You can now buy a Zune for $130 at woot.com. I am perhaps the only person that has not won a Zune at a Microsoft giveaway, and lord knows I have ridiculed it to no end… I played with it a few times, it’s cute but its in the same category as the iPhone – “Cool, but not very useful in its current form”; Maybe I’m wrong, who knos..

But even I have to admit that if this is a true picture of Zune 2.0, it might actuall give iPod a run for its money. I got Katie a new iPod Fatty (Nano) and the video on it is frankly very, very cool. I can see how it could be a neat way to catch up on webcasts, video blogs, etc. I dunno, the thing below looks cool:

Could Microsoft actually get me to like a Zune?

P.S. I currently have a little clipon iPod shuffle… It’s the size of a stamp.

Got one of these gems forwarded to me by one of our customers earlier tonight, asking how we went about filtering something like that:

Subject: )!).*:[!-(:.).-+.*)

Sy!m]b*oool F]D:E(G
Last 0.04
T ar ge+t 0.12
!

Now, you can pretty much guess that with the amount of email we get there is no single person sitting in front of the screen saying “SPAM, “NOT SPAM”, “SPAM” – even if there was one I’m sure they would make a mistake more often than the computer does. But fair question, how do we go about nuking something like the above?

I’m about to let you in on how we write rules to identify messages like the above.

First, look at the subject. What do you notice about it, just on the face of it. Just a bunch of characters, junk. Right. But look closely. What’s missing? A word. But how do I know whats a word and what isn’t? Simple, you look for a continuous set of characters A-Z or a-z or mix thereof. Do you see any? Nope? Ok, bump the score.

Second, and a lot less error-prone – whats else is interesting about that subject? Well, there are no alpha characters in it. As a matter of fact, if you’ve received a few hundred of these you’d notice that none of them have any alpha characters in them! What are the odds that a legitimate piece of email would have a subject that didn’t have a single alpha or numerical character in it and that it wasn’t empty? If they are good, you receive a lot of email from your dog or cat or whatever type of an animal crawls over your keyboard. This however can be error prone, for example, what if you’re dealing with a CRM system in China? What if you dealt with people that have no netiquette? (ever had a customer send you a message with a subject: “HELP !#$!%@#!%$!#^#!^!^!^!# me!”)

Now, on their own, the two rules can lead to some false positives, that is, legitimate message being flagged as SPAM. But the two rules with a relatively low score lead to a less likely false positive match if the subject was just garbled or the body got garbled. Together, the score is higher and we take our gamble on trapping it.

There, see how easy that is?

P.S. If it still has a garbled subject and a garbled body and you still receive a lot of messages like that during your workday you really need to find a better way to communicate with your cat while you’re at work. Teach her how to use IM or something

Here is another in the series of customer service tips I’d like to share with you: Do your customers expect productivity or courtesy from you? I’d imagine its a little bit of both but it depends on your profession. If your chosen occupation involves a uniform of clear heels and a gstring, you should perhaps be more concerned about courtesy than about productivity. But if you’re not a stripper or a massage therapist then this rule applies to you: smile and do what I’m paying you for. Quickly. 

This applies to everything and everyone. If you’re checking people in at a hotel I would have a far more magical day if you just smiled and hurried up instead of wasting my time with show specials. If you’re making my sandwich I would rather you hurry up than ask me to try your special of the day. If you’re cutting my hair, if you’re changing my oil, if you’re bagging my groceries, if you’re checking in a flight, if you’re selling insurance, if you’re taking deposits, if you have any kind of a job where you provide a good or a service to a customer, I am going to give you this huge, giant, enormous, megalithic tip:

Your customers are not there to see you.

Your customers are there for a product or service.

Shut up, do your job, and let me get to something I’d rather be doing.

There, simple enough? I’m buying a sub, I am not here to hear about your day. I am shipping a package, I don’t care that the lady in the back has a garden. I am getting my oil changed, I don’t care which bolt screws into which nut and what the differences are.

You have no idea how many people confuse customer service for overwhelming personal courtesy and joy. Customer SERVICE is a process of product/service delivery. It is a means by which you, in the most efficient and effective manner, provide that service. If your focus is not on doing a good job, quickly, you’re screwed.

For example, how do you think 15 other people are feeling as they wait for you to finish your casual chat with the customer. What do you think is going through their mind? is it:

A. Wow, I love what they have done with the bank lobby. The clerk certainly had an interesting weekend, I can’t wait for my turn so I can find out what he’ll be doing this weekend. The suspense is killing me, I sure have nothing better to do with my life and I come to this place as a social excursion, not business.

B. Get me the f’ out of here.

If you answered A you’re an idiot. I hope you have a body for a stripper because thats about the only good you are to the world of business efficiency.

If you answered B, good for you! I’d love to be your client. I am sure most other people would, too. At the end of the day your customers are doing business with you because you do a good and efficient job, they are not paying you to be their BFF.

This rant brought to you courtesy of US Postal Service.

How to market your blog on the cheap – Eric announced a “free gift” for people that pinged him off the Microsoft mssmallbiz.com blog. People start talking about what may be coming, what it could be.. Well, here it is:

So, for the cost of about $20 for Starbucks and a tshirt you get 40,000 visitors hearing about your blog again. That’s a pretty good deal  I wonder just how many shirts are going to be coming in the mail now.

Heading to the ConnectWise Conference this week? If so, take this one along with you:

Whitepaper: ConnectWise sync with ExchangeDefender How-To

Thats right, in 5–10 minutes you can have your ConnectWise deployment syncing up with ExchangeDefender and becoming a regular resident on your Management Reports. So tell the other guys that the new sheriff is in town and he’s not selling your customers privacy out to Google!

Ok, so it’s a cheap dig but this one actually means something: the integration provided (and stats collected by ConnectWise) are so basic that they may as well be random useless numbers. Keep an eye on this blog for what I’m currently cooking up with my team to let you show the true benefits of having ExchangeDefender protecting that network. 

I need to hire a followup / cleaning monkey. As we continue to grow the need for a person that does no technical work is rising (ie, is incapable of helping, even if they wanted to); Here is what happens – we process a ton of orders, support requests, DR and other nightmare scenarios during the day. 9/10 times, we know the point of resulution and when we reach it, we close the ticket. Or we wait and after 36 hours of no updates we consider the issue abandoned.

What I am after is a slightly technical person to act as a monkey followup / poo-flinging-cleaner that can call the clients and make sure everything that needed to get done got done. For example, if the ticket is closed 90% of the way, I need this person to call the client up, review the ticket, see if there was anything more we could have / should have done. Roll the output into either a bug or feature request or reopen the ticket with a more precise problem definition.

The key to this working is hiring a non-technical person. If I hire another engineer, they’ll try to help and then the feedback loop will break again. If I hire someone thats somewhat helpful they’ll still try to help – and we’ll rope them into doing “something”, I just know it.

So… is this just a general intelligent secretary? Service operations QA manager? Recommended salary? If you’ve got the advice post a comment or contact me privately, I need to catapult this role from my daily tasks ASAP.

Today is a very good day for Microsoft - they released Service Pack 3 of the flagship product and all the Microsoft world is ajoy. This certainly cements the stability of Office 2003, and for many that have seen my Office 2007 demos, locks down the office productivity to this application suite for years to come. Bink has a breakdown of SP3 downloads, list of known issues when installing SP3, and other good news.

However, outside of the Microsoft world the response is mute.

Microsoft Office 2003 SP3 is not just not the top story of the day, it’s not even the second, the third, or even the fourth most relevant story of the day. Let’s see.. IBM is offering its Office software for free in challenge to Microsoft, Yahoo! just acquired Exchange’s primary competitor in Zimbra, Google is launching Presentations competitor to PowerPoint, and Mozilla foundation is pouring money into an eventual Outlook killer.

Now, Mr. Anderson, can you hear that?

Can you hear the rumbling of the companies that got screwed by Microsoft raising their voices, throwing their cash and their technology on a pile of Microsoft alternatives, right at Microsoft is struggling with its flaghsip operating system, struggling to release heavilly feature-discounted Windows Server 2008, struggling to reassure the customers that SQL Server 2008 is shipping on time.

That, Mr. Anderson, is the sound of inevidability – that of the collateral damage that remained after Microsoft buldozed the business desktop and server space over the past decade – as it seems to be raising up again?

Steve, I hope you don’t believe in karma.

Ok, so this is going to sound a little sick but I’ve been going down to the mail office every day for the past few days just waiting for Scorpion Software AuthAnvil tokens to show up. Dana and I talked about ShockeyMonkey supporting 2FA and have some joint customers but I never really bothered to ask what it actually costs.. You know the RSA rule – “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it”

So yeah, I was dead wrong. 2FA stuff that Dana sells is ridiculously affordable and for the past few days I have been going back and forth waiting on this thing to arrive. On each drive back home I would think of a different way to implement it with what we do and share with my partners.

Therein lies my apparent disappearance over the past two weeks. I have been so busy working on the reporting and data generation scripts for ExchangeDefender and Offsite Backups. As ExchangeDefender pretty much became a defacto MSP solution for SPAM filtering and business continuity (not just archiving, archiving with ability to correspond while systems are down) the MSPs have flocked to it like nobody’s business. Thank you, thank you for all your money. But, it’s not that easy. MSPs tend to ask a lot more (and a lot more detailed) questions than your average corporate user. So, for the past two weeks I’ve been coding the mind-numbingly meaningless number displays that are of no significance to anyone other than the sales guy trying to justify the cost of ExchangeDefender to the customer that is somehow shocked that the SPAM problem is so bad – why did you sign up for it in the first place genius?

So instead of doing productive development of training materials and explaining how to write new code, I spent the morning coding the automatic RBL removal request systems for people that get nabbed by ExchangeDefender for excessively spamming our customers.

Later today, more reporting work… There are days on which I really hate programming..

So, another hope that Canadian Mounties have made it through the mountains and mountains of slow, over the igloos and through the icebergs (my stereotypical impression of Canada) to hand the package off to US Postal Service which will of course kick it all the way from Seattle to Orlando (the realistic impression of how US Postal Service “handles” packages).

Come on…. give me something useful to code! I am tired of writing stats, reports and manuals!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yahoo! acquired Zimbra earlier tonight for cool $350 mil in cash. Zimbra, for the uninformed crowd basically means: Exchange features on Linux. Though its a lot more than that (collaboration, AJAX interfaces) the bottom line is that this is (or was) the main competition to Microsoft Exchange – Lotus and friends included. I must admit, Yahoo! is a surprise, what does Yahoo! gain (or what does Zimbra lose). Smelling the synergy? Here is how they are selling it: 

At the heart of this merger is the conviction that email is a core application and Yahoo! can continue to expand its leadership to new markets using Zimbra. For Zimbra, it was the opportunity to grow our footprint at an accelerated pace and the opportunity to provide innovative and new ways to use Yahoo!’s vast SDKs, trusted brand, vast network of users, great communication applications, core email technology like anti-spam and search as well as its ad network to bring in innovative combined solutions to markets that are still left untapped. At every step of the way, we will ensure that Customers have the freedom of choice in what they deploy.

Zimbra is clearly the big winner here. $350 mil in cash, free advertising, bigger footprint and customer base to pitch to.

What does Yahoo! gain? This takes away from their “everything ought to be hosted on our Yahoo! everything systems” and provides people with a downloadable on-premise, or more key – away from Yahoo!-privacy-concernville. Yahoo! now owns a piece of infrastructure incompatible with their message so was this huge deal just a takeaway to keep a key component away from someone else that has recently been talking about “offlining” their data?

Time will tell, congrats to the boys at Zimbra, Ferrari in every color is the only way to go….

I have been involved with Vista from the earliest Connect builds to the latest SP1 tests and I must admit that I love it. I appear to be alone at that. Over the weekend, one of my Dallas neighbors (we literally look directly at the American Airlines arena) wrote a post entitled Once you go Mac in which he explained a switch to a Mac – now this guy is not a n00b or unfamiliar with computers by a long shot. Earlier this weekend New York Times took endless jabs at Vista in an article that was actually bashing Apple’s retail quagmire.. Which leads me to the following questions:

Does Vista really suck that hard?

Is it your fault (poor system specs) or your computers fault? (poor choice of software)

Is it the software (Office 2007, McAfee) or the operating system (Indexing Service) that is causing the problem?

What have you done so far…

I am not a workstation guy, I’m a server/network guy. I’ll admit that ignorance right away so you can just laugh me off when I say I really like Vista. But the questions themselves are valid, and something we as “computer support” people ought to be able to answer fully.

I have written before, as Mark has written today, that Outlook sucks. We have had to roll back our Office 2007 deployments because of it, I have gone to OWA on my work computers, etc. The Dip, you know. I gave up on Outlook before it ruined me.

But Vista? Crashing? Hanging? Really?

I’m prepared to share some Vista tips with all’y’all but I wanted to extend two invitations to my tech-savvy audience. First – am I really ignorant here about Vista? (about Vista, not other things – vladville.com doesn’t have the disk/network capacity to address other issues) and Second – Help a brother out (blog a tip about performance tuning Vista) – just one tip a day and link it to this post.

At the end of the week I’ll put up a big splash page with all you can do to make Vista not suck. One guideline: Provide a con/pro of the change being made. For example:

Tip: Turn off UAC

Description of how to do it…. { }

Pro: Work effectively without dismissing endless access priviledge escalation warnings.

Con: Disables most of the security advantages Vista offers.

As with all IT consulting, the tip doesn’t have to be good (consulting = prolonging the problem) it just has to have an immediate impact (even if its bullet to the head in terms of functionality, security, productivity).