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Windows Server Estates

NT 3.51 through Windows 2000 — directory, messaging, proxy and systems management, at the depth of a twenty-five-exam MCSE.

Also known as Windows NT, Active Directory, Exchange

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 5 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

Server engineering across NT 3.51, NT 4.0 and Windows 2000: Exchange 5.0, 5.5 and 2000; Proxy 2.0 with logging to SQL; SMS 1.2 across a local site and remote hospitals; IIS and Index Server; Active Directory and directory services.

At StorComm this meant designing, specifying, configuring, installing and maintaining the entire estate — servers, routers, bridges, switches, modems, cabling and ISPs — plus the internet site, and writing the standards, policies and disaster recovery procedures around it. At Prudential, NT server estates, drive arrays and a thousands-strong workstation rollout. Later, a complete Windows 2000 domain design for Vystar Credit Union.

Obsolete now, and retained because it is where the systems thinking was formed.

Subtopics

  • SQL & Data PlatformsSQL Server administration and database design from 6.5 onward — and object database work that predates it.

Applied in

Through subtopics

4 further projects reference a subtopic of this entry rather than the entry itself.

  • Enterprise GIS Platform2006–2023Seventeen years of architecture authority over the City's geospatial estate — and the record of it is a capacity and availability record rather than a mapping one.
  • Enterprise Business Intelligence Platform and Capability2012–2016Architecture authority over the City's analytics platform, held deliberately apart from the group that built the reports — with the capability hired and taught to a published standard.
  • Insurance Carrier E-Commerce Platform2001–2003Mainframe to public web in 2001, across a colocation tunnel and two firewalls — where the deliverable was the boundary, not the website, and the documentation reached revision 243.
  • CSX Railroad Map Digitization1996Digitizing CSX property maps dating back to the 1800s, with MDL application development against MicroStation.

Career

Attested by

  • MCSE 2000+I1996 · LapsedMicrosoft Certified Systems Engineer + Internet on the Windows 2000 track, held continuously from 1996 — the systems and data layer beneath the network architecture.
  • Compaq ASE — Intel/Windows NT Specialist1999 · LapsedCompaq Accredited Systems Engineer, covering server hardware, storage arrays and NT platform integration.