XD Annoyarizer 2.0 a.k.a. ExchangeDefender Desktop Agent (Beta) is here! Say hello to all your SPAM! You can download it here, personalize it, make it fall apart. Remember that it is Beta software so no production use please. If you see something (anything) missing please email development@ownwebnow.com as this one still has about two weeks before it hits prime time.

Last month we released ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 Addin to much joy and celebration in our partner community. The orders skyrocketed, people loved it, everyone praised us and celebrated just how awesome the tool was.

Then they tried to install it on Outlook 2003 and were shocked that Outlook 2007 addins didn’t work on Outlook 2003. So we went to the drawing board and ported all the functionality of the Outlook 2007 Addin to our good ol’ Annoyarizer software, the Windows service that runs in the background and pops up every hour to tell you that you’ve got SPAM!

This is in part to reduce the amount of junk traffic and the inherent braindead design flaw that are SPAM email reports. Ordinary users simply do not comprehend that the reports are not realtime, that they are not going to reflect the same numbers of junk as they see in the realtime portal, yada, yada, yada. So we’ve fixed it. Above you see the software that will work on any version of Microsoft Windows that supports .NET 2.0.

Yes, even Dave Sobel can use it on his Mac.

How difficult is it to install. See below:

Yeah, double click on the file and hit enter a few times. Windows 3.1 style.

Here is what you get:

Realtime access to SPAM and SureSPAM listing. Ability to filter, search and show SPAM and SureSPAM for today, yesterday and past 7 days. Click on anything you wish to release, select Trust or Release and it’s in your inbox. If you never want to see it all again just hit Dismiss Messages.

Whitelist and blacklist management is there as well. As simple as typing in an email.

Stats too – For those that complain that ExchangeDefender is not working for them and they haven’t seen any SPAM today or it’s all been SPAM we can actually break out the numbers in realtime.

The least exciting screen: Settings. Just your username and password.

Thanks to Scott Buchanan of PDQ Technologies for being a guinea pig.

Seriously, if you can think of anything that will improve this, please drop us an email. You know where to find me. vlad@vladville.com

Now, we also took some precious time from developing actual features to do some shoutouts to the people that carpet bombed our support portal demanding Outlook 2003 plugins. As one of our good Irish friends said:

“This **** ******* sucks, Vlad”

Type that in the Search field in the SPAM quarantine and you’ll see a tribute to our external QA partner Anyone that blogs the screenshot of him gets a ton of SWAG. (P.S. *’s wont work, you’ll have to decipher it. I’ll help you by saying that the first word starts with S and second word starts with F)

Every day I see myself illustrated in Dilbert is another day I die a little inside.

There is no such thing as a publicly available Exchange 2007 SP2, just a reporter poorly paraphrasing press releases. And Exchange has supported Direct Push since Exchange 2003 SP2 which is available as a free update for both SBS 2003 and SBS 2003 R2 so the headline is misleading as well.

Yet, press and ad sponsored web sites are wondering why their jobs are disappearing..

One of the more unpleasant parts of running a business is that you get introduced to a ton of business drivel books that pick an outcome and find specific cases to work backwards to somehow prove a theory. People reading them feel good because the content reaffirms their common sense and attitude towards business. So much for Good to Great, if you haven’t read it, don’t bother.

But I thought it would be nice for someone to write the opposite.

Give me “Great to Meh” or “How I lost it all trading options” – I don’t want to read about how great and awesome people are, I want to find out how people failed tremendously so I can avoid being one of those suckers.

So here is my “Great to Meh” moment of the past month.

We’re building this incredible new product. We think it’s going to change this space significantly.

We are working with our usual suppliers, usual hardware, proven software.

But the empire starts to crumble on the most unforseen of tasks.

So the model of the motherboard changed and the vendor assured us it was the same thing. We verified the specs and agreed that it was the same beast.

Everything was the same. Except for the layout. The 4 pin ATX power feed was 4 inches to the left, making the case power 2″ too far away.

I’ll spare you the fact that we paid 4x as much for shipping for each extension cable as we intended to.

What we also did not account for was the new layout in the new 2U SuperMicro chasis that replaced the old one. So when we went to order the same old 180 degree SAS drive data cables because the 90 degree ones overlapped some ports on the old chasis… well, you can tell where this goes. The 180 degree cables protruded out of the 2U cases, back to the parts order page.

So what did we learn today…

First, never trust sales people when they tell you nothing has changed. Order one instead of a pallet.

Second, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever give people an ETA. No matter how well planned, how well organized or sure you are about a certain outcome there are forces working against you. Unless thing is up and running and sucking down power and has been burned in for at least 3 days, it’s just a concept.

Third, pick a person of authority in your organization that has the final say on yay/nay. Everything heard, read, seen or implied elsewhere should take a huge distant second place to the person in charge, preferably you.

Fourth, count the amount of positive feedback from this. Write a crappy business book and sell it to Karl. Failure in technology business is the norm, not success, so you would be better served learning how to avoid the biggest mistakes failures of this business took. Learn from your mistakes – wouldn’t it be more fun to learn it without making those mistakes in the first place? Absolutely, but nobody would buy such a book, people read for personal fulfillment not to be put through gut wrenching nightmares about how it can all go wrong. I am not sure how to explain the audience this blog gets….. I attribute most of it to my masterful spellling and grammar skills.

I’ve finally almost caught up with my email. That seems to be the perpetual state of my existence lately, I guess I’m famous. But almost, yes, almost got all my mail and issues all taken care of. Training up the new MonkeyForce has been a bitch, if I were a loser I’d probably just quit right now and say we’re not going to grow anymore but far too many of you know where I live and if the monkeys stop hitting delete there will be a pitchfork army at my door by the evening.

Phew, what a relief. Dodged e-myth prophecy once again!

And now that I finally have a breather, time to get myself way in over my head again! But more about that later, here is what you’re likely missing out on:

My good friends Wayne and Robbie are doing a huge webcast to introduce those of you down under to SBS and EBS.  Registration required but a free event. They will also be taking to the road and such. Own Web Now Corp is also doing a huge show of support for SBS with a new community, check back tomorrow. No, we still won’t sell it.

I got an invitation from my partner Dana Epp introducing the AuthAnvil v2 next week. Make sure you sign up for it – now much like ExchangeDefender and all the other serious stuff there are minimums – but if you work with OWN there aren’t – you can buy it one token at a time, $20 a month. I am sure I could put another pimpnote in here.

Someone out there ran a study and found out that SPAM gets 1 response per 12,500,000 messages. It also found I have a body of a prepubescent Chinese gymnastics champion. Please. We get dozens of calls a day with people questioning why their UPS invoice got stuck in the SPAM queue. Do you have an account with UPS? No. Do you ship with UPS? No. And you want the UPS Invoice from heyyou@retardibetyoullopenthatexecutableattachment.com delivered to you ASAP? Every company has exactly 1 idiot that will keep ExchangeDefender around as long as there is email.

Finally, a huge apology to Garett Chipman from TVG Consulting for still waiting on a quote from me. Second one in line to Stuart Selbst from SecureMyCompany for not getting the branded panel in place for the launch of the 50 cent / gig offsite backup. Apologies to the ConnectWise and Autotask families for the lagging SM integration projects, everyone waiting on Shockey Monkey, Vanderbilt, MonkeyForce, people waiting for the newsletter, James Cash, the angry UK villagers that didn’t get their invoices AGAIN and everyone else that stuck with me while I worked like a migrant fruit picker to staff and train this company through another growing pain point. Oh and Susan Bradley for working as my administrative assistant and getting me everything I asked for over the past month! Flowers are on the way.

To all those of you that wondered if the entrepreneurial spirit will get squashed with the idea of higher taxes, wonder no more. Just hit Play below and tell me you aren’t going to work just a little bit harder today.

The harder you work the more you get. Go and do likewise gents. The money is out there, pick it up its yours, if you don’t I got no sympathy for you.

It’s (almost) Friday so let’s try a little humor.

Who wants to predict the next Apple commercial? You can see them all here, as Apple’s PR and marketing are as big of a product as the iPhone and OS X.

So in tradition of taking infinite potshots at every misguided Microsoft marketing attempt, I think Apple will mock the new Microsoft ads titled “I’m a PC” where ordinary people upload 5 second webcam clips of themselves about how unique they are and how they use a PC, implying (in my humble opinion correctly) that Mac users are pretty much all the same drones.

How do I see this going down? Mac guy walks into the PC guy trying to tape a commercial. The kicker is that the PC guy is weird, obnoxiously pixelated and totally out of context with it’s message.

Where does Apple go with it from there?

“You know PC, Apple Theatre Displays with high resolution…”

“PC, you should get a MacBook with integrated high resolution video and iSight…”

“Why not use any of the latest HDTV cameras… oh, driver problems?

Microsoft is spending $300 million… so far it doesn’t appear they have been able to make it count. Their new life without partners is not off to a great start, talk about taking a wrong moment in the IT cycle to sink your advocates battleship. When your flagship product is on the ropes, you struggle in all measurable Web 2.0 categories and publicly admit at PDC that you’re playing catchup with technology others offer SLAs for and you can’t even preview…

It would seem they would have spent more time trying to make friends than enemies. Benioff is pretty much right on the money, Microsoft – wake up.

Thanks to the elections in Unites States a fair amount of public discussion has taken place over just who should be the leader. The smartest? The most competent? The most experienced? The toughest? Or someone that reflects the average man – Joe Six Pack that you can have a beer with and debate whether Africa is a continent or a country?

Who cares, isn’t the election over?

It’s a little bit bigger than that. Election cycle gives you an incredible insight into what drives people, what motivates them, what they fear the most and what they believe to be the solution to their problem.

As IT solution providers our job is generally to identify the problems and propose solutions. Some of us are wildly successful at identifying the true problems clients face. Some of us just suck at getting that information from our clients. Just asking people what they don’t like about their technology is not enough. Feeding data into a junk “Solution Creator” is an OK sales tool but it doesn’t get to the bottom of the true issues our client base faces.

One of the biggest drivers behind the development of the new wave of products at OWN has been a little “Development” tab where we keep track of what our current customers demands are. This is great when it comes to finding the specific nuances in functionality from client to client, from industry to industry. But refining a solution to fit the client is easy… how do you market yourself to the kind of people that would fit your solution portfolio?

That is why most IT solution providers fail at marketing and making it big.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. The reason your clients aren’t telling you exactly what they want from you is because they likely do not consider you to be their peers and would likely not understand them. So you talk to your clients in the best business language you can muster and they respond in the most technical lingo they have picked out of their trade journals.

One thing I realized last year is that as my business grew and I grew in my IT business and then grew in my business outside of the scope of running a “technology” business I lost that familiarity that has made me so successful working with small IT shops. It has been a few years since I had left a really small IT biz way of thinking and I realized that I was no longer the loudest proponent that understood the challenges of the really small IT solution providers.

Sometimes you just have to hire the right people that speak to the right kind of the market. So I set out to find a person that was most like the majority of IT startup guys. I’m not going to open up about all the secrets but suffice to say, people open themselves up to the people that they identify as their peers – technically, business-wise.

You have to play your strengths to be the right fit for your clients needs. Otherwise you are doomed to the professional life of taking orders, being second guessed, not in the budget, a decision to be made later.

Now that is a little doomy and gloomy, so let’s talk about something positive. Where I think most people fail at and get frustrated into remaining small is the failure of their first hire. Most people think to hire the exact same kind of a person they are. Techie. Competent. Someone that can help them scale themselves by offering the same kind of a service, same kind of a technical expertise and same kind of a go-getter personality type they have.

It puzzles me is that nobody ever asks themselves as entrepreneurs why they don’t work for someone else? Why would you hire someone completely unmanageable?

There are so many pieces of advice and books written on who you should hire, who you should hire first, how you should hire and on what terms. So I will offer you the single most important piece of advice and key to success:

Do not hire on the grounds of what would make you better off, what would make your life easier and who would fit you better. Think about your customers instead. Which of your hiring prospects would work the best with your client base – who are they most likely to respect and like as a point of interaction and representation of your corporate image and your corporate values?

Style points matter. You betcha.

What a lovely profane, filthy road it has been writing this blog for the past year. I would like to thank my friends Chris and Susanne, for helping with the notion that no matter how something sounded there was always a way to bring it to a new low.

It is November 4th and honestly, I’m out of ideas. I have pretty much accomplished my mission of pissing off everyone I can to the point that I can actually enjoy my life, family and business without anyone bugging me or waiting for me or thinking I’m a horrible person for not doing them a favor.

So tomorrow, this blog goes back to what it was prior to the Vlad, the worst person ever series that started last November.

Bit of background for anyone that cares: I have this personality flaw of extreme persistence and competitiveness which just so happened to be channeled in the wrong direction. I did just about everything I could to promote this blog and share the values that are important to me. It lead to a very wide readership through the blog itself, SBS Show, Shockey Monkey, Vladfire, etc. It lead to a ton of conference speaking engagements, focus groups, awards, etc. It also lead to a lot of personal anguish because there isn’t a sweat shop behind Vladville and people like to write very needy things when they need something. When and if I said no I got dragged through the dirt and had some filthy things said about me (far filthier than you’ll ever read on Vladville). I’ve singlehandedly taken more blame for Microsoft Online than even those guys did. I’ve been called everything from asshole to down right just the bad human being for not attending certain conferences their friends threw. I was “informed” that if I didn’t show up at certain meetings the person would do everything in their power to talk down my business and promote my competitors. The crown jewel of this came last year when I said I would be taking some time off to spend with my wife and my new baby. I think the series of articles written here over the past year have successfully separated me from enough “community” enough reporters trying to build a story and enough Microsoft staff looking for free publicity. Most people that have met me know that I’m a smartass and actually a very nice guy – and I made a mistake of allowing people to take advantage of that. So hopefully I have now built a firewall thick enough to make sure what I do and what I stand for doesn’t get involved in that. Don’t get me wrong, I am not hating on anyone that is trying to shamelessly whore themselves through those things to build a business, I totally respect and recommend that, it’s just that I’m not interested and I need to learn how to say no politely.

Microsoft made a lot of noise about Live last week, but some MSN tricks never die. For example, the new wave of Live apps is beyond broken, but they won’t let you download the old stable ones. So what to do, what to do.

I have a 32bit Vista Enterprise, and after attempting to install Windows Live Suite I am given the following error:

There was a problem with this installation. Windows Live Suite was not installed.

System error details

Code: 0x8000ffff

Description: Catastrophic failure

I found a great blog by Jonathan Kay covering this very issue and the resolution. It also has great tips on removing and adding different live components.