David Houston – Community Legend

If you follow the SBS Community at all you’ll have no doubt heard the sad news of the passing of David Houston.

I met David “virtually” online in 2007. Both he and I participated in the long departed monthly SBS Chat and were the only people from this part of the world. (mainly because it started at 1am GMT!)

Once upon a time I also tried to help promote an event he was running by blogging about it.

I only met him once when he attended an AMITPRO meeting and while I knew he had health problems I was still shocked to hear the news over the weekend as he was very much a community person and you won’t hear a bad word said about him.

Hearing about the death of anyone you’ve been connected to in one way or the other certainly makes you take stock of things.

There are a lot of people in the SBS Community I don’t know as well as I’d like so I‘m going to try and change that over the coming months.

Susanne Dansey (Purple Cow Ideas Management) talks about David in her vLog here which prompted me to post as I wasn’t entirely sure what to talk about but since she went to the effort of getting in front of a camera I thought I could at least put a paragraph together.

My thoughts go out to David’s family and I’d like to thank David for all his efforts over the years

AMITPRO Invades Microsoft Briefing

Bank holiday always throws me so this is sneaking up on me quite quickly.

This Thursday, (6th May), Microsoft are holding a regional Partner Business Briefing in Birmingham to promote the upcoming changes to the Microsoft Partner Network, showcase the current wave of Microsoft products and facilitate inter-partner collaboration (we promoted the event on the AMITPRO site).

As part of this, a number of partners have been invited to speak briefly around a variety of topics with partner collaboration and growth as a central theme.

It’s no coincidence a big chunk of those are AMITPRO members since working together and sharing ideas is one of the main reasons we’re all a part of the group.

I’m fortunate enough to be one of those asked to speak so if you’re going to be there leave a comment as I’d love to hear from you and I’ll introduce you to the AMITPRO crowd!

Get them while their hot! ZDTM Workbook special offer

In my last post I gave details about the upcoming event at AMITPRO featuring Karl Palachuk and Richard Tubb

I just wanted to share a special offer Karl has kindly put together

Time-limited offer for attendees of the April 6th AMITPRO meeting!
Karl has offered a massive saving of $120 (£80) off the cost of buying his latest book ‘The Network Migration Workbook’. If you’re based in the UK and have contemplated buying this excellent resource, then you simply won’t get a better offer than this:

List price inc. UK shipping: $339.95
Early bird discount inc. UK shipping: $289.95
AMITPRO/TVP Special Offer: $220 inc. FREE Shipping*

 

 

*Offer only open to people wishing to buy the book IN ADVANCE of the AMITPRO or TVP User Group Meetings. To qualify for the special pricing, you must collect the book from one of the aforementioned events. (please note: you don’t have to purchase a book to attend the meetings).

You can take advantage of this by visiting the SMB Books site here and you can read about this on the AMITPRO site too

Also Karl is visiting the Thames Valley SBS group the week before (1st April). The same offer applies for there too. If you’d like to hear more about their event you can read about it on Chris Timm blog

Finally….you can now become a fan of AMITPRO on Facebook

April AMITPRO meeting – Must Attend Event!

Just wanted to do a bit of shouting about our next AMITPRO meeting. It’s one we’re really excited about!

First, we’ve changed the date. Our meetings are usually on the second Tuesday of every month but we’re rearranged to accommodate one of our speakers. This means the date of the meeting is 6th April

So, the speakers, in no particular order!

AMITPRO’s very own Richard Tubb (@TubbLog), from James Cash.co.uk

Business Processes for SMB IT companies

How JamesCash.co.uk use them in their business, and how they can help businesses of all sizes rapidly grow. From the one-man-band where the owner is looking to take on his first employee but can’t find the time to take that step, to the bigger business where processes can help individuals grow in responsibility and encourage rapid business growth -  Richard will speak about the tools his company uses and the benefits you can expect from systemising your SMB IT business.

Richard has made great strides as a business owner in the years he’s been an AMITPRO member so it’ll be great to hear how something at the very core of his growth has been put together.

He went on to become one of the first IT companies in the UK to gain Accredit certification which is a testament to the hard work Richard put into the processes used to run his business

We’re trying to encourage more content from within the group so it’s fantastic Richard has stepped up to do this.

Our next guest is Karl Palachuck (@karlpalachuk) from KPEnterprises and Great Little Book. If you’re involved in the SBS community at all you’ll know who Karl is! He’s been heavily involved in the community for years and contributes an awful lot through his blogs, newsletters, podcasts, conference calls, etc, etc!

He is also the author of some great books, his most recent one being, The Network Migration Workbook, Zero Downtime Strategies for Microsoft Networks 

I’ve got this one myself and it’s brilliant

590(!!) pages crammed with information, checklists, diagrams and spreadsheets. There is also an accompanying CD with customisable versions of the documents and a website to continue adding value after you’ve read the book

Karl will be bringing various books with him so you’ll be able to check them out and get your own copies. They’ll be more information about this on the AMITPRO site as the date gets closer

Karl is actually in the UK on a holiday so we appreciate the time he’s taking to come and speak to our group

Karl will be speaking about

Zero Downtime Migration Strategies

Join one of the authors of The Network Migration Workbook for an introduction to SBS Migration that will make your business more profitable and your clients a lot happier. Is ZDTM really possible and practical in your business? Attend and find out.

Obviously there will be the usual pre and post event networking so in all this is going to be a good one!

If you’ve never attended a user group meeting before this is going to be a great one to start with!

If you’d like to know more leave a comment here or visit the AMITPRO website

We look forward to seeing you!

Bye Bye EBS!

You’ve more than likely heard that Microsoft are ending development of EBS with immediate effect. If you browse to the website you’ll see this

(eventually…I got this and the regular product page randomly on each page load)

There is also an an announcement on the official SBS blog

“New IT Trends Bring Change to Mid-Market Product Line”

This didn’t exactly come as a massive surprise. If you work in the SME market hands up who sold lots of EBS?

When the product was initially announced it sounded like an interesting proposition but I had a few problems making it “fit”

Comparisons to SBS are bound to happen so that’s where I’ll start!

SBS works because it fits really well into a couple of scenarios that met a need for small businesses

New company, first network, first server

Obvious really. New company, buying infrastructure to get started. Decides to do it right from the offset and goes for SBS

Existing company, existing network, first server

A company that’s grown and needs to go from that peer to peer network to their first server

Existing Company, existing network, replacement server

You know the type. They’re using a “beefed up" PC as a central storage area for their files or they have been sold sold a more expensive "big daddy” Windows Server for sharing files and have no other functionality

As a side note Windows Foundation with some hosted services thrown in could easily swap out for SBS depending on the size of the company

So where in comparisons does EBS fit?

That was my problem.

Business that were generally large enough to look at EBS don’t really fit any of the above

New companies generally don’t start out needing to support 50+ users straight away

Existing companies that have grown to that size do so for a reason and they’ve usually made their IT mistakes and got something in that fits well. Usually “big daddy” Windows server but they pay enterprise prices because there isn’t a product specifically for them. Hence the introduction of EBS!

Since most existing companies like this generally have decent enough networks running it’s difficult to justify ripping the whole thing out and starting again.

So the other scenario I see is the businesses reaching the upper limits of SBS

I actually have this exact scenario going on at the moment with one of my clients and have agonised over EBS vs the regular server products

One of the issues I had was with the “Security Server”

The client in question had already made investments in protecting themselves at the gateway with a dedicated hardware firewall so had no need for Forefront Threat Management Gateway and were already covered by a message hygiene solution so no need for the Exchange Edge role so what exactly were they going to use this server for?

If you are doing it the traditional way then it’s a whole physical server you just don’t need. Obviously you could virtualise it but it’s still a running server that you need to provide support for, patch management, etc  (* this is based on my understanding being that you have to roll out ALL the servers to make EBS work. If I’m wrong please correct me)

There is also another point made by Andy Trish (UK SBSC PAL), that I saw on an email discussion tonight I hope Andy won’t mind me quoting him

They were trying to sell to a market that didn’t need the resellers knowledge to install and support
We wanted to sell using our knowledge to a market who we wanted to get rid of their support and use ours.

Andy is spot on here. Companies of this size have grown up enough to usually have some sort of IT function in-house. They may lean on a support company for advice or specific project work but they’ll make their own decisions about infrastructure. They’ll already have a happy system ticking over quite nicely. What benefit will they actually gain by ripping it all out and replacing it EBS. Slightly simplified licensing and Remote Web Workplace? Technically there really isn’t anything in EBS they aren’t already doing

Again I have a client where a similar situation occurs. They run about 30 internal staff and some external staff. They are quite a technology smart company and don’t run SBS as they have been running multiple Windows servers before SBS was actually relevant (I’ve known this company a LONG time!)

They improved the system a server at a time and now have pretty much all the servers in the EBS stack

File and Print, Domain Controller, Exchange, SQL, ISA (at one point, that has gone now though)

While EBS looked like a decent fit here it would be at the expense of ripping it all out and starting from scratch. This obviously makes no sense.

We actually had the same discussion around SBS a while back with them but what benefit would they get from ripping the whole thing out to start again with SBS?

The killer SBS/EBS feature they don’t have natively is Remote Web Workplace. There are other options for this though such an SSL VPN device or TS Gateway. Remote Web Workplace would be great here but they’ve done ok without it so far

Obviously this all my opinion and very specific point of view. In some ways though it’s a brave decision for Microsoft to just cut their losses and continue with the stuff that does make money so maybe we should applaud them for that

If you’ve already purchase EBS though Microsoft will be making an limited time offer (June 30th to December 31th) available to transition onto the regular products. Someone will have to actually perform the transition which will have a cost attached so it’s not entirely free

So as Guy Gregory said in tweet earlier

Farewell Essential Business Server, we hardly knew thee.

As always your own opinion more than welcome via comment below or email!

Office 2010 Versions

With everything that’s been going on personally and professionally the last few months the newest version of Office sort of skipped by me

Sure I installed the “alpha” when it was released on one of my machines but I wasn’t using it full time

Yesterday I had to do a rebuild of my main office PC so I took the opportunity to install the Beta

This post isn’t about the shiny new features though, it’s about the different suites you’ll be able to purchase

This time around we get four retail versions (from the Office 2010 engineering blog)

Office Home and Student1	Office Home and Business	Office Professional	Office Professional Academic
Word 2010	Word 2010	Word 2010	Word 2010
Excel 2010	Excel 2010	Excel 2010	Excel 2010
PowerPoint 2010	PowerPoint 2010	PowerPoint 2010	PowerPoint 2010
OneNote 2010	OneNote 2010	OneNote 2010	OneNote 2010
	Outlook 2010	Outlook 2010	Outlook 2010
		Publisher 2010	Publisher 2010
		Access 2010	Access 2010

On first glance I’m really pleased

OneNote for everybody!!!

However on second glance I’m a bit gutted as you’ll notice that once again there is no InfoPath unless you buy Office via licensing (Office Professional Plus for most businesses)

I commented before on how I think a lot of smaller businesses are missing out because InfoPath is inaccessible to them

It’s frustrating when we can sell Small Business Server 2008 with one of the key features being the inclusion of SharePoint and then not being able to create some really great solutions because a key piece of software isn’t as easily available. A quick search found Infopath 2007 box product to be somewhere in between £100-£140. Licensing is obviously different but if you’re going down that route you may as well just get Professional Plus

So it’s left to the SBS team to save us! Here’s my idea,

If you ever release SBS 2008 R2 (and I understand that is IF) can we get some InfoPath licenses added to the Premium CALS? 

I know that is unlikely to happen but a guy can wish right?

Check Your SBSC Status

It’s come to light recently that some partners are having their SBSC status change without realising

The reason being that the Sales and Marketing Assessment you have to complete when signing up only lasts for two years. On top of this you don’t receive any E-mails or alerts to let you know.

Microsoft are aware of this and looking into it but in the meantime just do the following to check

Logon to the Microsoft partner portal (this link is for the UK)

Click “View Your Membership Account” and then click “Membership Center”

Select “Competency Summary” from the “Requirements & Assets” menu

Scroll down until you find the Small Business Specialist Community section

You’ll notice at the bottom it’s letting me know that I need to complete the assessment so click on the “Training and Assessment” link

This takes you to the assessment page – click start to begin (make sure you allow pop-ups from the site)

The assessment is shouldn’t be too difficult to complete if you’ve already done it once before. Once you pass you should see this

You can then return to the competency summary to check to see if you are compliant once again – this doesn’t appear to update straight away though (it hadn’t when I’d posted this) so check back later

AMITPRO Meeting – October 2009

I’ve been meaning to post about the changes at AMITPRO for a little while but I’ve been a bit on the busy side recently. I’ve started the post about three times and never finished it!

So the changes…if you’re a regular attendee to AMITPRO you’ll already know that Steve Wright has decided to stand down as group leader

He’s done a great job over the last twelve months and will still have input into the group via his Partner Area Lead role

As of this month the new leader of the group is Guy Gregory of Peak Support and me!

Both Guy and I had shown an interest in taking on the group lead role and decided a joint effort would bring more to the group and sharing the responsibilities can only be a good thing

Since I’ve been involved with AMITPRO there has always been a great spirit of collaboration so it makes perfect sense from my perspective to take this on with someone else

If Guy and myself can keep up the great work from Steve and Vijay before him AMITPRO will continue to be a great resource for IT Professionals in the Midlands area

Tonight’s meeting was our first as joint leaders. Steve had already organised the speakers so we were able to hit the ground running!

Our first speaker was Zoe Russell of ZHR Marketing

She gave a great presentation about marketing specifically for the small business. It took a while for the group to warm up but once they did there were lots of questions and ideas about different marketing ideas. Hopefully it will have given everyone some new ideas!

Next up was Cécile Cathala and Richard Zinner from StorageCraft Europe

While StorageCraft isn’t a new name over in the States they are only just branching out into the UK.

StorageCraft is a backup imaging product for grabbing snapshots of servers and PC (competing products are Backup Exec System Recovery and Acronis TrueImage) that can also restored to dissimilar hardware or even a virtual environment

They have editions for Desktop PCs, Servers and Small Business Server

There is also a managed service provider licensing model if you would like to provide backup and recovery as a service

One of their unique features is their IT Edition. This is a technician license that allows you to create images of as many servers as you need. You can also run this directly from a CD or USB Drive while the system is running

There are trial versions of the products available so it’s definitely worth a look

Just a quick overview of both speakers. They both did a great job

Afterwards we retired to the bar and continued with our usual mix of chat about business, life the universe and everything!

Next month we’ll be organising speakers of our own…that’s when it gets really serious!

Small Business Server 2008 – Installation, Migration and Configuration

A book review!

Small Business Server 2008 – Installation, Migration, and Configuration by David Overton

While there are some great books for anyone working in the SBS space I’m of the opinion there aren’t enough written in the UK so it was with great anticipation I awaited the release of this book once I’d heard UKSBSGuy, David Overton was penning this title

I’m pleased to say the book doesn’t disappoint

The title fully covers exactly what the book is all about

Installation

Getting SBS 2008 up and running as quickly and smoothly as possible on a new system. Even though this is a pretty straight forward situation it fully described and backed up with pictures

Migration

Making the move from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008. The book follows the official Microsoft steps for migration and builds on top of that with lots of pointers and makes you aware of any “gotchas” along the way

Configuration

Once SBS 2008 is installed the book then goes through all the steps you need to go from installed to operating in a production environment. This is where you’ll learn about areas such as installation of a 3rd party SSL certificate, working with Office Live and configuring backups

The book has three other additional areas (it would have been a really long title!)

Managing User and Computers

While it may sound a pretty trivial area a chapter is dedicated to creating users and groups and adding computers and ensuring they are kept up-to-date

Working with SBS Services as a user

This is a great chapter. When a new server goes in to a business more often than not one of the first questions you’ll get it is

“What does it do?”

As a techie it’s then very easy to reel off a long list of things the system can do. This chapter takes that list and steps through it in a simple and easy to understand fashion covering three main areas

E-mail, Calendar and Contacts – this demonstrates Exchange functionality

Managing Files – covering SharePoint/Companyweb use, search and file recovery (via Shadow Copies)

Remote Access – everything you need to know about Remote Web Workplace, OWA, Mobile phones and connecting via VPN

Introduction to SBS 2008 Management

A full introduction into looking after SBS 2008 once it is running as expected

Areas covered include

Using the admin tools, configuring daily reports, security, backups, storage and event logs

The last part of this chapter looks at common problems and how to resolve them (e.g checking DNS forwarders, tweaking spam settings and investigating poor performance)

Conclusion

The book comes in at 380 pages but there are a LOT of screenshots.

Where needed David has added pictures of every step needed to complete a task which can be a massive help when you are doing something you haven’t seen before.

The language used is clear and concise and when a new piece of technical language is used an explanation is provided

The book is pitched in such a way that a tech savvy business owner who wanted to manage their own server will be able to learn from this book but not so simple that people with previous experience wont feel they like being taught old tricks

The book also breaks out to David’s website when something goes beyond the scope of the book and provides background information and other useful resources (there some very good scripts around file share migration)

From the perspective of my day job the book is worth buying just for the migration section alone. It’s in depth and covers every area without straying from the Microsoft official migration strategy. 

Not long after the launch of the book David came to an AMITPRO event where we ran through a live migration. David had never seen either of the servers provided but following the steps in the book a successful migration was completed with a minimum of fuss (Vijay blogged about it at the time here)

Having spoken to David at the event I know he put a lot of work into it and it certainly shows

The book is available in either print or e-book formats directly from the Packt website (though it is available in lots of other places too)

If you work with SBS 2008 this is definitely worth picking up

Susan Bradley says it’s great too so what other recommendation do you need

Disclaimer: A review copy of the book was kindly provided by Packt Publishing – I’ve donated the money I would have spent on the book to Cancer Research UK

Microsoft Partner Network: 2009

I’ve been asked to spread the word about an upcoming event

On Wednesday 7 October, the Microsoft UK team will be inviting partners to the number one UK channel event, Microsoft Partner Network: 2009 at Wembley Stadium.

This free event will give attendees  insights into current Microsoft strategies and the direction the company is taking the business, first-sight of some of the innovative technologies launching this year, and information about how partners can work better together for greater success.

The event is aimed at Partner executives and sales leads and set to be the event of the year for Microsoft in the UK.  American and UK Microsoft executives will be on hand to learn:

· Insights from Microsoft executives as they share the Microsoft vision and strategies together with business growth opportunities and product innovation

· A range of Partner-to-Partner online and offline networking opportunities, plus strategic and practical guidance on how to collaborate successfully with other Microsoft Partners

· Market insights and guidance on developing customer opportunities

· Useful resources to help you sell, market and deploy Microsoft technology, particularly when you find yourself in competitive technology situations

· A glimpse into future industry trends and innovation, with exciting demonstrations

· An introduction to the UK award winners from the Worldwide Partner Conference 2009

To register your place at this essential event, click: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/InviteOnly.aspx?EventID=DD-1E-C0-39-22-3C-75-22-2A-77-E7-A8-70-48-B2-67&Culture=en-GB and enter invite code: 22BAF4 or call: 0870 166 6670

Check the Microsoft Partner Network 2009 website for more details about the event over the coming weeks. You can also sign up to our RSS service, or follow us on Twitter.

This has been posted on the UK SBSC Blog with a bit more information so check that out too!