First of all, glad to be back, it's been a while since my last blog post but I’ve since decided to refresh my blog look & feel and more updates will be coming soon too. This should include regular posting again!

I thought it would be fitting to start blogging again today given the announcement of Steve Jobs passing. I can't say I knew a lot about Steve Jobs other than knowing that he was a co-founder of Apple Inc and that he was CEO …etc. However, most people will agree that he is a visionary individual who has helped transform the digital & computer world into what it is today. If you haven't read or watched his speech in 2005 at Stanford University I recommend that you do. There is a lot everyone can take from that I think.

So after learning of Steve Jobs' death today I thought I'd take a moment and share my thoughts on how I think his passing away will impact the industry and even the world.

Earlier this year it was reported that Apple Inc shares dropped based on news of his health. However, I personally don’t think that this time around the same will happen again. I'm no trading expert though so don't quote me on that!

For consumers: I think he will be remembered as a person who changed the way they do things daily in their lives and as a result the link he established between consumers & Apple as a company is not likely to be broken. In fact, I think it will probably grow larger in his honour!

For business people & entrepreneurs: I think he will be remembered as someone who went for what he believed in and people will look at what he's done and how he's done it which will result in younger generations following their dreams and also changing the world in their own fields and ways.

For students: well, it's all summed up in the speech he gave at Stanford "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life… have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

For everyone else: they will probably watch everyone's progress in the IT industry and maybe other industries too and will compare them to what Steve Jobs has done and achieved during his time in the field.

So in other words, I think Steve Jobs after his death may have equal or possibly even greater impact on how the digital world progresses from this point onwards. RIP Steve Jobs.

In Part 3 of the Windows Azure Portal Series I covered the Database tab of the new Windows Azure Portal.

This post will cover the next tab in the series.

Service Bus, Access Control & Caching

Creating a service Namespace

Viewing Access Control & Service Bus URLs & end-points

Viewing Access Keys

As you can see here from the screenshots above the portal has a very consistent interface layout across all its tabs and it's much easier to use than the old one.

I was going to write up some detail in this post on how you can get started with the Azure Service Bus but before I got started i came across this Get Started with the Azure Service Bus video and it does a very good job explaining the steps. It also uses the old Windows Azure Portal so you can see from there the difference between the old and the new portal! I for sure wouldn?t want to use the old portal anymore!

For additional resources you can also check the Azure Learning material on Channel9

There is no doubt that most, if not all people in business these days use email most of the time. Whilst the amount of email people receive varies between one person to another, I doubt that everyone handles there email in the same way. Some might read emails at certain times of the day, some might read them as they arrive, some use folders with rule sets to sort emails, some manually filter through their inbox ...etc

I'm interested in knowing what strategies you use for managing emails at work or otherwise but mainly at work. Hopefully this post can be a collection of different strategies/best practices of managing emails!

Here's what has worked very well for me recently and sometimes leads to me having 0 emails in my Inbox most mornings! Yes that's zero emails and not zero unread emails!

My Strategy Steps
- Setup personal folders for all regular senders I receive emails from or ones that I've received a large number of emails from over a period of time (only needed to do initially)
- Breakdown the list of folders into separate groups for example Business Team, Development Team & Test Team and having the relevant people under each folder
- Create rules to automatically move emails from my inbox into the folders created in the previous step and apply them to move as many emails out of my inbox as possible.
- For none regular email senders that belong in the above groups I create an Other folder where I manually move emails there once I've read and processed them.

You may be wondering so how do I find emails that relate to ProjectX or ProjectY. Well, that's where Search Folders come in! After all my emails are filtered by sender into the respective team & sender folders and the remainder manually handled/moved to where they belong. If I need to find an email or a group of emails based on a certain project or topic I do so by using the search folders.

The above points sum up how I manage my emails and it has worked very well for me recently as it allows me to easily spot and priorities reading and responding to emails based on sender and subject ...etc.

What's yours?