Happy New Year!  And welcome back to work!

Yeah, I know… I feel that way, too.  But hopefully, like me, you have some important things to be thankful for.  Such as:

1. Washington “avoided” the “fiscal cliff”.*
2. The Minnesota Vikings beat the Packers and are in the playoffs**, and
3. We are starting a new series of blog posts / articles for the entire month of January!

“Who is ‘we’?”

This time we’re drawing on the entire set of “big guns”.  I and all of my ten teammates throughout the U.S. that make up the Microsoft IT Pro Technical Evangelists.  You’ll find their names in my list of bloggers in the margin here.

“And what are ‘we’ going to cover in this series?”

We’re going to be discussing the ways, options, methods, and reasons why you will want to run some servers “in the cloud”; specifically taking advantage of Infrastructure-as-a-Service now in preview and provided by Windows Azure. 

Part one of our series..

“Hey!  This is January 2nd!”

Yeah.. as I was saying: Part one of our series launched yesterday. 

“Oh.”

And in it, my good friend and central region teammate Matt Hester kicked things off by introducing the idea of Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and how Windows Azure will soon support it.  (Click this link to start your 90 day free trial, where you can try out this capability!)

READ MATT’S EXCELLENT ARTICLE HERE

I’ll blog about Part two later today.  I have a lot of e-mail to catch up on. 

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* Please… Don’t get me started.

** Hopefully this won’t be our usual “lose the first playoff game” situation.