SBSC Exam

I’ve just got back after taking the 070-282 exam so we can qualify as Small Business Specialists….

and i passed!

It wasn’t quite the exam i was expecting but i passed so thats the important thing

Hopefully it wont be too long before it registers against my Live ID so we can get signed up as an SBSC partner and i can start annoying people at any SBSC only events :-p

There Goes The Weekend

We’re moving to bigger premises and we get started tomorrow morning and keep going till we’re done.

Guess what i have planned for my weekend     

I’m actually really excited as it’s a milestone for all the hard work we have put in over the last two years and we’re seeing the payback in the company growing. We also have an offer in to someone for a techie position and hoping he’ll say yes…i don’t fancy having to find someone else!

I also booked my 70-282 exam for next Wednesday so hopefully we’ll be all official on the Small Business Specialist front by the end of next week

Knowledge versus Ability

I was looking down the “recent posts” bit on my wordpress dash board when i came across this post

Programming Knowledge versus Programming Ability « Imran On Tech

I generally agree with the post and it has a good footballing analogy too!As we’re looking for new staff at the moment it definitely got me thinking.

On the whole i hated the process whenever i’ve been looking for work (and yes i know there are other ways, such as agencies, but i’m being pretty broad here!)

Advertise job, Receive CV’s, Filter CV’s, Interviews, Offer job

I always wondered how you could give someone a job based on what is written on a couple of pieces of paper and a brief chat.

I know lots of jobs have test know-a-days but that doesn’t tell you if they’ll be able to recover that corrupted Exchange store while they have 100 users in their ear

Anyone can embelish their CV and “blag” at the interview.

What about someone who is really talented but is a bundle of nerves at the interview so doesn’t come across well. How can you determine what if they’ll fit in with the rest of your staff? How can you determine they are willing to put in the effort to make the company succeed? There are hundreds of elements to determine if someone is right for your company before you even get to their ability to do the job?

As a small business we also dont have the time or the money to go round and round trying to make sure we pick the right person. We need to get it right straight away!

How do you determine if someone has the ability to back up the MCSE (or other appropriate certificate!) they wave at you?

I’d be interested to hear how other people do it?

Just a bit of closure

I posted a week or so ago after my frustration with some work we were quoting for. I got some good comments from Nick including a follow up post here which gave me the sort of feedback i was looking for.

Nick thought that maybe we were coming in a bit high while the competition were coming in a bit low.

Just to follow up on his post..it was 25 workstations (not 15) and also we were looking at about 80 effort hours instead in of the 90-100 he mentions. Also we are doing a little bit more work than just the SBS (firewall, router, other stuff)

I was very pleased to get his comments as it gave me a bit of perspective and allowed me to see it from a different angle.

As closure on this i thought i’d post to say we got the business in the end. When pushed a little further they conceded that maybe they would “be pushing it” with the amount of hours it would take them and a new figure appeared that wasn’t too far away from ours. This in combination with certain parts of their quote not quite making sense meant that the trust went and we were awarded the job.

This sort of proves me right for the reason i’d get so worked up and prompted the post

The competition had quoted a smaller labour figure and would have added it on later giving the customer a nasty surprise at the end. When we quote it’s the MAXIMUM they will be billed. If we quote 10 days and it only takes 8 then they’ll be billed for eight. If we quote 10 and it takes 12 then we take the hit and make sure we learn from it.

All’s well that end’s well in this case but it could have gone the other way with the customer learning the hard way

Am i losing business for doing a proper job?

I’m putting my neck on the block a little with this but wanted to ask the opinion of others

We’ve recently quoted to do a new server installation

We have both quoted for the same hardware and software (HP Proliant Server, SBS Premium) but we have been told we’re being beaten on the amount of days we’re quoting for configuration

Basically the competition are quoting a day in their workshop for inital configuration of hardware and SBS and three men on site for one day to do the rest (so three man days, four in total)

The work will basically involve configuring server hardware, putting in the new sbs (from scratch..not a migration),setting up user accounts, email (exchange), getting data from old server, ensuring permissions are correct, installing a hardware firewall solution, getting the pc’s (with user profiles intact) onto the new domain (25-30 users), configuring backups, monitoring & alerting, installing anti-virus software, install and configure UPS software/hardware, re-installation of printers onto new server, plus anything i have missed here and the other things you only find out about while on site.

Now i’m not doubting that you could do all that in three man days (four if you count the workshop day)

If i was doing this as a swing migration i’d be adjusting the times but this specific situation doesn’t lend itself well to that (long story in itself!)

Would you be happy you had completed the work to a high enough standard or are we (as a company) taking long?

We have quoted a day in the workshop to put the server hardware together and start the SBS install off and then two guys on site for five days (eleven man days total)

As a side note when it comes to these installs we always let the customer know that we do err on the side of caution as there is always something you dont know about until you get to site (like they dont have their isp information, or the disks for some LOB application have gone walkabouts). The customer usually prefers to know upfront instead of getting nasty suprises at the end. So we only actually invoice for the time we’re there so it may not actually be eleven man days

Also bear in mind we have been installing SBS since 4.5 so are no strangers to it.

So either we’re taking too long or their not doing the job properly…honest opinions please?

I do actually have my own opinion as to what the situation is here but i’d be keen to hear what everyone else thinks before i say anything else..

Thanks

How does anyone do business?

Good post today from Susanne about problems with distributors.

This is something I have had to learn lots about over the last couple of years as I’ve become more involved on the business side. It’s very frustrating when your account manager isn’t tuned into your needs.

An example of bad management happened recently. I’m not going to be naming names so we’ll call them “Dist X”.

We have had a couple of calls and emails recently from Dist X asking why were hadn’t been using them much.

First thing is we had the same thing about six months ago and we told them some of the issues were

1) Everyone else gives us better credit facilities than you

2) We don’t even know who our account manager is!

So we got our credit facility updated and an account manager was assigned to us. This account manager then hounded us for an order. Letting us know the “offer of the day” and generally being a bit of a pain.

We had a small order to make so thought we would give them a go.

This is where it got even worse. Once we had placed the order the account manager did a disappearing act. Then we got our goods, but we also managed to get an Exchange 2003 media kit we hadn’t asked for. The invoice for this arrived so we asked the account manager to sort it out. They wanted us to fill out lots of paper work to return the item. The guy in charge of our purchasing wasn’t impressed with his staff having work created for them when it wasn’t their error. The account manager eventually told us to dispose of the media kit as it wasn’t worth arranging a collection. We then couldn’t fill out their returns paperwork as they wanted a serial number from the product.

I’m not entirely sure where we are with this now but as a first order they didn’t really do themselves any favours.

As Susanne said we are the small customers but surely we deserve better?

Putting the cat amongst the pigeons

I wasn’t going to comment on this but i’ve changed my mind

Susanne blogged a while back asking about Microsoft’s strategy for Office & Vista in the small business marketplace and why they should make the move.(This was also followed up by a post by Vijay)

At the time i agreed with many of her points so i started a post of my own but struggled to add anything extra to what she had already said so it stayed in my drafts.

I’ve just been going through my backlog after my holiday and noticed a few posts in reply to Susanne

The one i was most interested in was David Overton’s response.

Couple of things of interested to me:

[Susanne] The gadget toolbar that shows me the time (I can do that already thanks), RSS feeds (that’s what Outlook 2007 or IE7 or even Firefox** is for), and other applications that most Small Business Specialists would ban because they could potentially encourage time wasting – 2.5hrs a day is spent searching for information (I told you I listen Microsoft!) so why swap one problem for another?

[David] The gadget tool bar might look like a “toy holder”, but we are beginning to see people building gadgets that return business value.  CRM can put out an RSS feed, having the top 5 issues appear there, or the latest actions to worry about has some value.  People spend serious time and money chasing information that if presented in a glancable way on the gadget bar would show business value in terms of productivity.  People also need to feel that their computer is personalisable to be useful to them.  Want to know the cricket scores – you can either have a gadget, repeatedly open a web browser to see, or make your staff unhappy by banning the cricket results from the business.  There will be more of these coming along, but Key Performance Indicator gadgets will be a boon, and worst case, you can have one written – isn’t that the value proposition for Open Source??

[Me] Nice reply. I complety agree with him on this. We all push SharePoint to businesses so that they can get quick access to important business data. Moving some of this to the desktop would be really useful. At the moment all the gadgets that are available to seem like “toys” but as Vista gets deployed i think lots of partners will get creative and develop gadgets that have lots of business use

———————————————————————————————————————–

[Susanne] BitLocker – great! but oh wait… Enterprise version only

[David] This is one of the features that some customers are willing to spend money on (or even already do on 3rd party solutions).  How can you get it for your customers – Open Value licensing, including my favourite of Open Value Subscription, which has a lower cost of acquisition due to the fact that you don’t own the software, but means it is quicker to obtain and some customers would much rather rent software – which means you then have an ongoing relationship over the years as to how you enable them to get the most from the latest software, which is part of the rental agreement (as is training, home usage right, staff purchase etc etc)

[Me] Sorry i’m with Susanne on this one. Why should we have to get Enterprise edition just for this? I have lots of customers that runs SBS. Have between 10-25 PCs and a couple of laptops for sales and management staff to take off site. Bitlocker would be great here for if (when!) laptops get stolen/lost. This is one of those features that small businesses really could do with and dont want it to be complicated and dont want to spend a lot of money on (thats small business for you!). This generally rules out most third party offerings. Licensing for a couple of laptops seems a step too far

———————————————————————————————————————– 

[Susanne]

OneNote 2007 – great! but oh wait… Student and Teacher versions only (I’m seeing a trend here)

Exchange 2007 is great but the voice messages via email is already available as an add-on

Can the American Exchange Lady have a domestic accent instead please? You may tut at this but as a telephone specialist we always get asked to change the American voice to English.

As much as Exchange has a ‘wow’ factor – I think small business clients CAN afford not to talk to their server

[David] I will agree with the comments about Exchange – it is not a great fit in the SBS small business world due to it’s x64 server requirement, which is not something that SBS 2003 can do, so a 2nd server is required.  Having said that, for those where unified communication (or the lack of) is a problem then this is something to consider for them!!

[Me] Ok you have agreed about Exchange. But you completely missed out her question about OneNote. Tons of people in business use OneNote as it’s so damn useful and i know from reading Susanne’s blog there is a reason she asked that question ahead of the Exchange question! She also brings it up again a bit later but it never gets mentioned. So is the solution here we should all be buying Enterprise and Ultimate edition? I dont think so..

I have a similar bug bear with InfoPath to be honest. Even in the Office 2003 unless you buy Office 2003 Pro/Enterprise InfoPath never gets seen in the small business environment as it’s too expensive as a stand alone product. When we sell SBS2003 and show customers SharePoint and how well InfoPath works with it our customers are really interested. But they only want Office Small Business Edition so InfoPath never happens. Terrible shame in my opinion

That’ll do! Any more comments and this post will take longer to read than the SharePoint resource kit

Dont get me wrong. I really like Vista and Office and i’m looking forward to using them more fully in the new year. The way i see it working with our customers is that they wont be making the upgrade until they need to. Vista wont appear until new or replacement PCs are installed and apart from a few exceptions Office 2007 will be pretty much the same. However, as most office politics determine once one user has it everyone wants it!

I’m glad that David went to the effort of replying in the first place because it means that Microsoft do listen!

Good for business?

Over the last few weeks i’d been to meetings with a company that i had dealings with at my previous company. Recently they have been increasingly frustrated and unhappy with the service they have been receiving and since i know some of the staff there personally they got in touch with me and asked if we would be interested in taking over the contract

So earlier this week i went to check out the current state of the network so that we dont get any nasty surprises when the paperwork gets signed.

Now normally when i do these sorts of visits there are one or two things i spot that makes me think “why are they doing that?” but i guess certain configuration and management techniques are a matter of opinion right?

Anyway i was having a quick look around the newest PC and was a little disturbed at what i saw.

First lets get establish a couple of things:

1) The client in question uses McAffee Virusscan 7.1 on the desktop

2) They employ “a.n other” company as their managed IT support company (lets call them ANO* from now on)

I was just checking to see if the anti-virus definitions were all up to date but couldn’t find the “blue shield” you expect to find for McAffee. All i could find was the familiar yellow of the Symantec anti-virus offering. Turns out when installing the pc ANO* just hadn’t bothered to install the anti-virus software the client uses. The symantec anti-virus was a 30 day trial version shipped with the new pc which actually runs out next week

Am i wrong for being really pissed at this?

ANO* are effectively their IT department so why have they installed a PC and just not bothered with the anti-virus? I can’t think of a valid reason for not doing it.

When we sell a PC we charge for the installation as i’m sure the other company. Installation means making sure it’s in full working order, placed on the domain, applications that are needed are installed and configured, printers installed, windows updates applied, etc etc.

If they are missing something so basic what else is wrong?

Quite a bit apparently.

The PC had it’s default out of the name box. You know those random letters and numbers that all OEM Windows end up with? Looks like this: XXX-cc4ab20404

Since this is an SBS (2000) network i’m betting it wasn’t joined to the domain using the setup wizards either. I know this isnt’ a major thing but it doesn’t look too professional

Highlights of some other things i found included:

None of the PCs or the server had up-to-date anti-virus definitions. Last update was sometime in September

The only laptop (taken on the road by sales staff) in the company had NO anti-virus software installed.

Two XP Pro machines didn’t have SP2 loaded

All PC’s in various states of Windows Updates. None of them were totally up-to-date

POP3 logged had been turned up to high so the event log was useless as every 15 minutes when the mail was collected it just filled the log

The RAID utility on the server had no e-mail alerting configured. How would anyone know if a drive fails?

Now maybe some of things are only minor in other peoples opinions? I think the anti-virus situation is far from minor but again my own opinion

It’s also my opinion that if this site was a department in a large organisation the person responsible for the IT would have been fired!

What annoys me is that they pay ANO* a lot of money each year to be their IT department. They had no idea about the issues until they were pointed out.

Now its good for my business if other companies aren’t doing their jobs properly as more work may be available but bad for everyone elses if they are wide open to a virus attack!

The sad thing is that companies dont always know if their suppliers are letting them down

* ANO is just a fictitious name standing for A.N Other

Back In Business

Finally back in the office after a long period of work

We completed an SBS2003 installation over the weekend and Monday was left to tidy up the bits and pieces.

I setup Update Services and was impressed with how easy it was to get going but i’m having a bit from trouble getting it to do it’s thing.

The computers (and server) are all registered. The updates are scheduled for installation but the computers never seem to get the updates. I tried setting it to manual installation as well and it still doesn’t play ball.

I’ll go back to the documentation and see if i can figure it out now I’m away from site.

Had a bit of a nightmare situation with a photocopier engineer but that would be unprofessional of me to comment further…right?  :-p

Now i just need to work my way through 5000+ RSS posts  

I’ve been so busy this last week i haven’t had a chance to pick up Gears of War..i’m hoping i can change that over the next few days!