So all my friends have been playing with Groove for about a month and I never joined the party. Frankly, I never could get Groove to work. I had a few hours to kill today so I figured I’d finally get this thing fixed and having been over a month since I last tried to get it to work I figured I’d take a shortcut (ie: IM to sbradcpa: “Hey, whats with ‘can’t find provisioning server’ thing in Groove) from which point I was redirected to PSS Canada. Apparently Dana had the same problem and the PSS reference is important for two reasons: First, it took him 20 minutes to answer my IM, followed by “They don’t have Google search in America?” and “I have to go, but if you have a problem later I’ll help again, SRX07…”

So what made me so “special” – well, apparently my antivirus software wasn’t playing along. I couldn’t get my Groove on (I know, I know) because I have a 64bit Vista workstation with way too much RAM and I can’t get a decent A/V solution for that so I have to deal with the third world software makers (ESET).

Bottom line — ESET/NOD32 hates GROOVE.EXE. If you’ve got the combo and you’re getting the “Groove 2007: Unable to contact provisioning server” you need to add GROOVE.EXE to the IMON exception list. Details here..

It’s all in the Relay Server URL configuration (which Groove gets on it’s own, its not modifiable as are other parameters on your Advanced Network Settings). Because Groove is being intercepted by IMON you’re not getting to the relay server and are instead stuck with the grooveDNS://backwardscompatibility.groove.net – but add GROOVE.EXE to the exception list and voila, you’re set with a *relay.groove.microsoft.com relay server.

As for NOD32. Open up your Control Panel > IMON > Setup > Miscelaneous > Exclusion > Edit > Add > C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\GROOVE.EXE

So today I had the enormous pleasure of presenting the SBS content to a bunch of SBSers at TechPartner / TechMentor conference. I have to say it was a lot of fun to see the little idea lights come on during the hour and a half I was given to show people how and why people become successful with SBS technologies. Thanks to Eric Ligman for hooking me up with the good ol’ Microsoft “opportunity” slides so I can oppen the presentation today the way I always dreamed I could if I worked for Microsoft:

Thank you for coming out here, thank you. Really, I appreciate you paying to come out, take the time from your busy day and the conference to see my presentation. Now that you’re here, give me 15 minutes to sell you on why you should be here. You see, there are 3.2 million businesses with a network and 5 or more PC’s. Can you smeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeel the opportunity?

My god that felt great. In retrospect, I do owe Eric an apology. Maybe two years ago I complained about having me and my staff sit through these webcasts to endure the same crap every single time. Yes, partner program this, action pack has this, partner program that, blah, blah. But when I asked if anyone had used Microsoft Financing to close a deal the dead sea of business owners looked very calm. When I asked if they were aware that they could get the business financed for just $3,000 a few jaws dropped. When I asked if they knew that they could finance about $3,000 of software and services for just $102 a month, I could see the sea starting to part:

How many of you have eeeever had to take the walk of shame out of an SMB office after being shot down on a $5,000 deal?

Don’t lie to me, we’ve all been there.. (more heads start to nod)

Now as you were walking back to your car, did you not walk by at least two brand new Benz, BMW , Lexus or other $60,000 or more cars?

You mean to tell me they got $60,000 to spend on a car but not $5,000 on their business????

(brief pause)

Did you really think those people owned them? Heck no, they were paying them off! You think they are going to sink $5,000 worth of the company’s cash flow into a bunch of software?  

And as the sea parted I thought to myself… I wonder if I can get a cut out of the business I just sent to Microsoft?

I know I won’t, for they have not assassinated me (yet) for all the crap I always say about them. Which coincidentally was the remaining hour and a half of my presentation. I explained to the audience what Centro is, what Home server is, what SBS Cougar is and literally followed up with a truckload of info that just fell off the Microsoft NDA bus. I tried my hardest to give people the reality of whats going on, why its going on, who has the most interest in telling them what they need to think.

The Objection Land

At one point a gentleman (Certified Partner) asked, point blank – “Who cares? If they need a server today I can’t sell them Centro, I am selling them whatever is available. So why should I care?”

Eyes started to open up even further a few minutes later when I asked how many of them are out there fielding that ginormous demand for Microsoft Office 2007? “Wow, they changed eeeeeeeverything, thats awesome, Bob, I’ll take 30 copies! Forget about training, it’s so easy and intuitive I can do it today”

“Let’s talk about managed services… what does that mean to you? How many of you do it? <crickets> Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa? You haven’t dumped $50,000 of dollars into MSP software yet? Why not? Ok, well, lets go through the room and talk about what the managed services are, and what that ought to mean to you.”

That one was the most surprising one. I think everyone had a different take on it, most of them direct rewording of the parts of the MSP software makers marketing bs. Queue nail, hammer, coffin:

So whats with all then excitement then folks? Let me ask you this – how many of you know or have heard of a highly successful IT shop that only does the managed services?

The answer to that one, and what followed… well, thats why you pay to go to a conference. But I will share one with you for free:

Who cares about Office 2007, Cougar, WHS, etc? Not a single client. And perhaps they shouldn’t either, thats why I’m the geek and I play with it for years in advance. But you see… I make it a point for them to be aware that I’m playing with it! They talk to me because they want to see the technology, I talk to them because I want to show them whats possible. So a year or two down the road, when things come to the front, I want them to remember one name: Vlad.

I talk to people all the time. I don’t sit there and sell and push. I don’t need to, the solutions are solid enough. More importantly, I don’t need to BS people and pressure them at all, I’m just being me and thats very easy to do. But the candid talks pay off over time and I’m in this business for the long haul. I am selling solutions and services to the people that have talked to me in 1996. More than a decade later, I still do what I love without compromising my integrity or the respect that my business has built. I am not in this business to make it through this quarter and get promoted, I am in this business because I love what technology can do for people and I / we make those things possible. And when thats the philosophy you live by, the temporary blips, threats, opportunities and issues do not impact your ability to build a great company and be a good citizen to your community.

Thanks to the Redmond Magazine for inviting me to present this business content to my peers. It was a priviledge.

Exchange Server 2007 SP1 beta is now available, check out the release notes first.

Lot’s of new stuff coming to Exchange 2007:

• Personal distribution lists that users can create and manage themselves via Outlook Web Access
• Ability to edit Server Side rules through Outlook Web Access
• Deleted item recovery
• Office 2007 document converter so you can see those docs on the web
• S/MIME
• and Public folders

Yes… public folders… yes.. SP1… Yes, 2007… No, I’m not kidding.

So aside from that little bit of shame, Susan Bradley is singlehandedly killing my ability to sell Exchange 2007. I’ve had two partners today decline their new mailboxes on Exchange 2007 and opted to go with 2003. In both scenarios they said:“I don’t want any surprises”

I’m presenting some fresh SBS/Centro/WHS content this Thursday, 10 AM EST at TechPartner event. I spoke to a few of my local buddies that are volunteering at the event, they seem to be really enjoying Mark Minasi’s Vista presentation.

I’m going to be there tomorrow and Thursday, look forward to seeing you out there!

It gives me great pleasure to announce that ExchangeDefender v3 is up and running and we’re taking a few days off  Seriously, this has been a long development cycle and a big source of pride for us is that the interface guidance was given by actual ExchangeDefender users who wanted to be more efficient as they go through the mail. We’ve managed to simplify the interface even further to really make security management as seamless as possible.

Don’t believe me? Check out this video: ExchangeDefender v3 Video Tour (5 minutes)

Thanks to all that made this release possible, in particular three folks outside OWN that worked very hard to bring you this thing: Rich Walkup, Judy Schmidt and Pablo Averbuj. It is absolutely amazing when your own customers take the time to improve the product because they like what it does and want it to work better: and to that end thanks to all the customers for all the feedback, guidance and testing. Thank you for helping us get to this point.

What’s next? Well, MSP stuff this week, agents hit next week, Live Archive feature (which is absolutely revolutionize how you think about SMB messaging continuity) and more all coming online over the course of the next month or so. The goal behind ExchangeDefender v3 is ambitious – we aim to be the most feature-packed easy-to-use, over-hyphenated mail security service out there!

By the way, for any suggestions/bugs/complaints/etc please use the Own Web Now official forums where things can be seen out in the open and we can have a more open discussion that one-on-one. You do have to be registered to post, so contact Support to get an account. 

So over a week after the surprise drop of Windows Server 2003 SP2, the product team blogs the following:

Rapid customer adoption of Windows Server 2003 SP2 continues.  In less than a week since release there were more than 400,000 successful downloads!  Interesting that some have commented that we “quietly” released SP2.  The trade press have certainly covered it, since November when we broadly publicized the Release Candidate and product details, and at launch last week. At last count there were several dozen news stories about SP2 over the last week, and many blog posts.  SP2 also required less advance education compared to SP1 or XP SP2, because (by design) it is generally much easier for customers to “consume.”

You send an alert the Friday before saying there would be no security patches the next Tuesday. Any IT department larger than 1 person normally considers that a cancellation of the mandatory around-the-clock patch testing and deployment work cycle that you put your customers through every second Tuesday of the month.

Then you “quietly” release SP2, though I’m not sure why you’d quote a factual description but I’ll play along. Quietly means without announcing the release. At the time of it showing up on Microsoft Update there was no email. There was no announcement. There wasn’t even an announcement page on Microsoft Technet.

Even your own employees had no idea this was coming!

So after putting us through series of ineffective DST patches, after not following even your own procedures for publicizing the release date of service packs, after admitting that you messed up by pulling high priority classification from MU hours after it was placed there, after years of the “patch-or-die” security track record that leaves everyone not patching with an exploitable system with 0–day attacks… After all that you have the decency to poke fun at the people that alert the public when you mess up and pretend nothing went wrong? Here’s a quote for you Joel:

“Fuck you, you jackass!”

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
Microsoft Partner whose 14 data center network wastes millions of dollars in overtime dealing with Microsoft security patches, hotfixes and service packs.

Mary Jo Foley writes about the 23% of C-level executives indicating their intention to drop Microsoft Exchange. The analyst that produced the report is quoted saying:

The users attributed their decision to their belief that Linux Email and messaging packages are cheaper and easier to manage than Exchange,” according to study author and Yankee analyst Laura DiDio.

There is a lot of truth and a lot of irrational exuberance in that very small paragraph.

First, its true that people find managing Exchange to be difficult. But what they find difficult to manage is usually not simply Microsoft Exchange, but the entire Microsoft platform – In my many presentations both to business owners and IT professionals I frequently talk about the importance of training.  Corporate america does not have a talent pool required to manage these incredibly complex environments. Likewise, its important to realize WHY this very problem exists in the first place:

Businesses rely on email today far more than they did 5 years ago or 10 years ago.

So when you put ten fold the workload on top of a mail system that was designed to handle small 5k email, and turn it into a fax server, voicemail server, PBX, mobility storage and management system, groupware solution… well, you have to understand that at that level of complexity you are dealing with far more than what those “competitive” solutions offer.

Please take it from me – I run Exchange, Postfix and Sendmail solutions. These corporate managers that “believe Linux messaging packages are cheaper and easier to manage” are simply buying the feedback from the blindfolded high school and college kids they have left to manage their corporate messaging platforms. They have highly underpaid and undertrained jr. system administrators in charge of an enterprise platform that may be constantly crashing and are taking the advice of a kid whose Postfix box at home “just works” in a default Ubuntu install. So when they ask “can we save money” and the Linux kid responds with “we can do it with Linux” what they are really saying is “we can replicate some of the very basic functionality for free, or some more functionality and save about 50% on licensing cost but will eventually quadruple that initial investment because the software to monitor, manage and scale those solutions just doesn’t exist” — good news is, we know Perl so we can do it!

So there you have it. Yet another “wave of change” scenario that dies when someone with the business and finance expertise which barely got them through the 11th grade goes to the CEO and tells them they have to give up their Blackberry or install the redirector software on their Windows desktop…. That CEO will turn into Charleton Heston clinching to his Blackberry: “From my cold dead hands.”

This is a business post, as you can tell by the category, but I didn’t think that the title was appropriate for the Own Web Now Corp blog. So here goes the pitch, I’m interested in your feedback if you’re giving us money.

For years our business plan has been to offer high-quality SMB commodity services with a high degree of actual service. So instead of driving the cost of the service straight into the ground and making you pay through the nose for support or through lost business when we embarras you like my competitors do, we kept our pricing at levels where we can all make a profit but you get the benefit from a true partnership. Makes sense, right?

Since the startup and maybe until a year ago or so most resellers we dealt with were just happy to either get a check or pass the discount on to their customers and just move on. Not quite the case anymore. Today resellers are firmly embedded in the clients IT infrastructure, support, etc. They more you promise to those clients in terms of flat support costs and services the less margin you have to use to deal with services that will fail you – the services everyone needs like offsite backups, web hosting, email, virtual servers, dedicated servers, etc. OWNs are more reliable, thus cheaper overall. In the end, we grow much faster together.

But…

But times change.

I have been one of the most prominent pimps of the work Karl Palachuk has been doing. The books aren’t cheap – but I’ve yet to meet a person that wouldn’t have paid 10x as much after having read it.

Last weekend I was in LA and Erick took me to check out what Intelligent Enterprise is doing. I got to watch one of their MSPU bootcamps and.. well, wow. If you thought the book was something you’ve got to check that thing out. Erick actually let me tape one of the sections of the bootcamp and show me their entire practice.. I was kind of skeptical of the SMBer that would pay $3K for that training but having seen it live… again, wow, they got their s… together in a really big way, talk about an investment in getting to the next level.

Amy Luby also has an organization that spawned out of the SMB Managed Services yahoo group, that takes an online community approach to helping VARs scale up. I haven’t seen it yet but I keep on hearing good things about it.

So here is the point..

All of these things cost money, in some cases a lot of money. And they are well worth it. It is in Own Web Now Corp’s best interest to support these organizations because they produce content, training and support services to help smaller IT shops make it big, take things to the next level, get organized, etc. For example, we’re sponsoring SBS Migration’s ITPRO conference because its a pure SMB community event where people can come and exchange ideas without being harrased by vendors posing as presenters and forcing people to eat out in a parking lot. It just makes sense for my partner base.

The more embedded my partners become in the SMB they support, the better off OWN is because we get more business, more support, more feedback and in turn provide better services that make us all more money…

Get to it already..

…. so I’m really happy to pimp what others in the community are doing because it makes sense for everyone involved. Thus Vladfire, SBS Show, Vladville and the thousands and thousands of people that have partnered with us. I can tell you to go buy Karl’s book, but what if I actually gave you a cash incentive?

So here is the pitch I want your feedback on: Any discount offered on ExchangeDefender service would just go on to pay for something else. Maybe power this month, rent the next, etc. Most of you that are in the partner program and took the time to join our conference calls last night already know just what we’re up to in terms of the new support services and so on… but what if I gave you a true incentive to sign up for some of these SMB services by giving you a discount if you’re doing business with me AND you belong to their programs, books, camps, etc?

I want to give you a financial incentive to get training and stay involved in the community as you grow your business.

Look at it as my investment in your business by taking a part of the revenues you bring in and reinvesting them in education and training that would scale you to the point where you’d need even more of my services. Not that I don’t believe in that very thing today, but lets face it, money talks bull…. walks.

Good idea? Bad idea? You know where to let me know whats on your mind…

Bit of a short notice but I’m doing a technical presentation on Exchange 2007 and Windows Mobile 6. This being the sixth or seventh time I’ve done this I actually took a shortcut and recorded the technical aspects of it so they can be reused as people dip into Exchange 2007. Susan is giving me exactly 1 hour to present both Exchange 2007 and Windows Mobile 6 and it takes 48 minutes to do a full Exchange 2007 installation. You do the math, there will be smoke and mirrors and all that.

The presentation is for SMBTN Fresno group in Fresno, CA. It is a technical presentation but even hardcore SBSers should be able to follow it too. If words “raise the domain functional level” don’t mean much to you this will be very painful. I will not talk about clustering, promise.

Subject: Exchange 2007 for Vista load fest
Meeting URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/winserver_usergroup/join
Meeting ID: Z2NG98
Meeting Key: w;T6PhM

It’s at 10:00 PM EST tonight (Thursday, March 22, 2007), Livemeeting info is above.

Please join me in singing Tim Barrett a happy birthday song, today is the big mans b-day:

Vlad Mazek says:
hey man, did the Visa come in?

Tim Barrett says:
Say what?

Vlad Mazek says:
From the Florida Old Geezer department, asking you to move to an Active Adult community in the Sunshine State!

Vlad Mazek says:
Happy Birthday!

Tim Barrett says:
I have Alzheimers, so I don’t remember if it came in or not

Vlad Mazek says:
it’s hard to count that high up, Alzheimers or not

Today Tim is a decade older than me and Susanne. And joins the senior citizen club by having the same age as Amy Luby and Chris Rue. Unfortunately, Susanne and I have to hear constant war stories of yester-year and how us whipper-snappers would never have these gadgets if it weren’t for their great generation inventing the wheel and the fire. So take that Centrum with your Sarsaparilla and have a happy birthday!