There are 5 major sections provided in this comprehensive planning methodology. Below is a description of what’s included in each section.

The Comprehensive Research and Tools in This Innovative Methodology Guide You Through These 5 Crucial Steps to Strategic IT Planning:

I — Understand, Assess and Plan IT and Business Alignment

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II — Understand, Assess and Plan Application Direction

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III — Understand, Assess and Plan Technical Infrastructure Direction

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IV — Understand, Assess and Plan Organizational Direction

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V — Document and Present Detailed IT Strategic Plan to Stakeholders

You Will Receive Detailed Instruction on Each Step and More Than 45 Tools and Templates in Total

Click here for Detailed Information on Contents

1 – IT and Business Alignment
Always start with IT and Business Alignment. This critical initial section provides all the tools and instruction you need to get business goals and IT plans on the same page. Detailed instructions will walk you through the following 11 tools and templates:

1. Stakeholder Guidelines and Analysis
2. IT Strategy and Roadmap Scope Statement
3. Kickoff Meeting Agenda and Template
4. Technology Monitor Worksheet – Scan for Potentially Enabling Technologies
5. Business Executive Interview Guide
6. Assessing Enterprise Strategy
7. Enterprise Strategy and Goals Statement
8. Key Success Factors Analysis Tool
9. IT Imperatives Template
10. IT Vision Meeting Agenda
11. IT Vision and Mission Statement Template

2 – Application Direction
This section helps you assess your existing application portfolio, identify new enabling technologies and provides a migration plan that meets your long-term business objectives. The following 4 tools support this effort:

1. Business Function and Application Assessment Worksheet
2. Application Topology Guidance Document
3. Application Improvement Opportunity Template
4. Application Direction and Migration Strategy Template

3 – Technical Infrastructure Direction
This section will walk you through the critical steps of assessing your existing infrastructure including internal hardware and virtual components. From there, you will identify the gaps you need to fill to align to your organizations long-term goals. Finally, you will create a detailed direction for your infrastructure strategy. The following 7 tools are provided to aid you in this effort:

1. Infrastructure Components Inventory Worksheet
2. Network Diagram Primer
3. Network Diagram Template
4. Infrastructure Assessment Worksheet
5. Technical Infrastructure Direction Template
6. Infrastructure Improvement Opportunity Template
7. Infrastructure Prioritization Template

4 – IT Organization Direction
In this section, you’ll take an in-depth look at your staffing and overall organization. The first step will be to identify weaknesses in your current organization in terms of readiness to support the current and future strategic objectives of the company. From there, you will create a long-term staffing plan that aligns to the future objectives of the business. The following 9 tools are provided to aid you in this effort:

1. IT Staffing Worksheet
2. IT Skills Inventory
3. Irregular IT Staff Inventory (consultants, contractors, etc.)
4. Staff Level Allocation Worksheet
5. IT-Business Interaction Model
6. IT Service Model Alignment
7. IT organizational Gaps Worksheet
8. Statement of Organization and Capability Direction Template
9. Organization and Capability Improvement Opportunity Template

5 – IT Strategic Investment and Value Roadmap
This is where it all comes together. Now that you have assessed your application, technical infrastructure and organization portfolio, you can turn those opportunities into action and describe the practical steps that now need to take place. The overall objective of this section is to create a fully documented and supported strategic plan for the IT organization. There are 14 supporting tools and templates in this section:

1. Analysis of Available Options
2. Optional Evaluation Tool
3. Assessment of Current IT Projects
4. IT Strategy and Roadmap Scope Statement
5. Initiative Description Template
6. Initiative Prioritization Template
7. Guide to Documenting Your Strategic Roadmap
8. IT Strategy Budget Impact Worksheet
9. Business Case Template
10. Communications Plan Template
11. Strategic Plan Presentation (PowerPoint)
12. Strategic Plan Template (Word Doc)
13. Executive Meeting Agenda Template
14. IT Strategic Roadmap Maintenance Guidelines Template

Filed under: Architecture, Design, Reference Tagged: Agile, Analysis, Application, Arch, Architect, CMM, Design, Diagrams, Documents, Downloads, Evaluation, General, Guidance, Images, Infrastructure, IT, Kickoff, Models, Plan, Planning, PowerPoint, Prioritization, Project, Refer, Schedule, Scrum, SEI, Six Sigma, Tasks, Technology, Templates, Tools, Worksheets, XP

I think I have a fairly normal, modern life. I don’t have a landline telephone or a 9-to-5 schedule. I do have two mobile phones and a 100-minute-a-day commute. At work I have TweetDeck permanently open on one of my three work monitors (Outlook and Internet Explorer 8 are open on the other two). I also have two Twitter accounts, six Windows Live IDs and a Yahoo! account I haven’t checked since 2001.

And yet it’s still hard to schedule a date night (with someone with a vested interest in making it all work out) much less poker night with my friends. And since we don’t live in an alternate Life on Mars reality where everything moves at the speed of 1973, I bet pencils, paper calendars and in-person meetings don’t work so well for you either.

So, while we can’t do too much about your commute or your work-life balance, Microsoft does have a few things you might not know about that should help you pull everyone and everything together.

1. Hotmail: The new Hotmail has a wealth of features to make working together easier –even if you can’t meet up in person. There are more than 350 million active Hotmail users, sending more than 8 billion messages a day. And more than 200 million of these folks also use Windows Live Messenger. So, chances are, your social network is already on Hotmail.

Collaborating with Hotmail is about to go from easy to ridiculously easy with the launch of Office Web Apps (see below). If you send one of the 350 million Microsoft Office documents shared on Hotmail each month, the recipient will be able to view and edit the doc in the browser –even if they don’t have Microsoft Office on their computer. In my opinion, this is the coolest new feature since snap. Sharing pictures has also never been easier. You can automatically upload them to SkyDrive (which gives you 25GB of free space) and a link will be sent to the recipient or look at them as high resolution thumbnails right within your email.

2. SkyDrive: SkyDrive is probably the best Windows Live service you don’t know you have at your fingertips. It’s a virtual 25GB hard drive, and it’s yours free with a Windows Live ID. Upload anything you want and it’s safely stored. It’s great for group projects when you can’t actually meet in person.

Personal tip: I store the picture page of my passport on SkyDrive so if it’s ever lost a copy is just an internet connection away.

3. Office Web Apps: The technical preview (or beta) of Microsoft Office Web Apps is available now and the release version is coming soon. Office Web Apps are great for folks on a budget (and just about everyone in college). What’s not to love about a free, online version of Microsoft Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint? Pair them with Hotmail (see above) and Sky Drive and you have a complete virtual workspace.

4. Last.fm: Finally, whether you’re flying solo or wrestling with a group, no one should have to work in silence. While not as popular as Pandora, I’m partial to Last.fm. I think the online interface is slick and the downloadable scrobbler is cool. If you’re into electronic music, the Tiësto station returns particularly groovy results.

Hit me up anytime @winashbrown on Twitter.

I promise I am going to be more than the offers guy but today –you guessed it—I have another offer for you.

Starting tomorrow, you can grab a Dell XPS 16 loaded with Windows 7 Home Premium plus Microsoft Office 2007 Home & Student (with a free upgrade to Microsoft Office 2010 Home & Student) for $1,049. The Dell XPS16 is one of the machines that Ben uses as his work machine and he blogged about last week.

This Dell XPS16 is a great graduation gift for students heading back to school next fall because it’s powerful enough to handle work and entertainment, and comes with the Microsoft Office programs (like Word, PowerPoint and OneNote) that students use every day.

Like our Dell XPS 13 deal, this offer is only available in the U.S. through June 25, 2010 or while supplies last.

We now have five ways you can save on great new PCs this summer, so keep checking back.

Questions? Leave a comment or find me on Twitter @winashbrown

Occasionally we have to make use of subscripts or superscripts in our documents. The most common use of these is with dates, as in 20^th. There the ‘th’ is a superscript; that is, smaller text that is raised. Subscripts are most often used in technical language such as if we refer to water as H₂O. There the subscript is the ‘2′; smaller text that is lowered.

To switch to subscript mode or to change the selected text to a subscript, hold down the Control key and press the = key. This same combination will also set selected subscript text back to normal and switch out of subscript mode, as with the keyboard shortcuts for bold or italic mode.

To switch to superscript mode or to change the selected text to a superscript, hold down the Control key and the Shift key, and then press the = key. As with subscripts the same combination switches back to normal text to if presses again.

This tip applies to Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, but unfortunately not to Excel.

A while ago I wrote an article that suggested that rather than printing directly from web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, it is better to copy the information that you want into a word processor and print it from there. In that article I mentioned the use of the ‘Paste Special’ in Word, which enables you to remove formatting from the information that you paste. In this article I will explain how to put a button for ‘Paste Special’ onto the toolbar in word. This technique can also be used to add any of the other available buttons onto the toolbar.

Open up word and right-click on one of the toolbars, which are at the top of the screen below the menu and look something like this:

From the menu, select ‘Customize…’, which will open a dialog box. Click on the ‘Commands’ tab.

Select ‘Edit’ from the left-hand menu, because the ‘Paste Special’ tool is listed in the ‘Edit’ menu. Scroll down through the list on the right-hand until you see ‘Paste Special’ then left-click on it and hold the mouse button down. The mouse pointer should change to an arrow pointing at a rectangle with a square to the bottom right, which will have an X in it initially.

Move the pointer up to the toolbars and release the mouse button when it is in a suitable position: next to the normal paste button for example. You will notice that the mouse pointer changed appearance again when you hovered over the toolbar, with the X being replaced with a + to let you know that the new button can be placed there.

Your toolbar should now look something like this:

If you wish to remove a button from the toolbar, follow the instructions above for opening the ‘Customize’ dialog, but rather than drag from the dialog box to the toolbar, click on the button you wish to remove from the toolbar and drag it into the dialog box.

This process also works in the other Microsoft Office applications such as Excel and PowerPoint.

Your first thought after reading the title is likely ‘Why would I want to disable password protection for my presentations?’ Any presentations that have been password protected in PowerPoint 2002, cannot be opened in earlier versions of PowerPoint, even if the user does know the password. This is because PowerPoint 2002 was the first version to introduce password protection and earlier versions do not support it.

By disabling password protection, you can eliminate any problems that may occur when sharing presentations with users that have earlier versions of the application. On the other hand, if you never share your presentations, this tip is not for you.

You can disable password protection using the steps that are described below:

1. Within your PowerPoint presentation, click Options from the Tools menu.
2. Click the Edit tab.
3. Under the Disable new features section, check the Password protection option.
4. Click OK to save your changes.

Password Protect Your Presentation In PowerPoint 2003
Password Protect Your Presentation In PowerPoint 2007
Increase The Number Of Recently Used Presentations In PowerPoint
AutoRecover In PowerPoint 2002
Increase Recently Used Files List (PowerPoint 2002)

HTML Password Lock
PowerPoint 2003 Viewer
SaveIt! v2.1
Install The Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack For Word, Excel And Powerpoint 2007