On my way back to Dallas and a schedule carpet-bombed with meetings.. suffice to say that power outlets were nowhere near my list of concerns. But apparently I am not quite appreciating the size of this blog and just how many people read it. (Note to self: Write more technical articles to bore people to death).

So someone at DFW caught my post about not being able to find a power outlet anywhere in the airport and bothered to wait for me at the gate! Nice to know American Airlines has nothing better to do than read my blog  Anyhoo, they were nice enough to talk to me about the Samsung deal and show me a facility in which they not only offered free lounge and wi-fi access but also had leather chairs and sofas.  

And yes, I made sure to take a picture of the power outlets as well. These lounges are in each terminal along the tram that connects all the gates - so you can get to your gate, sit down and plug in.

I did make a suggestion to put a sticker on the walls where they removed outlets from. I fly out of DFW all the time and I never even noticed these things around.

So there you have it! Huge thanks to American Airlines for the tour too, I’m always surprised when an airline is willing to give me an extra can of coke on a domestic flight, not to mention hook me up with a tour guide to tell me where to juice my laptop!

The west coast tour is slowly coming to an end. Off to Dallas tomorrow, then back to Orlando. This weekend was very nice, another focused conference with lots of community interaction and chances to learn from one another. I got a chance to help Michael and present Windows Mobile 6 yesterday and do a fairly deep dive into Exchange 2007 today. This one was a little special for me because I got a chance to share some of the corporate training materials that we use internally at OWN; People really seemed to like it. And I have to admit the conference was great – lots of food, fresh content.. same faces but that ought to give you an idea of the value people find in these things and why they keep on coming back.

The shock of the MVP Summit has still not worn off, I’ve committed more to paper in the past few days than in nearly all of 2007. What I have seen and what I have learned is effectively changing the business plan and lets just say… you’ll want to be on our side in 2007.

And so the MVP Summit is over. All I can say is… WOW. I’m conflicted whether I ought to write this or not seeing how its akin to saying “nyah-nyah, you didn’t get in” but perhaps it gives you an idea of what the benefit of being a big community contributor is all about. MVP Summit was basically TechEd if it had a future-vision superpower. Incredibly in-depth discussions, explanations and questions followed by mockups of technologies, ideas, solutions, problems, restrictions, business realities and user experience concerns. This is unlike anything I’ve ever done before and wow.

First and foremost… the Exchange team… holy… Ok, I’m starting to sound like Chris. I literally have no words for the type of stuff they showed off. The best I can explain it is by comparing the MVP discussions to the big “Epcot Ball” (actually spaceship earth) where you’re taken on a trek through time to see how people communicated. All the way from the cavemen to the future. Well, Exchange team did that today, in terms of comparison what KC and Kristian showed us today… well, Exchange 2007 is the caveman. I’d love to talk more about this and believe me, it takes a lot to make me speachless, but this did it. WOW.

I also had the very good fortune of being invited / not kicked out of the SBS and Centro sessions. I spent half my day yesterday in WSSG and got to see where Cougar, Centro and the rest are going. I was extremely impressed with Cougar and what I saw, I am still skeptical of the performance potential of this thing (heck, we can hardly keep Exchange 2007 running on two Dual Core server grade processors with 8GB RAM ) but I guess only time will tell. Centro… I kind of feel validated in everything I say and everything I believe about the state of the IT Professionals in the SMB community and I think Microsoft sees it in much the same light. I get beaten up when I say it out loud so I do wish them better luck in pitching that one. One thing is for sure, Kevin Beares rules. Not only did he organize multiple kickass events and get us together with everyone, he even promoted his WHS event like the folks that work on the Las Vegas Strip… “Slap, Slap… Here you go, 2B, check out the home server”; Seriously though, Kevin kicked major butt and I’m sure Susan is well on her way to sending him a bullet proof vest with some life insurance.

Well, my bottle of Koolaid is running low (one is on its way to you Mark) so I’m off to California / SMBTN now. I’m helping Michael C. with the mobility presentation tomorrow, running the Message Consulting bootcamp-ish presentation on Saturday. Disneyland on Sunday?

Microsoft has released Microsoft Windows 2003 Service Pack 2 for both 64–bit and 32–bit editions. It is flagged as a high priotity update meaning that if you have your box set to automatically apply updates you will likely be seeing this message just as your server is rebooting.

We got a bit blind-sighted by the decision to release SP2 today. Usually major service packs are announced well in advance. Will update when I find out more, in the meantime carry on with due dilligence and proceed carefully.

Update: SP2 has since been moved off the High Priority list.

This is the lowest thing I’ve done in quite some time so I figured I’d share:

If you’ve walked through 20 terminals without finding a single live power outlet, how unethical would it be to unplug the soda machine to refuel your laptop and cell phone batteries?

Just in case you’re against it, this piece of entertainment is courtesy of what will likely be a very warm can of Pepsi for an unlucky DFW traveler.

Just an alert, blogging will be fairly light this week on Vladville as I will be out of town and most blogging will happen over on the ownwebnow.com blog to coincide with the launch of ExchangeDefender v3.

I’m heading to the MVP Summit and I am absolutely looking forward to it. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting the high up folks on the Exchange team in the past as well as a bunch of Exchange MVPs who are easilly some of the most brilliant people in our profession. I’m hoping to blend in 

There will be some media here and for the most part canned posts. Have a good year and if you’re an OWN customer, thank you for all your money and letting me swing a week off in the middle of March!

Got this one today from Mike Willis; On a Friday afternoon after months of coding, weeks of auditing, beta testing and documenting….. it’s nice to know that my work makes a difference:

Thought you may like to know that a client of mine phoned out of the blue today saying that since running Exchange Defender it has changed his life and productivity AND JOB SATISFACTION. This is because of the lack of junk that he know has to wade through on a day to day basis that was actually getting him down. I thought this was worth passing back to you as we all hear the sh1t on a day to day basis but it is great when a client feeds you back the good stuff without asking.

Thats why we do it.

Earlier today on an ExchangeDefender conference I made a brief mention of Shockey Monkey and wow did people jump on it. Here is the situation:

Because of the committments to ExchangeDefender v3 I have not had as much time to work on provisioning Shockey Monkey for everyone. To be fair, there are over thousand of you waiting with just under a thousand enrolled so I hope you can give me a break. I realize it’s been months since commercial launch but a big part of Shockey Monkey is training and understanding how to run a business and only rely on the monkey to organize you. So to that end, rolling out everyone is not as simple as pushing a button, there is a significant amount of “if-then-else” that goes into the deployment of the application.

By the end of the month nearly everyone will be up and running on Shockey Monkey; I’ll be at the MVP summit next week without a whole heck of a lot to do at night so I’ll do my best to knock out at least a hundred an evening. But in the meantime, remember that training is important so hit up my friends Erick @ MSPU and Amy @ Mobitech and get your learn on first. In terms of books, you can’t go wrong with Erick or anything that Karl has done so if you’ve done absolutely NOTHING so far please first go buy a book. 

One of my partners (Central Florida Helpdesk) recently moved into a new big office and invited me for a tour. What’s nice about Judd is that he’s totally embraced the idea that you can keep the lights on through the reoccuring income that you don’t have to work for at all. Judd has been reselling our ExchangeDefender, Exchange Hosting, web hosting, etc and even had us help on a web migration project at some point. Most people I talk to lately are so blinded by the promise of managed services that they dismiss the power of getting a few bucks here and there to their bottom line that in many cases with my partners literally pays for the rent, bandwidth, phone fees or more. I should really sit down and write something at length about this stuff because every now and then I meet a JimmyJoe Everything that does everything in house to earn extra $2 a month but spends entire weekends managing his halfassed Plesk box on which support expired a year ago. Anyhow, on to the partner.

Now it’s awesome to meet people with the same kind of clasiness that I have. On the way in I stopped by a Publix to get them a housewarming gift. Traditionally this is modest gift for a new home (or in this case office) owner that lets them feel at home in their new home and community – anything from food, fine wine, house supplies, etc. Being the thoughtful guy I am and knowing that he’s got 5 men in his office… I figured I’d bring in something that would at least show the signs of life – half-bloomed purple Orchid. And in line with clasiness, I also got a 12 pack of Bud light. (25 miles away from Daytona, you’re not really allowed to drink anything else here).

They promised me a desk thanks to all the fine work I do for them. Below are the pictures of my “nook” and as you can tell it is strategically placed near the neccessities.

As for the equipment, well, the 2’ work area included a certificate of excellence, a sign and a half broken laptop. They also know how full of it I am so I got an unusual amount of toilet paper as well. Double-ply Charmin… oooo yeah.

Gotta love it!

Over at OwnWebNow and ExchangeDefender we have forms that allow our customers to request a callback.. so instead of calling us and leaving a message or sending appointment requests they can just tell us when to call them.

Sounds good, right?

Well, over the past few months the amount of form SPAM has absolutely gone wild. I’ve initially hacked in the WordPress mechanism for blacklisting IP addresses.. then I tied in CAPTCHA.. then I tied in the ‘prove you are not a computer’ deal where I threw in a form input element and using CSS set it invisible - pretty neat, worked for about a month. But now they have broken through that as well..

My last step is to keep on rotating my hidden elements and timing the sessions to make sure they are not direct hits.

What I have found in common is that they all are just junk using a freemail address like yahoo, aol or hotmail. I have been junking them pretty rapidly but I suppose the reason I am writing this email is that I see a business model in the online form management. I talk to people every day that are having issues with ExchangeDefender and forms that end up in quarantines (later they apologize when they see that the form had a great stock tip in it instead of that part order) but there is a lot of demand for online data management and customers do not want to pay for a Sharepoint CAL… so, where is the middle?