This session describes the relationship between Active Directory and DNS domain names, Windows Internet Name Service (WINS), and other name-resolution strategies.

Designing the Network Access Infrastructure
This session describes how to design a network access infrastructure by gathering relevant data, and then analyzing and using that data to design for network access security, remote access, and wireless access. The module includes strategies for authentication, administration, access monitoring, interoperability, and user education.

Designing for Federation
This session describes how to design Active Directory to support Federation. Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), a next-generation information security infrastructure designed to help IT professionals extend internal applications to external users.

Notes from Field and Contest Case Study
This session will showcase the best practices followed for Active Directory Architecture and will have panel of experts discuss their Enterprise (Active Directory) Architecture experiences.

ASAP: Application Development

diegumzone — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 01:37:00 GMT

ASAP, Aspiring Software Architects Program, was a series of web casts originally delivered for aspiring application architects in India. It brought Champion Architects from Microsoft's partner organizations who were challenged by Microsoft host, Vikram Rajkondawar to share their experience, challenges faced, pitfalls and lessons learnt across interesting topics

The program was a complete success so I asked Vikram for the chance of making all these available for any aspiring architect all over the world (session language is English in all cases). I want to thank Vikram for this contribution, that I'm confident that will help a lot of developers raise the bar, start thinking on computer applications in a different manner and get the necessary background and skills

The remaining ingredients in the Architecture Career prescription is up to you, guys: experience, dedication and passion! Enjoy!

Architecture and Design Fundamentals in the .NET World
This session talks about architecture from the .NET perspective. We will try to understand the roles of architects and designers in a software project. We will delve into patterns and practices, some of the enterprise solution patterns authored by Microsoft. We will discuss software factories and debate the viability of software factories. We will discuss tools and offerings from Microsoft and also some open source tools that enable Continuous Integration. Towards the end we will discuss the Architecture of the Case Study.

Abilities Design : Architecting for Performance
This session talks about how to architect and design applications for application performance with proven models. We will discuss various best practices used to architect, design and code applications that would help in providing consistent performance against industry benchmarks. We would also discuss various techniques to review, measure and tune performance.

Architecting the UI Layer
This session we would discuss how to architect consistent, scalable and high user performance user interface. We would also look at the end user productivity gains that organization can expect from a great UI, using the various UI design patterns, web client software factories and leveraging web 2.0/Ajax in creating a extensible environment.

Architecting End-to-End Security
This session focuses on the various security considerations that influence the development of the architecture of a .NET application. It starts with the business imperatives of considering security and the right amount of security to implement in the architecture. It also discusses security topics like authentication, authorization, auditing, single sign-on, external interface security, secure data transmission and storage as well as security architecture for SaaS scenario. It discusses the value of conducting threat modeling in application development and also the secure coding practices that must be implemented to mitigate the risks associated with the common attack vectors.

Designing Service and Business Layer
This session discusses the best practices around building business layer as well as service layer components. It also focuses on the importance of moving towards SOA and terminologies and ontology relevant to service orientation. This session also discusses the patterns and anti-patterns which are appropriate for business and service layer design/development. We will also talk about Microsoft’s Web Services Software Factories implementations which are useful to get started on SOA along with the case study.

Data Architecture
This session is about the guidelines for implementing a data tier in a multi-tier .NET based application. We discuss on what are the challenges faced during designing the data architecture and the considerations that an architect should take care of. We also discuss on different methods/patterns available for passing data across various layers and for e.g. how SaaS or SOA architectures influence these decisions.

Testing for Architects
This session is about how testing influences architecture, and how it helps architecture. We discuss the various types of testing - functional testing, non-functional testing (load tests, stress tests, etc.) and touch upon performance testing - what counters to look for, what some interpretations are, etc. We also look at testing in the current RIA / SOA world. We also look at Microsoft's offerings in the testing arena, and how to leverage these tools well.

Deployment and Management and Transitioning to an Architect
In this session we discuss on how Deployment Management directly impacts revenue and end customer satisfaction. We discuss the criticality to map system functional, non functional requirement to production physical environment in early stages and define deployment strategy. We will also talk about some of the key aspects to be considered while deployment like Management are Security Consideration, Rollback Process, Application Configuration Information, Error Logging Mechanism, System Alerts Management, Load Balancing and lot more.