Mail filtering in iOS10

I am not sure that this is a well known feature, I discovered it by accident after upgrading to iOS10. In the Mail app there is now a little icon in the bottom left corner. When you click it your mail will be filtered to show only unread messages by default.

location of the filtering button


You will notice that ‘unread’ is blue. If you click it a whole filtering menu will appear, allowing you for example to select I only mails with attachment. Handy to tame your inbox…

mail selection fiktering options

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Resources to learn vRealize Operations Manager

Last week I was visiting a customer and quickly realized they had an issue that could be solved with custom groups and a dashboard. The customer was starting out with vROps and had no idea. It is sometimes difficult to find resources – outside of the tranings – to get familiar with vROps in your day-to-day job. Since I was also gathering info for a Blue Medora blog post on polcies I am writing, I quickly updated my resource page with these great resources:

  • VMware feature walkthrough videos: A little known tool that has extensive demos of several recent products. The main page list some topics like NSX and vSAN, but of particular interest to us is the vSOM page. A lot of details, including info on policies. A lot of it is pertinent to vROps advanced and enterprise too.
  • The book “VMware vRealize Operations Essentials” by Matt Steiner. Matt is a cloud specialist for VMware UK and an overall great guy. Available on Safari Booksonline or Pakt Publishing.
  • The book “VMware Performance and Capacity Management” – Second Edition (!) by Iwan ‘E1’ Rahabok. Again a great VMware colleague in Singapore this time, who is a master of capacity planning… Available on Safari Booksonline or Pakt Publishing.

Hope this helps you in your work with vROps !

 

Get Blue Medora certified and receive a gift !

Are you working in pre-sales at VMware or a VMware partner in EMEA ? In that case I have good news for you. Blue Medora runs an online training and certification programme for our management packs for vRealize Operations. The training takes only 30 minutes of your time with a test at the end.

The good news is that we will send you a nice shirt upon succesful completion and we will be able to link you to sales opportunities. The bad news is that new, harder tests are coming, so act today !

The landing page for the test is at http://bluemedora.com/cert and follow these instructions:

·        You’ll land at a log-in page.  On the right side, click the ‘Register’ button, where you can enter your name then create a username and password

·        It will take you a page that lists four lessons and a test.  Hit the orange ‘choose program’ button at the bottom and you’ll land at a menu that lists the 4 lessons and test

·        It’s best to progress through the content in sequence, ending with the test, but you have the option to skip around if database environments are more timely or interesting, as an example

·        Click on the lesson name (Company and Product Overview – in blue font) and you’ll go directly to the first lesson, which is a 12 minute video on the company and product.  If you get interrupted, you can go back at any time

·        Once you complete the first video lesson, the lesson menu will re-appear and you can progress through the four lessons and test at your leisure

·        You can always click the “take a test” tab to go to the full content menu.

·        When you’re ready and have checked-off all of the training videos, click the Blue Medora Tech Sales Overview entry at the bottom, for the test

 

The test has 25 True/False and Multiple choice questions.  Passing the test gets you a slick Blue Medora Technical Sales certificate.  If you are having a bad day and fail, or want to go back to it later, just select it from the menu again.

A new challenge ! With Blue Medora !

Well, I have been quiet on the blog, I will not hide from you that the 3 months following my forced exit from VMware have not been easy on a number of fronts (like my dog dying a month later…), but outplacement training has been a great help to me.

I am therefore more than happy to announce that today is my first workday for Blue Medora ! If you do not know this great company yet – and you should ! – we make all those great management packs that extend VMware vRealize Operations to manage more than your VMware virtualisation layer: NetApp and Nimble storage, Cisco Nexus and UCS platforms, Microsoft SQL Server and SAP HANA,… So it is not only on the hardware level, but also applications. And we also make plugins for Oracle Enterprise Manager and New Relic. Find an overview here.

I will be solutions architect for Europe, working as a contractor, since we are starting up in Europe. But business is booming, especially now that VMware resells some of the management packs and transferred development of some to Blue Medora !

What is especially great for me is that this allows me to continue with VMware vRealize Operations, the platform I know and love, and continue to evangelise it !