So I wrote about the Microsoft Small Business Specialist program that was announced yesterday at the World Wide Partner Conference. More interesting stuff is coming out of Microsoft regarding the benefits of the program, but if you’re doing anything with Microsoft in the smallbiz arena, suffice to say, you need to get it.

There are many details on where the program fits, but I’ll leave Microsoft’s propaganda machine to give you the details. Here is my opinion, based on all my work with Microsoft and Microsoft Partners:

This is the first big distinction Microsoft is making for individuals that specialize in Small Business IT. Essentially, it gives Microsoft’s seal of approval stating that you’re competent in smallbiz and they are behind you. This approach is very similar to the Microsoft Certified Partner program.

Whats more important is that this shows that you have support from Microsoft. Whether that is in the form of documentation, free PSS calls, free software, marketing collateral or anything else, it will definately show your clients that you have a real relationship with Microsoft.

What do I do now?

First, and the most important step is to train and pass the 70-282 Microsoft Certified Professional Exam. Details on this exam are available at Microsoft Learning : Exam 70-282: Planning, Deploying, and Managing a Network Solution for the Small and Medium-Sized Business.

You will not pass on your knowledge of SBS2003 wizards alone, you will need to train. Take a class, read a book, download a sample test, pay for a test simulation, read a book. Which book? Microsoft Small Business Specialist Primer & 70-282 Exam Preparation Guide by Beatrice Mulzer and Harry Brelsford. If you flip to the back (way, way back) appendix you’ll also find my 70-282 review

After you have passed the test, you need to pass the Small Business Sales & Marketing Assessment which you can take over and over and over again until you figure out all the answers. No big deal, after all, this is what you’ll be doing all day long anyhow.

Long enough? There is a great community starting up on the smallbizserver.net forums where you can ask all the questions you want about this certification. I will take some time to post there from time to time so get the book, get the guides and get certified!

Microsoft Announces Small Business Specialist Community: New designation within the Microsoft Partner Program helps partners that focus on the small-business space differentiate themselves and better serve their customers.:

Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference

Microsoft Partner Program: Smallbiz Specialist Readiness

We had another OrlandoSBS meeting last night despite the few hurricanes just around the corner. Most people were still on the 4th of July vacation but I decided to hold the meeting anyhow and I was quite pleasantly surprised. OrlandoSBS, for those of you hearing about it for the first time, is a professional association of IT professionals and solution providers focusing on small-to-medium business.

We mostly talked about security, mobility and the business. On the tech side, we went through the complete deployment and configuration of Windows System Update Services (WSUS) and Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 2.0 (MBSA) and then turned to business: how do I make this a part of my support contract, how do I give my clients a better service and a professionaly managed network without the high cost.

Small groups, especially when brought together with a common goal, tend to be a lot more productive than bigger groups because people overcome their shyness: they ask the questions and share information they may not be willing to share in a larger setting. For example, we found out how a local partner handles spikes in demand for his services and how he trains the new staff. Talk about the value not in just recruiting, but training and keeping the client happy.

If you’re not a part of an ITPRO group you’re hereby invited to join OrlandoSBS IT Professional group: there is no fee and what you will learn is priceless.

For the longest time the biggest complaint mobile users had with Exchange sync was that it did not bring all the address book contents to the device.

With this tool, you can bring your entire GAL (Global Address List) with you on-the-go and keep it in sync. There is a demo on how this works over at Eileen Brown’s Weblog.

Reuters Source

It would seem that the European corruption engine is not as advanced as the one here in the USA: they rejected a software patent bill by a vote of 648 to 14. Patents in the software industry are only intended to stifle and eliminate competition. There are quite a few things that do go under Intellectual Property, but you have a large army of unscrupulous brainstormers that just sit around and write patent applications for what is effectively vapor — and USPTO is always happy to get their $330 fee. If someone actually executes a plan and brings the service to the market all they do is sit back and sue.

Patents are intended to give their creator an artificial monopoly so that they can recoup their research and development costs once they bring their product to the market. If they put no effort at all into a commercial development of their idea, why should they be compensated by the court for effectively flooding the USPTO and sitting on their butt?

Use someones WAP, go to jail

Another law protecting utter idiots who shouldn’t have Internet access to begin with. Guy pulled up in an SUV and accessed some random persons AP, which by the way was completely wide open. He didn’t hack, he didn’t break encryption..

I personally manage a global network and have always felt (in spite of all the extravagant costs for security) that the burden of keeping a network secure falls onto the owner of that network. If I just plugged things in and “relied on the kindness of strangers” I would have been out of business the day after I started.

Which brings on two interesting points.

1. Ignore for a second that unauthorized access to a wireless network in Florida is a third-degree felony. The idiots excuse for not securing his property was: “Dinon knew what to do. “But I never did it because my neighbors are older.” Shouldn’t there be a law punishing idiots like this? How about at least a misdemeanor for “assisting hackers and criminals by providing transparent access to a public network”

2. Unauthorized Access? I don’t think so. The person accessing the network powered on their laptop. Their laptop sent a DHCP lease request to the WAP. The WAP approved and GRANTED access to the network. Thats what DHCP does. So at which point is this “unauthorized” — the access was provided over the airwaves (which are free) and it was granted by the device connected to the network.

Windows Server Update Services
Join the experts from Microsoft to discuss deploying Windows Server Update Services in your corporate environments. This chat will also cover configuring WSUS servers for synchronization with MU, or upstream internal upstream servers, client self-update, check-in, update status and update installation behaviors. Our experts from Test, Dev, and PM will be available to answer your questions in these and other areas, as well as to listen to your views on our newly released product.

10 AM EST: Join the chat

Get ready for more spam, if you don’t already accept faxes electronically you might want to consider it before everyone you’ve ever met decides to slam your fax machine.

The bill allows businesses to send you unsolicited faxes so long as they can find your fax number in a public place and you have an established business relationship. Until now, they had to have a written permission to spam you (and look how well that worked) and that is now gone. The reasoning DMA used was that the burden of paperwork was too high and that “if you have your fax number in a public place” you obviously NEED unsolicited faxes.

http://www.toolkit.cch.com/columns/office/05-170fax.asp

Bink is reporting about the news on Exchange from TechEd Europe, looks like they are getting a much better preview of whats going on in E12 than we got at US TechEd.

Also glad to see some discussion on Public Folders. Exchange team had hoped to drop the public folders and effectively force the people into SharePoint, something I would love to see not just because Public Folders are a nightmare to manage and SharePoint uses SQL as storage, but because its a wonderful technology that falls by the wayside because its too difficult for someone to open up a web browser! Perhaps they’ll have some time left in E12 to integrate access to SharePoint in the main icon set under Journals (yet another thing absolutely nobody uses).

Exchange E12 Preview
Server-side search
Admin can choose Exchange server roles, like edge server, OWA, backend.
AutoDiscovery service to configure Outlook and devices to connect to Exchange
Scriptable command line interface
Native 64-bit Support (direct when it is relased)
Ability to connect the Exchane 12 server to a PBX, users can receive voicemail and faxes in their mailbox and better, users can phone to their mailbox and have email read to them or cancel appointments and send the meeting attentdees a voicemessage.

Serverside search
* Access documents form Sharpoint sites

OWA12: Shared SharePoint documents from OWA
* Efficient, reliable meeting scheduling
* Browse contacts, language setting

Message hygiene
* Edge Server Protection
* Anti-virus & Anti-spam extensibility

Secure messaging
* Auto-establish secure B2B email
* Secure content sharing over email

Enterprise policy enforcement
* Mail flow policies: archival, encryption, routing
* Storage policies: retention, archival, deletion
* Rich auditing and search

Public folder enhancements:

* There is a new wizard added in SP2, the PB settings wizard, making life easier assigining permissions and more to folders.
* A new option at organisation level to stop public folder replication at once, so the PF admin can solve replica issues more easily.
* Folder deletion logging

Other enhancements

* Exchange Standard Edition will have a major sotarge .limit increase from 16G to 75Gigs! (about time)
* Improved cached mode performance
* 30% size reduction of Offline Address Book (OAB)
* Reduced causes for full OAB download
* OAB indexing moved to the client
* Connection controls and migration
* Cached mode connection enforcement
* Supported GroupWise 6.x connector/migration tools
* Iberian & Brazilian Portuguese OWA spell check

This alert is to notify you of the release of Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) 2.0.

MBSA 2.0 offers an intuitive user interface and more informative dialogs compared to previous versions. Using the new Windows Update Agent and Microsoft Update catalog, MBSA 2.0 has automatically expanding product support.

Users who primarily have:
- Windows 2000+ SP3 and later
- Office XP+ and later
- Exchange 2000+ and later
- SQL Server 2000 SP4+
- Other products supported by Microsoft Update in their environment should switch to MBSA 2.0 today.

MBSA 2.0 is compatible with Microsoft Update (MU) and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) and the SMS Inventory Tool for Microsoft Update (ITMU). MBSA 2.0 offers customers improved Windows component support, expanded platform support for XP Embedded and 64-bit Windows, as well as more consistent and less complex security update management experience.

For more information on MBSA, please see the MBSA home page located
here:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/tools/mbsahome.mspx

More information on MBSA 2.0 can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/tools/mbsa2/default.mspx

If you have any questions regarding this alert please contact your Technical Account Manager or Application Development Consultant.

Thank you,
Microsoft PSS Security Team