Why are we losing great community resources? Why is everything going commercial, why does everyone want money for their time?

Dear friends,

There is no such thing as a community.

Oh sure, there are many brilliant people, many sociable people, many caring people and really just outright skilled peers that you can talk shop – and if you’re really a great person (or pretty) people might continue talking to you after the event. Every now and then they might drop you an email, or their blog address, or something of relevance… but,

There is no community.

Don’t get me wrong, once upon a time there was such a thing as a community, in which people wrote long emails, helped one another, blogged, put up podcasts, video blogs, wrote amazing books..

Where did they go?

Well, we’re still out there. We’re still talking, still networking, still helping one other out at all hours of the day and night. What, nobody invited you? Well, here’s the funny thing. When you don’t support those people that provide these items to you free of charge under the hope that you’ll learn something from it and extend the same courtesy to the people that have come after you… when you choose not to invest anything in your local community and only pick and choose to go to events where you might get something without ever putting any of your knowledge on the line… when the leaders of this community organize events and you don’t go to them because you’re too busy… when its in your budget to constantly take but never in the budget to contribute or give back… when it’s a community only when it benefits to you but “it’s just business, Vlad” when you have to support someone else… when you constantly challenge and insult those who actually care to contribute their knowledge in the open… when survey after survey comes up and you ignore it because you’re too busy to help the very people that want to help you and are only asking for some direction…

When all of that happens, the leaders lose interest and they share it behind the closed doors or behind the counter as a service. And they aren’t the ones to blame, you are:

• If you don’t regularly attend your local UG meetings..
• If you don’t support the people and organizations that support community events..
• If you don’t support the webcasts and presentations..
• If you do nothing to share what you’ve learned with someone else..
• If you don’t have a blog or a wiki or any way in which you’re willing to make your opinion known..

Well, what do you expect?

For a week now there has been a survey out there asking the global SBS community members to post their opininions. The guy that put it together posted today wondering why there has been such a low response rate, given the size of the community? Someone forwarded me Chris’s blog post about how few people attended Microsoft’s quarterly partner summit. Amy sent me a newsletter the other day saying that only 50 people are paying members of the community she has built – and mind you, she has been to more SBS user groups as a free speaker than I can count.

You take the contributors to this community for granted and then have the decency to ask why Microsoft doesn’t care about you, why you have to pay for information, when the next SBS group meeting is going to be, when the next UG meeting is going to be, when the next SBS Show is coming out, when the documentation for something is going to come out, when the next video will be posted?

When?

When you stop thinking only about yourself and how the community benefits you. The community has benefited me and Own Web Now tremendously, but thats because I invested into it. If you aren’t investing into things, you can’t expect any returns.

As Robbie says: It’s that simple.

I can’t find any decent pictures of me in my “Go away or I’ll replace you with a small shell script” tshirt but yesterday I did just that. Part of doing business with OWN is that we trust you to set your own priority for the support requests. If something is urgent, we will handle it right away. If its a high priority case, we’ll work on it before we work on the other normal priority cases. It’s just good business. By setting your own priority you can rest assured that you get the support under an SLA and that when you really have an urgent issue, we’re there for you.

However, customers consider any matter, even a little annoyance, to be urgent to them. Not quite according to the SLA they agree to which defines an urgent issue as something that affects all users and makes it impossible for any work to get done. High priority is given to something that is affecting a large portion of the business. And just in case you’re wondering, no, it’s not urgent if the CEO is an idiot that nuked his entire inbox, if the business goes on the priority is normal.

It’s just human nature for customers to consider themselves the center of the universe and anything that happens to them needs to be handled urgently. Some MSP’s don’t even allow users to set their own priority, they let their staff judge how important something is. To each his own. Here were our support stats for Sunday and Monday:

Sunday: 31 support tickets, 16 urgent, 9 high
Monday: 89 support tickets, 30 urgent, 41 high

So I bounced an email to the Shockey Monkey mailing list and took some quick feedback. The resulting “replace you with a shell script” move is illustrated below:

So I still trust my customers to tell me if something is urgent, or high. But if you go urgent and it just so happens its not urgent according to the SLA (service level agreement) we both entered in…. you get charged. Quick IM over to Dave Sobel to check if this is too rude and with his blessing it went into production around 10 AM EST.

Notice that you are not given a confirmation screen, just an alert. There is some logic behind that. I don’t want to ask you for a permission to agree with the SLA you already agreed to. I don’t want to automatically reset the priority to normal if the $250/hour bs fee doesn’t appeal to you. Perhaps this will make the customer read the priorities and consider where they would put this issue if it were their own IT staff doing it.

Back to the subject: you can address business issues with software, here are the results.

Tuesday: 75 support tickets, 1 urgent, 3 high
Wednesday:  28 support tickets, 0 urgent, 0 high

So we went from total 96 high/urgent priority cases on Sunday Monday, to only 4 after the warning went in. In all fairness, I have to give credit to Erick Simpson whose support portal always shoots back a confirmation email for every new ticket and explains their response time, SLA, etc – I even sent an email over to their support alias to get the threatening text you see up there.

Sad to say this but after a full day of testing the latest Shockey Monkey agent code I am not ready to let it loose yet. I’m buying myself another week and will hope to push out the agents in a beta next Monday (instead of tonight, as planned). The problems are as follows:

• Shockey Monkey mobile agent designed for Windows Mobile 6 and Windows Mobile 5 utilizes the SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition to provide offline content and caching. So if you update a ticket or create a contact when you have 0 reception, or want to quickly look up a contact, etc – the call is made to the local SQL database on the device. It seems that the rollout of that will require an update of mobile .NET framework and some other kung fu, not to mention prettying up the Interface.
• The Server Monitoring WMI agent needs some server-side work to integrate properly into the ticket SLA escalation process. The way it currently works, you are required to deploy an executable on the remote server (that you wish to monitor) on which a Windows Service is installed. That service constantly feeds the server various inventory data (peripherals, system events) as well as pingbacks to track uptime, etc. Since its WMI based obviously lots of things can be monitored but designing a friendly interface around that is proving more difficult than I thought (friendly not powerful).
• Random improvements to the SLA manager, network and system documentation sections, new ACL controls and how it all ties in together is something I have to discuss with Chad at greater length. I know how others are doing it and I think it blows, there has to be a better way.

I’ve literally be doing dev work for about a week now, plus a few other business roadblocks, so I have not had a chance to activate anyone. I will likely do some towards the end of the week.

Have an Exchange question thats on your mind? Well, Microsoft is hosting an Exchange Server Expert Q&A tomorrow and Thursday and I’ll be one of the folks answering the questions. Want some free Vlad support?

Exchange Server Q&A with the MVP Experts
Exchange MVPs will be on hand to answer your questions about Exchange Server, Outlook and Exchange for Small Business Server.  So if you are thinking of upgrading to Exchange Server 2007 or have questions about Exchange Server 2003 we hope you can join us for this informative online chat!

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/chats/vcs/07_0621_TN_ES.ics

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/chats/vcs/07_0619_TN_ES.ics

Tomorrow at 8 PM EST, and Thursday at 1 PM EST. Hope to see you there! More details on the Exchange Blog.

I don’t know why the subject cracks me up so much, after all, I sell Microsoft vaporware for living (“Sure, of course it can handle a 14GB mailbox!”) but when someone goes out and sells my “Solutions built on a toilet ™” software I crack up.

Shockey Monkey, as some of you have noticed, has been in use by people worldwide since about the early October. It is a heavilly optimized portal software for SMB consultants, but more than a few people have managed to sell it to everything from SMB up to the government. I kid you not. Todays conversation:

Dave: It’s hot.

Vlad: Welcome to Florida.

Dave: I sold Shockey Monkey!

Vlad: What?

Dave: I logged into it to wrap up a ticket and the person liked it so much they want it for their own business.

Vlad: What do they do? (crossing fingers, hoping its not a drug dealer… again)

So keep on selling that monkey. Lord knows I can use some more backlog, almost two weeks now. But seriously, SM is not a good CRM solution. There are plenty of good CRM solutions for the problem of large SMB technology budget. 

There are a lot of you out there reading this blog, downloading podcasts, videos, etc. Thank you for your support – I get dozens of messages each day with wonderful comments and praises. Thank you.

What I would like to know is… what would you like more of?

Pretty simple, leave the comment or hit the Contact page.

I spent most of the day today cleaning up the place, in particular, the nightmare that is my home office. I think its more precise to describe it as my home “storage locker” as it seems to have degenerated into a semi-intelligent live mass that inhibits one of the rooms along with cables, media and mail – constantly moving, shifting and repositioning in the most perfect way to eliminate any chance of actually finding anything in it.

Today I decided I would go through the mess, brave the mess, and clean it all up. I came to a single conclusion:

We do way too much marketing.

Not we as in OWN, but we as in IT people. I’ve easilly scraped off at least $10–15,000 in swag and marketing off my beta bench alone. Not to mention the closet, the floors, the bookshelves. My god. It was everywhere. Media. USB connectors. SWAG. More backpacks than Noah could have used to transport all the animals. Tshirts. Stuff that looked like a software box but was a tshirt. Flyers. Flyers. Computer gadgets. Portfolios.

I think I’ve decided, today, on my own…. to do away with physical marketing. Remember, this is my home office. This is actually the little tiny percentage of crap I actually thought was interesting. I probably threw away 10x as much. And I bet you everyone is exactly the same, so it doesn’t make sense to blow money on things that will just be discarded. Why buy marketing collateral if people won’t pay attention to it. Might as well invest in some airline stocks

This came at a rather good time, just when we’re gearing up to update our semi-annual maketing and partner guide. That sucker is gonna be 100% electronic, at least based on the junk I threw out today.

Kudos to Bink for turning me on to the new development in the SideShow device family. If you’re as ignorant as I am, you’ve certainly viewed SideShow as another irrelevant laptop addon, such as marketed by NVidia Preface. The big selling point of Preface is that you can walk up to your laptop while its off and do a very limited set of functions such as playing mp3s or checking your calendar. Now, show of hands of people that have laptops that are off? Thats right, nobody.

But, this new-to-me development in the SideShow gadget land is certainly becoming very interesting. For about $80 to $150 you can get a separate SideShow device, such as this eChatter that can let you view messages, read blogs and utilize little Vista Gadgets which I’m slowly starting to fall in love with. Why is this cool? Because it brings an additional sense of mobility and connectivity, no matter where you are in your house.

Unlike queenie most of us don’t have palaces and castles spanning acres so the bluetooth connectivity just might be good enough. Interesting possibilities – the the ability to go into a meeting without that 15–17” monitor blocking the view of others, ability to read a quick blog post or check the calendar without holding the 5lb laptop in your lap in bed, etc. Could this be the final answer in the decade long search for the mythical home/office mobile communicator?

VladCast 6, The summary of experiences at Jeff Middleton’s ITPRO conference in New Orleans and the Microsoft TechEd – Why they matter to an SMB ITPRO!

Also a look ahead at Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference in Denver and about six minutes of how you can make this conference a success for your business.

Warning: This is the heaviest VladCast I’ve ever produced, just shy of 20 minutes. This might not be something you want to hear if you’ve had a rough day, it discusses adult situations in a serious business setting and dispells some of the myths you may have heard about the WWPC and TechEd. So if you’re content living in your little box, this is a podcast to skip. If you’re striving to improve yourself and your business… this is the best 20 minutes of your day.

Play VladCast:

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Add feed to iTunes  / File Attachment: Vladcast6.mp3 (6471 KB)

It’s almost 4 AM and I’m sitting around coding in MSN/Live/com IM integration for Shockey Monkey. The basic premise is that the system will IM me when there is a new ticket waiting or when a user had updated/escalated their request. I finished coding this thing about a week ago and it works fairly well for what it is (a dumb sql->messenger gateway) but tonight I sat down to get rid of some annoyances. Here is what I found out.

For the most part, MSNP 9 is the most thoroughly documented implementation out there.

MSNP 9 is also very outdated, and MSN is trying very hard to move/force you up (I think they are on 13 now).

There is a gotcha in the signup process. For example, if you sign up for a live.com/msn.com passport id and initiate the first connection via MSNP 9, you will be prohibited from logging into it with that protocol – forever. However, if your first session is initiated via live.com messenger client (MSN P 10+) you can use any of the higher and lower edition clients.

Also, MSN does not tollerate bots on their network. The proper way to integrate your bot in the MSN network is to do your development/etc via IM Provisioning Center.