I usually keep this kind of filth off Vladville but I figured since its a slow weekend this might break the iPod monotony:

Ten reasons why your SMB shouldn’t blog
1. Nobody is going to read your blog.
2. Nobody is going to read your blog.
3. Nobody is going to read your blog.
4. Nobody is going to read your blog.
5. Nobody is going to read your blog.
6. You’re barely literate enough for email, do not embarrass yourself by doing something you can’t lie about having “written on my PocketPC”
8. You probably can’t count either.
9. The only blog post of yours I’d ever read is on “how to unsubscribe from your crappy pseudo-SPAM mailing list, you annoying, incessant overpriced too-old-for-geek-squad goof”
10. Blogging, twittering, facebooking is most popular with the teens and middle-aged perverts chasing that tail. Which group does your business fall in?

-Vlad

Please send all complaints and angry mail to my PR Firms Barrett & Barrett Associates for USA, Susanne Dansey for EMEA.

Really looking forward to the WWPC. While the main reason for attending is the business aspect, there is also an interesting social aspect of partying that virtually everyone has had to sign an NDA on and take to their grave: The Microsoft UK Party.

So this year I’ll be bringing some American pride to that party, namely our appreciation for geograhpy and other nations. My shirt is below:

This being my last field trip for some time to come, I’m also getting this shirt for my next visit to Microsoft PSS; really looking forward to that one!

The tshirts above are from a company called BUSTEDTEES and they are currently running 4th of July sale. While Katie supported the Greece tshirt, her comment to me getting the sweatshop tshirt was not quite as glowing: “Deep down inside, you are a horrible, horrible person.”

I wonder if they’ll give me a bulk discount and ship em directly to Infomart  Here’s your performance review!

We recently switched our Asterisk (now Trixbox) setup from POTS to SIP (and a backup IAX) providers and the first thing we did was to spoof the caller ID. By spoofing our phone number to that one assigned to the POTS on each outgoing call the remote caller sees “OWNWEBNOW CORPORATION” <4074656800> even though that may not be the outbound route our call took? 

Enter Paris Hilton (yes, THAT Paris): This is why I never blog about politics.

Now prank calling and checking your friends voicemail aside, are there any of you that have not protected your voicemail with a password? When a “Corporation XYZ” calls in do you not refuse to hand over the credit card information, refuse to answer surveys (that always turn into getting competitive info out of you), refuse to deal with phone solicitors no matter how great their offer is? Just like SPAM, the reason why these things flourish and persist is because people continue to support them by playing into them!

This is why I never blog about politics. Do we really need a discussion on why almost 80% of the American public disapproves of the performance of both the president and the congress? Do we really need the law to protect stupid blondes that is going to screw up the legitimate business need of having a reliable and identifiable phone service?

For more technical information on caller ID, the CNAM database, etc.

Microsoft has been really busy over the last few days. First the rumor (or rather, published announcement by Dell) that SBS 2008 will launch in Fall of 2008, then the RTM of Centro CTP  midmarket solution as well as a refresh of the Windows Server 2008 beta.. all I can say is that its good to know that you can have a dual core system with 4GB ram for less than $500 shipped because this 2008 MCSE is going to be the most expensive one around with all the new technologies and I think (hope) that this will finally eliminate a lot of hobbyists from our space because the distance between the workstation world and server world is getting longer and longer.

On the professional side of things, I hope some of you got the chance to fill out that SBS WW Community Survey, as Tim suggests, because giving feedback actually does produce some very meaningful results:

(and yes, that is a very weasel way of working in an OWN  logo)

Over the past year I’ve been watching one of my best friends aspire towards proving herself in the big business. Susanne announced her move to West Coast a little while ago but I wanted to publicly congratulate her on taking this next step in her career. I am immensely proud of her for both taking on a challenge and having courage to step out of the family business to prove something to herself.

Now as much as I would have loved to have Susanne kick ass at OWN, she has become a BFF over the past few years and I know she will love her new role of big business working for small business over the mental torture that the life of Texas would have been. Truth is, Susanne has been a monkey behind the scenes of Shockey Monkey marketing as well as what OWN will be announcing over the next few months so in congratulating Susanne I suppose I also ought to congratulate a lot of you who haven’t yet had a chance to do business with Susanne at Readycrest that now get to work with her at West Coast – she is by far one of the smartest cookies when it comes to marketing to SMB customers and I hope you follow her.

My more eloquent half from UK sent me IM today asking if I had read Chris’s blog. Haven’t, so I asked what’s up? Apparently, Chris isn’t coming to WWPC because his business isn’t coming to WWPC because (paraphrasing quite a bit): “it’s about Microsoft and (his) business doesn’t come from Microsoft”. The rest of this post isn’t about Chris but rather about the statement above which I think will lead many of you to get the wrong impression about what Microsoft conferences are really all about.

So if you’re in a happy place, don’t read this. If you’re an SMB consultant thats happy with what you’re up to, don’t read this. If you think you’ve got the world figured out, excellent, don’t read this. I feel thats a sufficient warning for the reality check I’m about to offer you:

Conferences are all about what you make out of them. Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference is not about Microsoft. Microsoft TechED is not about Enterprise. Yes, if you’ve got an attention span of an ant and can’t get the picture beyond the conference tagline then by all means, enjoy your rut. If you think the conference is for you just because it has words SMB in it, you deserve to be robbed blind and charged $899 for a crappy vendor festival pretending to be SMB community content. I always beg my SMB partners to consider the big picture, and to think more than 2 fiscal quarters down the road.

So allow me to let you in on a little secret. Microsoft events are expensive because they keep the crud out. They keep amateurs, hobbyists, those Hair Salon action pack subscribers and Jimmy Joe Bob experts out of the loop. They let you talk to the leaders in the space, and set a conversation at a meaningful level, one beyond “Microsoft licensing is too hard” and at a level of “we all know it sucks, now how do we succeed despite the limitations”.

Finally, Microsoft World Wide Partner conference is not about Microsoft. It is about Partners. And if you’re one of the partners that allows themselves to be cattled into the mindnumbing and pointless keynotes thats your own sheep fault. The real conference is in the networking section, which is bigger than the keynotes, lectures, sessions, labs and lounges put together. Wonder why? Because THAT is the real conference. Not getting dunk with your friends. Not watching 6 hours of keynotes a day. Not playing labs that you can get for free on the net. Not distributing your memorandums or voicing your complaints. Not about the community.

It’s all about you. What WWPC is really about is building your business. It’s about finding solutions, about talking to other partners, about getting advice, about arranging deals, about talking to the best, about learning from the successful, about making connections, about keeping connections, about making your presence… so when you need something you visit all of the above and you pull it off inside your business.

Let go of your pre-conceptions, let go of the limitations you have in your own mind, let go of the ignorance that is keeping you where you are – otherwise you have no hope at all. When you realize that the only thing between you and success, in whichever terms you define it – is just the set of roadblocks you put up for yourself… wonderful things happen. But what do I know, I’m just a guy with a blog.

Since roughly Monday I have been on a pretty steady load of Nyquil and an assortment of other medications I generally do not take. I don’t remember the last 24 hours at all. I remember very little of the last three days but the good news is that I can finally breathe.

So to my surprise, I opened up the Google Reader this morning to find stories of people lining up for the iPhone. Amazing. Ryan from Engadget has a great summary of the reviews so far, to say that this is Apple’s usual polished brick for homosexual appeal would be an insult to both the gay & lesbian community as well as to the bricklayers union. What a truely useless gadget that does.. well… nothing right. Not a good PDA, not a good cell phone, not a good camera, not a good ipod – then what the heck is it designed for? I love the commercials too, showcasing how you can search the web and get data back instantly – yeah, thats gonna happen. It would take more than twice the length of that entire commercial to download the front page of the newspaper, but as with all Apple commercials since 1984, it is aimed at non-conformists who don’t rely on evidence but word of mouth (or word of vendor selling the device/software). While anyone could predicted all of the above, I really didn’t expect people to start lining up for it. Even the Zune’s #1 fan doesn’t appear that big of a loser right now.

In other news…. new CTP for Windows 2008 server, just as I was finishing up the beta3 deployments. This world sure moves fast when you’re on drugs.

All the Shockey Monkey activations that were requested until today have been put into the provisioning process. So if you’ve ever applied for Shockey Monkey and never heard from me, it likely got eaten by your SPAM filter. Please reapply and whitelist ownwebnow.com domain in your app.

There are only two reasons why someone would not get their application accepted:

• Submitted an email from a freemail system
• Web site or organization does not exist

So if you sent me an email from aol.com, msn.com, gmail.com, yahoo.com, sbc.com or any other freemail system the message has been destroyed. System usually does this automatically, I wish I could reply to them all but there are so many form spam bots with those addresses that its impossible whats legit and whats fake. So use a business email address. Second reason for being denied would be the lack of a corporate web page. If I can’t tell that you have an online presence, I can’t extend the service to you due to some long standing legal concern. When/if that changes you’re welcome to reapply, I frankly don’t see these as big roadblocks to any established IT firm.

So there is currently 0 backlog, everyone that wanted it (and met criteria above) is being taken care of – if you aren’t, hit the app again after you whitelist me.

Thank you for your phenomenal, awesome and amazing support. 

The pace of signups for Shockey Monkey is picking up for some reason. I don’t know why but I am guessing that the people using the monkey are really enjoying it and are recommending it to their peers - for that I thank you and I am very happy.

I’ve taken a moment to write the following document that explains Shockey Monkey activation process. As you can tell, it’s quite simple.

The big secret..

I know what you’re thinking: “Big Bad Vlad the service automation programmer sure can’t automate things worth crap.” – So I’ll let you in on a little secret. Yes, this can be automated quite easilly. However, by making people jump through the hoops of updating their contact information, updating their corporate information, ordering a service, creating a new contact, updating and reviewing the support ticket and more I am effectively training the future administrators of Shockey Monkey on how to use the product. Yes, you can watch the video all you want and read the documentation but after you’ve been put through the paces you get the feeling for how the platform works, events and triggers, and by the time you’re in your portal you already know how it works, most importantly, you know how your clients are going to view this new thing you’re offering them.

So you see, sometimes a lot of thinking goes into seemingly stupid decisions.

Bare with me folks, I’m going as fast as I can. Only about 60 more to go. If you do want to help me out get this done as fast as possible just update the ticket and (if you’re getting your own SSL cert) go through places like RapidSSL ($14/year from www.theplanet.com) that issue the cert on the spot.

This cold is very frustrating. I work for about 1–2 hours and then the medication of the moment knocks me out for a few hours, then after I wake up and roam around like a crazy person for an hour before I get back to it at which point I’m about an hour away from the nap again.

My productivity has fallen to that of a salaried developer.  One line of code a day.