Out of Office Getting Married…

Expect blogging to be light over the next 2–3 weeks as I’ll be out of the office getting married… or eloped to be more precise. We’re off to Maui so for the most part I will be around quite a bit clearing out the post buffer (things I wrote but never quite pushed publish)

When I do come back things at OWN are going to be considerably different than they are now. Certain projects that I’ve been working on for months are finally going to see the light of day and the way we approach, empower and enable our partners is going to change significantly. There are some new fresh faces coming to the front along with me, some that you know, some that have been hiding behind the curtain for years. If you think I’m insane, wait till you meet the people that work with me

Day 1 Update: Slept 15 hours straight. Total lights out, I heard a lot happened around me but I have not noticed it. Enjoy.

Before you read any of whats below I just wanted you to know that I have not been paid, commissioned or bribed to provide any of the below. It is simply a reaction to the question that was asked on a Yahoo list questioning whether you can really get $100 of value from $100 book. I find it sad that questions like this are even asked, have you ever (outside of the enforced school system) ever picked up a book about your profession that did not give you some value or at least charge you to do what you do? Anyhow, review is provided for your enjoyment, hope you read it:

The Guide to a Successful Managed Services Practice – What every SMB IT Service Provider Should Know.. Volume 1, Introduction.

The Guide to a Successful Managed Services Practice book is written by Erick Simpson, CIO of Intelligent Enterprise (www.ienterprise.us) and the basic premise of the book is the way that an SMB IT break-fix shop converted their practice to offer managed services. The book describes this process in fine detail and goes beyond telling you what you already know – it addresses the concerns most SMB IT shops have with moving to managed services. It breaks down different business models, different approaches to providing services, marketing ideas, product offerings as well as serving as a guide on how to do it all.

Erick first walks you through the concept of managed services beyond the definition of what managed services actually means to your business. He talks about why you would consider managed services offerings to begin with, how they will affect your cash flow, how they will affect you both before, during and after the transition takes place. If you are afraid of what offering guarantees and SLA’s will do for your business the book paints a very clear picture of what happened with Intelligent Enterprise and offers you some numbers to consider for yourself.

Erick then moves into the “deliverables” of managed services – what you actually promise to do for the client. He gives lists of popular software used and discussed in the SBS community, explains how they fit into the puzzle and explains why you would consider certain tools. Every aspect of monitoring, helpdesk and management of “managed” services is explained, detailed and linked. This is the key value of the book, it consolidates all the information so you can start to formulate your game plan. In addition, each section is filled with best practices and ideas you may want to consider. As a matter of fact there is a full chapter describing all the various pricing models and implementations of managed services.

Finally, Erick moves into the marketing and management of managed services. If you’ve ever seen Erick, he is no Robin Robin. He neither looks nor sounds anything like her. The book is completely devoid of flash and spectacle, it goes straight to the difficult questions that anybody considering this book would ask themselves – How do I sell managed services? How do I sell it to the existing clients? What do I bring to the first meeting? What about the cost analysis? Do I just sit in front of my potential client and fill out the Technical Assessment Toolkit forms? Those are not the pretty or joyful subjects, but they are critical to your success and will prepare you for difficulties you face in running your business.

This is covered in the first 200 pages of the book that you can read in two evenings. First glance at the book will leave you with the impression that Erick had a large section of a Brazilian forest to clear out as the entire thing is double spaced. We gave him quite a hard time about it but as I was reading through it I found it helpful to write down my own notes and my own impressions on some of the ideas presented in the book.

The rest? There are extra 100 pages that provide collateral you will need as you move through the managed services. These are worth while even if you currently have a plan under way or are just growing your managed services practice and are trying to save time. These include sample agreements, sample spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations on how to pitch managed services, a flowchart of your helpdesk issue routing/escalation process. As much as the first 200 pages are the ideas and concepts on how to consider managed services, the last 100 pages are literally resources you can use immediately to get started. All these tools are included on the CD along with some presentations that I frankly have not watched.

The final, and perhaps most worthwhile reason to spend $100 on this book is that it will give you a lot of reasons to formulate, revise or evaluate your plans. My company lives and dies on managed services and our SLA – if you’re not up, we’re not eating. This has been our premise since day one – when email is down people tend to call and they are not happy to hear my voice. Those are the expectations we have set for our clients, that’s why we’ve been in business for over ten years. If that is your goal, if you want to truly make money and build a sustained business that is ethical and responsible both for your business and for your client, you need this book. I didn’t need this book. I got it anyhow and I flipped through it as I do with all of my business books. Then I found an interesting chapter and read through it in less than a minute. Then I went back and forth through the book before deciding to actually sit down and read it completely. Then I started writing down notes. Then I called my partners, then my friends, then we hammered it out on the SBS Show. Then we looked at all the ideas, all the concepts, the entire story and we found holes in our management process. Was the book worth $100? Oh yeah.

So will buying this book give you $100 worth of value? Absolutely not. This is not a reference book that will save you a couple of minutes here and there when you run into a bump. But if you do take a few days to actually _read_ it and a few weeks to consider all the ideas, best practices, suggestions and collateral.. Your only regret would be not getting this book sooner. You can get the book at www.managedservicesuniversity.com and I’ll just give you one final incentive - If you don’t like the book and think its absolute trash it is about an inch thick and Erick has been an active participant in the SMB community.. so if you really hate it you’ll be able to throw it at him at the next big IT event and have a good chance of hurting him.

Now I did promise this would be an honest account of what I’m doing, not just a sales outlet. So here it goes: The biggest mistake I set myself up for with Shockey Monkey is assuming that all the people considering it would be competent IT consultants.

That apparently was an exceedingly optimistic and has eaten up nearly a week worth of my productivity to backtrace. Let me explain the particular problem: Shockey Monkey is rolled out as a hosted portal that is totally customized and tweaked for the company that will be using it to work with its customers. This includes everything from the color scheme to the logo and even the URL itself – think about it, if you were about to work with your client wouldn’t it be far more professional to offer them a url of https://support.mylocalsbscguy.com than https://aadvarkconsulting.schmuckhosting.org?

The first step in the activation is asking them to provide an FQDN that will run their hosted Shockey Monkey portal on. I won’t tell you how many questions about FQDN came up. Next up – why do I need SSL and what is it? Third, can I just send you my SBS cert Fourth… you get the idea. Some were emails, some were phone calls, some were IMs. All left me in a partial coma over what I was trying to do here. Thankfully its only been a small bunch but even one person that doesn’t know whats going on is far too many.

So here I am, 7 days behind deadline, staring at a growing list of people that need to be explained what an SSL certificate does and why its important to encrypt the portal that they will use exchange financial and other secret data with their customer. I am at this point writing more documentation than code and I need to figure out a more effective way to train people on all of this. Look on the bright side right, now I know why video professor makes so much money.

The first failure: Not writing enough documentation to cover every aspect of deploying an ASP service. 

Yesterday was the quarterly Microsoft Small Business Specialist webcast, packed with an updates on the program, new promotions and ideas. They really have made this thing phenomenally successful, far beyond anyones expectations. Susan talked about it here, if you missed it I know the recording will be posted here.

If there is one thing.. one thing.. I despise about Microsoft’s webcasts its the inability to hold back on adding meaningless numbers to show “the opportunity” – Wow, I can miss out on that many billions worth of sales! So I use my opportunity to do something worth-while with my time, like check who is on the attendee list and catch up with them over MSN Messenger. I know they are just as bored as I am, “So how big of a piece of the $5.5 billion dollar market are you going to get?” is a great ice breaker and we move on. Yesterday we had a few people in a chat room going back and forth over what was being discussed, sharing opinions, ideas, etc. It was a truely international crowd and the conversation eventually went to the recent changes in the MAPS. We don’t (and can’t) subscibe to MAPS so I’m happy to see Microsoft restricting this easy gateway to piracy. However, registered partners who rely on MAPS to have legitimate licensing and ability to test and deploy Microsoft software feel quite differently. So here are the two problems with restricting MAPS:

Most registered partners are System Builders

Most registered partners are system builders and not in the traditional Microsoft way. They build their own systems for their use and don’t rely on Dell or other OEMs for anything but laptops. So when they build a PC with a TB of storage for their media center they don’t get an OEM license because they expect it from MAPS. With the XP Pro in MAPS becoming upgrade-only most will have to purchase Windows XP in addition to MAPS.

Most are going virtual

Most partners are taking their testing and design systems virtual. In a virtual machine there is no such thing as an OEM preinstall. This limits the partners ability to install XP in a testing environment and restricts them to either prebuilt Microsoft TDTK or eval versions which need to be refreshed every six months.

Is Microsoft shooting itself in the foot?

Apparently. Registered member community is individually small but quite large in the evangelical sense – they support Microsoft, buy Microsoft products and services, beta test and really participate in the SMB sector. Is it wise to piss them off?

I am having a hard time with this question. On one hand, I’ve seen MAPS go to so many places that shouldn’t have it – no XP goes a long way to crushing that, in my humble opinion they should pull back Office and SBS/Standard Server as well but they will never do that because there are alternatives to Office and SBS out there. To XP? Not so much – what are they gonna do, get a Mac?

On the other hand, limiting MAPS in this way is a bad PR move, will likely get at least one TS2 presenter killed by a tomato and will lead to less loyalty for Microsoft on the desktop. You never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever take a loyal partner and send them to find alternatives. Microsoft is not Ferrari, there are substitutes.

What Would Vlad Do?

Restrict MAPS to Small Business Specialist Program.

Let’s face it, if you want to be taken seriously you need to act it. Barrier to entry? Ok, sign up for the partner program and we’ll ship you a few DVD’s loaded with trialware. Pass a certification exam and Microsoft hooks you up with the full deck of their software to run your business off of.

Do you really think a small business will go through the process of training, exams and certification just to get MAPS? Of course not. This benefits Microsoft a lot too because it documents, tracks and validates the partner as someone that is a little more than an email address and a PO Box.

Will this happen? As long as someone at Microsoft is goaled on the number of partners in the channel this idea will only be a fantasy you read on Vladville.

Not quite sure how to categorize this so I will share the words I shared with Microsoft PSS earlier tonight: 1004 ft bitches and landed it in the spikes!

Hail to the king, baby! Whats your score at Kitten Cannon?

Alright, so I went back to it (straight crack, just try it) and this time I bounced it 1,718 ft. Woooooooooooop!

There is something magical about the mixed sounds of dynamite and meows.

Update: Vlad: “I really pick the WRONG things to be good at.” – I really ought to close the comments as this is really the one time I am fearing that Katie or other girlfriends may comment on here. Knowing the pattern the bottom will likely be marked by either Chris or Susanne.

As a followup to my last post I just found this interesting tidbit over at David Overton’s site:

“…The research in our labs, and this matches what I observe with the people I know who start using 2007, is that it takes between 2 days and a couple of weeks to feel at home in the new user interface. Now this is NOT how much downtime each user suffers making the transition, it is the time it takes for them to feel as confident with the new release and to take advantage of the new usability…”

I don’t buy this for a moment. I’ve seen people uninstall Office 2007 because they could not be productive due to all the changes. Maybe thats days to weeks with training? I’ve been in beta for quite some time and I still find myself looking for stuff in the old places. Wish Microsoft could build in “Classic” view for Office 2007 because as much as I like the new UI in Outlook I can’t be bothered ™ with it in PowerPoint or Excel. But I digress, the reason I started writing all this is to tell you:

Dave found a neat site that has videos called “Interactive Command Reference Guide” – click on a feature on Office 2003 UI and the video shows you where its at in Office 2007. Pretty neat!

Word 2003 to 2007 Interactive Command Reference Guide

Excel 2003 to 2007 Interactive Command Reference Guide

PowerPoint 2003 to 2007 Interactive Command Reference Guide

This article certainly points to an interesting change of pace in Redmond when it comes to the ongoing battle for Web 2.0 dominance. While Microsoft is certainly turning the ship to open fire on Google and the myriad of the new .com startups, Microsoft still remains at disadvantage because it has a lot more to lose than to gain at least initially. This new development of making Works available online for free is certainly interesting, considering that the cost of $50 (to Microsoft, “retail”) could be easilly made up by anyone actually using the application online:

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. said on Thursday it may offer a free, advertising-supported version of its basic word processing and spreadsheet software, in an apparent bid to fend off a nascent challenge from Google Inc. in the business software market.

Microsoft, which dominates the market for desktop computer software through its Windows and Office franchises, has long resisted offering its software online.

But it faces a growing pack of Web-based competitors — led by Google — that is offering similar technology for free with a business model that makes money off advertising.

The world’s largest software maker is now mulling how it can move Microsoft Works, a basic suite of business software that often comes preloaded on inexpensive consumer PCs, onto the Web as part of its growing stable of free online services.

Microsoft continues to roll out new online services under the Windows Live brand and it started testing Office Live, a software for small businesses to create e-mail accounts, Web sites and collaborate on projects.

Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft Information Worker Business Strategy, said the company will consider many options to woo entry-level users.

“We’re also thinking about how we might take advantage of new business models like advertising and other payment models, as well as new forms of distribution,” said Yates.

Revenue from software licenses for Office and the Windows operating system accounts for a bulk of Microsoft revenues.

The challenge for Microsoft will be to make sure a free or, possibly, a subscription-supported version of Works won’t hurt sales of its dominant Office software, which accounted for a quarter of the company’s $44 billion in sales last year.

Microsoft expects its new version of Office, due out in early 2007, to spur another round of demand. Office includes Outlook e-mail, PowerPoint presentation software, Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft Word.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft sells the latest version of Works, which includes a calendar, word processor, spreadsheets, Web Browser and e-mail, for $50.

Last month, Google said it created a free software platform to run a set of business software programs including e-mail, scheduling and communications. A paid, premium version will be available later this year with an ad-free option.

At the time, Google also said its online spreadsheet and word processing software were candidates for bundling into its business software platform.

Google acquired word processing Web site Writely.com in March and began testing Google Spreadsheets, which allows users to create, store and share spreadsheets on the Internet, in June.

So here is the Web 2.0 scale as I like to see it. A year ago right about this time Microsoft was almost down for the count. It just got smacked by the steel chair and got the elbow drop from the top rope across the ring. Google released Gmail and speculation of Google Office was mounting. Microsoft, dazed and confused, was spending live.com $$$ on creating online/sharing integration for its upcoming Office 2007 suite knowing full well that most corporate (“big money”) users have privacy policies restricting the sharing and uploading of files outside of corporate firewalls.

So here we are a year later and boy does time make a difference. Google has released one uninteresting application after another unexciting bundle and is slowly but surely losing both trust and fan girl image that it once had. They are the Back Street Boys now, whether they like that or not. Fan girls are over on myspace, on Youtube, blogging, vlogging… and Google has to put a finishing move on Microsoft, which as in all wrestling, appears to be Hulking up through some miraculous burst of energy.

Make no mistake, Microsoft is still very bloody and the greasy hair is looking pretty bad. It has to convince already frugal corporate gatekeepers that the productivity from its new OS and Office suite will displace the additional costs of retraining and retooling literally every non-ITPRO worker (you know the kind, that have printing instructions glued to the side of the monitor) and change the way they have worked and viewed their desktops for close to a decade.

The funny thing? Even though Microsoft is no stronger a year later, Google is by comparison weaker and has virtually everyone else after them, at least in the web 2.0 world. And that, after all, is what we’re lead to believe is the future… The funny thing is that the one leading that notion is Google themselves.

I have to admit I am quite excited that BlogOrlando is just two days away. This weekend (sessions on Friday, fun at Disney World over the weekend) we finally get to do something that seems to happen every weekend in NYC and the Silicon Valley – a social/geeky gettogether. We already have a very active ITPRO community and Linux community but the new cutting edge stuff is just not there. Kudos to Josh for putting this together.  

I’m presenting/herding/moderating/harassing-my-friend-Jen on video blogging, check out this sales pitch:

Using Video to Connect, Inform or Sell
Join us for a 30 minute crash course in video blogging from getting started to best practice. Then talk and listen about how it can make sense for you both personally and professionally. Compared to blogging, video blogging is very much in its infancy and the only limit is your creativity. We will discuss the costs involved in creation, editing recommendations, publishing options, promotion and communication.

Anyhow, if you’re in the Central Florida area you really need to show up. You can register here, for free, and meet a fairly diverse crowd of people. I’ll vlog some of it for those of you abroad just to see how it all goes, as we all know that major conferences are pretty much dead but we still need to find a way to network so perhaps unconferences are the way of the future? Cheesecake?

P.S. Let’s open this up to the peanut gallery. Most of you know my girl-friend Jen and the joy she has brought to my life by letting me pick on her, endlessly. She is a PR monkey so brainstorm some questions IT people would want to ask a PR person. Susanne rules: keep it clean!

Thanks to Chi Melville for floating up the info that Microsoft will no longer be distributing full versions of Windows XP Professional with the Microsoft Action Pack:

“We apologize for any inconvenience you have experienced; however, Windows XP Professional is no longer included in the Microsoft Action Pack, due to a high amount of piracy we have been experiencing. Since this product is no longer a benefit of the Microsoft Action Pack subscription, we are unable to replace any CDs or product keys for this product.”

Thank you Microsoft! We have been screaming and moaning and whining for Microsoft to do something about the proliferation of illegal sales of Microsoft Action Pack to firms that do not focus on IT. You see, you used to be able to get a full copy of Windows XP Pro (as in, install on barebones PC) with the action pack and roll it out on up to 10 PC’s in the company for just $299 per year along with a billion other tools. Some unscrupulous partners criminals have been taking advantage of this Microsoft Partner benefit to illegaly provide licensing to businesses. It took a long time but finally… Microsoft has closed this down.

Susan has done a bit of digging as well so here is the official comment from Microsoft:

Why doesn’t Action Pack include the full version of Windows XP? In response to feedback we are receiving from partners, and to address piracy and abuse of the Microsoft Action Pack Subscription, Microsoft is taking steps to bring compliancy to this subscription by changing some of the software media available. Beginning July 2006, Microsoft will provide the upgrade version of the Windows XP desktop operating system within Action Pack, which is consistent with how this product is distributed to our Volume Licensing customers. The total number of Windows XP Upgrade licenses will remain at 10.

Good job guys!

Update: They are on the roll today!

I have Outlook 2007 on my laptop and Outlook 2003 on my main workstation – and the latest Technical Refresh seems to be causing a slight bug that made my Outlook 2003 view ugly. If Outlook 2007 fires up first with Outlook 2003 being offline it resets the default font on the default Inbox view from Tahoma 8pt to Segoe UI 8pt…. a font that looks really ugly in Outlook 2003. Anyhow, here is how you reset it back: (click on the screenshot to enlarge)

Right click on From/Subject/Received header in your inbox and select Customize Current View.

Click on Other Settings button to adjust fonts.

Click on Row Font button and reset it back to Tahoma 8pt.

Thats it. Bugged…