As Shockey Monkey project grows, and let’s face it, as there are many of you out there using it and making your living on it the need for a serious site grows. I have worked very hard today to make ShockeyMonkey.com a better home for all Shockey Monkey information.

The new site has the long desired roadmap, updated FAQ, and something I think many of you will really enjoy even if you have no intent to ever use Shockey Monkey. I’ve spoken to well over a thousand of you over the last year of the Shockey Monkey development and through that process identified a lot of best practices, pitfalls and challenges an IT solution shop faces. While my long term vision of Shockey Monkey is to help lessen some of the pains, I am taking to writing down some of those consulting best practices and management tips in form of documentation on the site.

Consulting best practices & Shockey Monkey Documentation

Find out how to shape your IT practice through best practices. 

What’s the big idea? You can figure out what to put in for the email branding screen or what an announcement is. But what you might want to learn is what makes an effective announcement, what to say, what to avoid, what works and what doesn’t.

That, I believe, is the overall value of Shockey Monkey, the collective intelligence of SMB IT community put to work for your business.

Coming up this week: Customer-facing documentation and video to help train the customers, Shockey Monkey discussion group/list, documentation and videos on managing tickets and a few more developments on ticket management workflow implementation.

(those of you that picked up on the Iron Maiden reverence, you rock!)

Exciting Saturday night of coding and Shockey Monkey deployments. Big thanks to Armen Varjabedian of PropelNet, Robert Muir of Practical IT Services, Ken Edwards of Maverick Mesa and Garett Chipman of TVG Consulting who wasted their Saturday night to help deploy the new Shockey Monkey management engine. This is the backend management code that actually creates portals: creating the user accounts, copying files from cvs, setting up httpd.conf virtual servers, copying over caching includes, initializing the database, etc. For all it does it’s actually quite a slim piece of code, only 124 lines most of which are for error handling. It does run one monster SQL query that 341 lines to setup the db schema for your portal.

Why is this cool? (take it with a grain of salt, it’s 1AM Sunday and I’m excited about the evening of coding I just wrapped) It’s cool because this backend system allows me to manipulate data over the entire Shockey Monkey enterprise. For example, I can drop a single file or execute a single SQL query over 2,000 isolated virtual servers on demand. I can also link and team them together, relocate them (when Shockey Monkey grows it will have geographical locations which at this point look to include UK and Australia in addition to USA Dallas / LA.)

But, it’s not all good news. First, my management of these activations blows. The documentation blows. I’ve had to ask people to go look at 20 minutes worth of video 3 times so they would get the single 5 word sentance I said somewhere in the middle of it and didn’t highlight it enough. The process for registering/signing up for Shockey Monkey blows – you have 3 sites, 2 hoops, and two other places to deal with before you can even sign in. The process can take hours, days – or if you’re POM trying to get an SSL certificate with a .AU domain… well, prepare to wait. I aim to address all of these issues today, along with a web site, a single signup, single activation and more accountable activation process.

I’ve managed to create all this, yet it took doing it wrong 2,300 times to finally realize how to do it right. I might as well move to India. 

VladCast 5, the SMB ITPRO world condensed into a loud 5 minute podcast:

– Less than two weeks left to get to SBS Migration Conference
– Interested in Cougar? Ask your SBS group leader for a beta invite.
– Changes with Longhorn
– Susan’s Patch-week: WSUS3, WSUS v2 Client
– Contest: Post the authors name, book title and why you’d read it!

Play VladCast:

Add feed to iTunes  / File Attachment: VladCast5.mp3 (1883 KB)

The more Carly changes, the more they HP the same.

While iMate is well on its way to provide the third OS upgrade to their iMate JasJar PocketPC (from 2003 to WM5 and now to WM6) the HP strikes again – denying updates to their entire customer base. And while all the WM5 devices can be easilly upgraded to WM6 because it’s the same underlying operating system (WindowsCE 5.0/5.2), HP yet again leaves it’s customers with fairly pricey paperweights.

The message: Ignore HP.

While I got burned by HP years ago, I still do not have Vista x64 drivers for any of the printers we use. HP continues to sell equipment with outdated technology while pricing it at a premium. Are consumers dumb enough not to notice the difference? Apparently, yes.

The next time you login to Shockey Monkey support portal at OWN you’ll notice a new tab. Development.

The Development tab is a bug and feature wishlist tracker that will allow us to take public feedback on features you are looking for. It will also provide you with the ability to report any bugs that you may encounter and allow others that are experiencing the same bug to see if it was opened already (known problem). Feature wishlist, as the name implies, let’s you request features you think our software should have. Just like the bug tracker, each wishlist is open for public updates allowing anyone in the system to comment on the bug or on the feature, giving our entire customer base an input into the type of software and features we develop. Anotherwords, we won’t R2 you – you’ll see exactly what type of a customer we’re developing solutions for because the name of the person will be printed on it.

Please allow me to point out the message here that is far bigger than Shockey Monkey:

We are doing this not just for Shockey Monkey, but for our entire software and service portfolio. That means no more “there was no interest”, no more “I’ve never seen that before” or “this is only happening to you”

Is this the kind of message you are sending to your customers and partners? If not, do you understand why you need to have a customer-facing portal thats more than just trouble ticket junk and shiny charts? So if you don’t have Shockey Monkey, maybe you should.

-Vlad

P.S. This is what I’ve been up to this week, so if you didn’t get your Shockey Monkey turned up since weekend ended, now you know why

Microsoft has announced that several cool virtualization features will be dropped from what was promised for Longhorn release. Bink quotes a seemingly angry quote complaining about the lack of live migration, no hot-adding of resources, CPU core limitations, etc.

I’m sure there are many that will be very disappointed about this move.

I am not one of them.

Even though my business is based on the Microsoft virtualization platform (not Vmware) from a customer and partner scenario I am not looking forward to Longhorn’s virtualization feature set. That is not what I find exciting about the new server.

What I am particularly excited about is the new IIS 7 modular configuration and management, the new Longhorn Core Server free of the usual junk. Given the past year or so, I’d just like a reliable platform that Longhorn promises and they can release all the “cool” features when they feel they are ready.

This worked really well for the SBS Show but as I put more and more stuff out directly here on Vladville I’m finally starting to give in to the constant requests for a mailing list – again. The reason Vladville came to life in the first place was because I was tired of managing the mailing list with a few hundred replies every time I sent a piece out. But there is a high demand and let’s face it, a large majority of you (80%) is not reading this blog via RSS.

So, would anyone care to recommend a mailing list service? I’m a little opposed to freebies (no Google, no Yahoo) because of their terms of service so is there anything out there that is competitive with Constant Contact?

Second month in a row without a major Microsoft patch incident – patches apply properly, systems reboot as intended, no BSoD’s, no application incompatibilities. Just like it’s supposed to work.

Are we starting to see a trend in improved patch release management at Microsoft?

I was invited to present content at Sacramento SBS User Group and Kansas City SBS User Group a while ago. I didn’t add either to my calendar, so when both Karl and Jason emailed me yesterday to see if I was ready I knew it was the time to test what’s know as the MVP race condition: “Can an MVP talk for more than 5 hours straight without sucking all the air out of the room and losing consciousness in the process?” We’ll find out tonight. 

Tonight’s presentation is free, live over the web and starts at 7:30 PM EST. It ends at approximately midnight EST. Here is the preliminary schedule.

7:30 – 8:30 EST: Exchange 2007 Overview (Level 100)

8:30 – 9:00 EST: ExchangeDefender, Shockey Monkey (Level 0)

9:30 – Midnight: Virtualized Services (Level 200), Shockey Monkey, ExchangeDefender, and other tools we make (and why) that IT solution providers are using to make more money. These will be product demo’s, not sales pitches.

Is there anything else you’d like to hear? Since we’re pretty much inviting SBSers worldwide, is there something you’d like to see? See you tonight, livemeeting info below:

Meeting URL: Livemeeting Address

Meeting ID: D7QS3H

Meeting Key: bn6′%~P

It sucks to lose, but when you lose big it makes you scratch your head about your approach.

May 6, 2007: Biggest Exchange loss in over 10 years. (at least in Vladville)

Comcast chose Zimbra to power it’s SmartZone portal. This is certainly a big loss for Microsoft Exchange but they will be OK, they are still in many ways untouchable by Zimbra when it comes to collaboration and the feature set.

Microsoft is the huge loser here. Conceptually. Ignore for the moment the financial loss here. Ignore even the boost this will give to Zimbra competitively, financially, marketing-wise, etc. Ignore the fact that none of these systems will run Windows, effectively wiping out a huge server deployment.

Ignore all those little details that hardly impact Microsoft.

Focus instead on the huge Las Vegas-style billboard this puts up to Microsoft: “Unbundle.”

Make no mistake, Microsoft didn’t lose this one on the cost – I’m sure they would have haggled it in. They didn’t lose this one on technology or feature set. They didn’t lose this one on the server stability and reliability.

They lost this one because, after years of alienating partners, Microsoft’s anti-competitive bundling strategy is starting to alienate it’s customers as well.

Comcast selected Bizanga, Cloudmark, Plaxo and Trend Micro. If you’ve ever seen my many presentations and tech dives on Microsoft Exchange 2007 you’re aware that there is very little acknowledgement of anything outside of Microsoft in that install or deployment. Microsoft Hosted Security, Microsoft Forefront, Microsoft Antigen, Microsoft LCS, Microsoft UM, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft.

Today’s head-scratcher? Sometimes 12 million users customers want flexibility. Flexibility that Microsoft fails to demonstrate by forcing offering Microsoft-only solutions.

Dear Microsoft, you still need your partners. It might be a good time to start being nicer to us.