Behind the scenes with my newsletter

I have been asked about where the odd name for my blog came from, and how do I do the newsletter.  So here is the info on this blog, and my newsletter. In no special order, just what I remember.

• I gather articles wherever I see them, and if I think they would be useful, I capture the article or the link in Evernote.
• I have a blogging notebook in Evernote where I keep all my ideas and one page is where all the newsletter stuff goes. And like 10 pages that are the archive!
• My audience started out as system engineers that worked at VMware’s partners. It has grown much bigger than that but still SE’s, sys admins, and technical people are what I am trying to reach. These are the people or the target group but I am trying to provide interesting and useful information to anyone.
• My co-workers are often where I get additional ideas from – when they cannot find something, or have trouble with something, or are irritated or pissed off about something, or when they have bad ideas about something.
• There is a number of people that send me ideas, or ask me questions that often make me think it worth writing down and making an article about it.
• When I am at an event, especially things like VMUGs or VMworld, I try and talk to people and hear what they are having trouble with and what I can help with.  I often get ideas in situations like that – for example, in the SouthWestern Ontario Veeam User Group I heard that only one or two in a group of 60 Veeam users knew what a SureBackup job was.  So that night I started writing this article in the hope that it would help.  I often get ideas in these places for things to share as well.
• It takes me most of a day to organize, write, proofread, and publish a newsletter.
• When I say someones first name, like Ken or Mike or Alan it means I know them. Meaning, I worked with them, or eaten with them, and have spent lots of time chatting with them over the years.
• Why did I start doing this? I started with VMware as a Partner SE, which means I enabled SE’s who worked for VMware partners. I did not think they got enough from VMware to enable them. So I started a weekly email newsletter. Did that for roughly 5 years, and took some time off before I started the blog. That time was in R&D and mostly dealing with stuff I could not talk about.
• The newsletter was called Notes from VMware, so when I did the blog I called it Notes from MWhite.
• What will you hear about in the new year from me?  Some of the same – I will keep doing newsletters to share out cool and useful info for a long time yet.  But, as I work more in the public with my product you will start to learn more about it from me in this blog.

I hope that this works as an answer for the questions I get about my blog.

Have a great day, and a wonderful Christmas!

Michael

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