Those who’ve read my previous blog articles, or who know me, know my frustration at finding good educational resources for IT architects. I’m not an enterprise architect or a senior developer, yet a lot of “architect” resources online are for just those audiences.
Microsoft’s older architect resources
About 10 years ago, Microsoft started publishing a lot of good academic material for IT architects. This is the type of material that doesn’t really age, unlike technology specific resources, but for many reasons it started to disappear, not get updated, or not get added to. Then the .net era took off and their attention shifted to the developer audiences. You can find what remains online here.
Three great new architect resources from Microsoft
Very recently, some good new technology agnostic IT architect resources started appearing on Microsoft’s web sites. I found them through the MSDN and TechNet blog RSS feeds I scan through every day and wanted to share them further.
The Value Realization blog
This blog compliments an enterprise strategy service that Microsoft Consulting Services offer their enterprise customers BUT the descriptions of the services it provides are useful to ALL IT architects.
Even though this blog uses the context of enterprise IT strategy guidance to CIOs – the same guidance can apply to your much smaller project that only has two or three stakeholders and a single sponsor. The same processes for identifying, communicating, and measuring should still apply to your project as it does to an enterprise wide strategy. Lots of good information here – thank you Microsoft for sharing!
Link to it here.
The Microsoft Architecture mini-site and blog
A key skill as an architect is knowing what other architects know even if it’s not your domain area. For example, it’s useful to know that the key trends in IT right now are cloud, big data, enterprise mobility, and enterprise social media. Knowing what our peers are working on stops us working in a silo and making decisions that could hinder future integration or re-use.
The blog and blueprints section of this mini-site are excellent technology agnostic (I know they’re not vendor agnostic!) resources for key architectural trends right now.
Link to the blog here and the mini-site here.
The Microsoft Virtual Academy architect training
The free online training resource provides the equivalent of a day’s training about one of many architecture processes and using it to scope Microsoft product based solutions. There’s a lot of pre-sales content in there, but if you’re not interested in that it’s worth skipping through to learn about generic architecture concepts.
I wouldn’t call it enterprise architect training like Microsoft have, but for someone in the Microsoft technology space and new for the IT architect world it’s a good resource:
Link to the training course here.
