Any good "professional only" communities?

iaind · 5 Jan 2013 at 18:57

Hi guys,

Was wondering if anyone knew of any decent online communities for IT professionals for technical/management discussion?

There's obviously here but its not the most active. Reddit's r/sysadmin is quite good but is getting quite tedious.... too many people treating it like "ask the expert" or asking the same questions over and over again ("how do I become a sysadmin" etc).

I might be being overly grumpy, but I also really couldn't care less about home setups, I personally find that when you deal with large scale business setups, I have no interest in reading about the PE2650 you put in your loft.

I find professional discussion forums are a really handy place to bounce ideas around between like minded people so it would be great to find somewhere.

Cheers!

SMN · 5 Jan 2013 at 19:16

Not used it, but Experts Exchange?

walnuts · 5 Jan 2013 at 22:13

Server room and windows technical forums are quite good here:

http://arstechnica.com/civis/index.php

There's also Spiceworks forums.

Shad · 5 Jan 2013 at 22:46

Sounds like you're looking for the forum for Certified Universal Network Technicians. I haven't found it yet either.

Hellsmk2 · 6 Jan 2013 at 22:21

Experts exchange and spiceworks are the best around, as already mentioned.

LizardKing · 6 Jan 2013 at 23:19

Edugeek pretty good as well

Ev0 · 6 Jan 2013 at 23:27

I've never really looked at reddit before for anything but seems to have a couple of good topics/pages/sections (or whatever a reddit 'thing' is called!)

iaind · 7 Jan 2013 at 07:41

Oh god, I'm so sorry....welcome to the end of your life lol

Reddit is awesome, unfortunately the sysadmin sub which is moderated as professional discussion only is full of home server stuff and technical support questions. /r/networking is better but going downhill although the more specific ones (/r/VMware, /r/Cisco etc) are OK but quiet.

Spend your day on /r/cats instead, it's a much better use of time

Hulkster · 7 Jan 2013 at 08:19

I've always found Tek-Tips to be a good community with some very knowledgeable members

Ev0 · 7 Jan 2013 at 10:41

iaind said:
Oh god, I'm so sorry....welcome to the end of your life lol

Reddit is awesome, unfortunately the sysadmin sub which is moderated as professional discussion only is full of home server stuff and technical support questions. /r/networking is better but going downhill although the more specific ones (/r/VMware, /r/Cisco etc) are OK but quiet.

Spend your day on /r/cats instead, it's a much better use of time

hah as I've got older it seems I'm out of touch with things

Found a couple of topics that seem decent and relevant to my work interests so will start off there

PAz · 7 Jan 2013 at 14:15

Depends. Do you just want general tech or something a bit more specific?

For MS stuff TechNet forums are good.

iaind · 7 Jan 2013 at 14:25

PAz said:
Depends. Do you just want general tech or something a bit more specific?

For MS stuff TechNet forums are good.

Not really after specific technical stuff, more a place to bounce ideas around between like minded people. "what products do you use for xyz" and the like

ruffneck · 7 Jan 2013 at 16:30

I think someone else mentioned it but the Spiceworks community is very good.

J.B · 9 Jan 2013 at 21:54

Ev0 said:
hah as I've got older it seems I'm out of touch with things

Found a couple of topics that seem decent and relevant to my work interests so will start off there

I frequent /r/netsec quite often which might be of interest to you

whitecrook · 9 Jan 2013 at 21:59

in the day usenet probably would have been the answer here, but perhaps still worth a look.... ?

HungryHippos · 9 Jan 2013 at 22:52

Stack Overflow is good too in my opinion.

Ev0 · 10 Jan 2013 at 10:32

J.B said:
I frequent /r/netsec quite often which might be of interest to you

Yup that was one of the pages I'd found

Vtec9k · 10 Jan 2013 at 22:03

Ironically there doesn't seem to be dedicated places for that sort of thing.

Linked in groups are sort-of ok for the more business focused areas, TOGAF/Prince2 or CIO/strategy but many are full of spam and self promotion. Stack Exchange is pretty good for specifics, will have to check out Arstechnica and spiceworks.

Face to face is still the best, quite lucky in Aberdeen because oil is such an incestuous industry! Going to try to blag myself onto some more conferences this year too, especially vendor or Gartner ones where you can get a lot of valuable free consultancy.

Also good for climbing that ladder