Back when my day-to-day duties included database administration work and enterprise architecture, I became rather obsessed with the idea of operational excellence. I read everything I could on the topic. I made a list of favorites, which became somewhat shabby over time, as I dog-eared important pages and scribbled notes in the margins. (Perhaps that list of favorites might, in and of itself, make a good blog post). Fast-forward a decade and I’m still mightily interested in operational excellence for IT organizations. It’s just that so much good material is available for free on the web.
Here’s a run-down of several useful documents and downloads to improve overall operation performance for those of you in a Microsoft-centric IT organization:
Microsoft Operations Framework
Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) version 4.0 guide is practical guidance for IT organizations. With the release of version 4.0, MOF now reflects a single, comprehensive IT service lifecycle—it helps IT professionals connect service management principles to everyday IT tasks and activities and ensures alignment between IT and the business.
Infrastructure Planning and Design
The Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guides are the next version of Windows Server System Reference Architecture. The guides in this series help clarify and streamline design processes for Microsoft infrastructure technologies, with each guide addressing a unique infrastructure technology or scenario.
Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 2.2 (for IT Professionals)
The Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer provides a streamlined method to identify missing security updates and common security misconfigurations. MBSA 2.2 is a minor upgrade correct minor issues and add optional catalog support.
Security Compliance Manager
The Microsoft Security Compliance Manager provides centralized security baseline management features, a baseline portfolio, customization capabilities, and security baseline export flexibility to accelerate your organization’s ability to efficiently manage the security and compliance process for the most widely used Microsoft technologies.
I suggest you look into https://dba.stackexchange.com for technical questions and discussion forums. If you want to ask questions and are also a Twitter user, then tweet your question with the #sqlhelp hash tag. You will typically get a high-quality answer within a few minutes. Hope that helps,
-Kevin