Ok, not an IT person but she is a friend of mine so.. suck it. Besides, if you don't think you can learn something from people in fields different that your own you're dumber than you think.

Nancy Williams worked for SMB Nation as a sales manager, meaning she edited, organized, managed and did all things SMB Nation. She also managed relationships with vendors, SBSers, writers and just about everyone. She talks about the upcoming SMB Nation 2006 in Redmond and what she likes about working with us.

Runtime: 3 minutes, 19 seconds.

Download a WMV (Microsoft Windows Movie) | (17 Mb)

Stream Quicktime (Fast, Streaming, Requires Quicktime) | (6 Mb)

Note: Susanne rules apply. Enjoy the advice on what to do at SMB Nation.

First of the SMB Nation batch and first of the SMB IT Success Profiles. Basically, these are the people that are at the top of their game, be it business, technology, community or otherwise. I will be disabling comments/feedback on these because unlike everything else you see on Vladville that is written to simulate interest, thought and feedback… these videos are there for you to listen. No, not talk back. Listen.. watch.. listen.. absorb.. learn.

First up is Beatrice Muzler, VP of SMB Nation, author, instructor, magazine editor, consultant, biker, runner and a permanent member of my friends list because she sent me a 5lb container of cookies from Germany.

Runtime: 6 minutes, 3 seconds.

Download a WMV (Microsoft Windows Movie) | (31 Mb)

Stream Quicktime (Fast, Streaming, Requires Quicktime) | (10 Mb)

Note: “Susanne rules” apply here. Don’t email me with rude comments, her cell phone requests, questions about her relationship to me, to anyone else, address, location, age, url of her fan site, requests for an autographed 8×10, etc.

Note 2: Yes, I am building this site on top of smart women with attractive accents. Yes, I realized I am alienating my core audience Chris. Dedicated to the memory my friend Tim’s vlog’s second episode. Looks and sounds good in a room with light, doesn't it?

Last but not least is the “community value” presentation by Mark Taylor. You’ve heard Susanne talk about the general success of the community-based initiatives and their value to Readycrest. You’ve heard Tom talk about the importance of networking to a one man band. Now it’s Mark’s turn.

Mark is a partner/owner of Chorus IT, Microsoft Certified Partner in UK. Mark talked about the value that the community has for a larger partner. His business is growing past $1M in revenues and he also found a way to both contribute and benefit from the SMB community. He also recently started a CRM blog so go check that out once you’re done watching the episode.

All in all, very nice and successful guy. I interviewed him for one of the future episodes for Vladfire community profiles and the interview pretty much kicked off with him talking about how he has been successful with CRM deployments. It will really be one episode to watch as many people talk about CRM, few are actually successful (reference revenue number above) with it. Well worth 10 minutes of your time if you ask me.

Runtime: 10 minutes, 6 seconds.

Download a WMV (Microsoft Windows Movie) | (53 Mb)

Stream Quicktime (Fast, Streaming, Requires Quicktime) | (17 Mb)

Note: Last of the WWPC Small Business Symposium UK presentation. I can tell from the previous 3 episodes that you really liked it so take a second to thank Susanne, Mark and Tom for putting this together.

Tom Crosbie of Crosbie IT Ltd talks about being a one-man band IT shop in UK. Tom talks frankly about how he started his business, the hardship in getting good business training and how the SBS community helped fill the void. Quite inspirational, enjoy.

Runtime: 8 minutes, 12 seconds.

Download a WMV (Microsoft Windows Movie) | (43 Mb)

Stream Quicktime (Fast, Streaming, Requires Quicktime) | (15 Mb)

Note: Sorry about the video/audio quality, this was shot in a dark hotel room. It is a part of the same presentation you saw by Susanne Dansey and Mark Taylor is next.

It’s not easy being green. The SBS R2 project has not been on a pretty road, until today.

For the first time in Microsoft’s history a product group has pulled the product back from manufacturing. They saw a flaw and decided to fix it. They pulled it back before it blew up in their face as a huge PR nightmare. No pointing fingers. No “we’ll fix it in SP1”, no "we'll patch it after new years," no "it's not that big of a big deal", no "we can't test every single piece of software," no "we already burned the DVD's, how big of a problem is this really?" talk of cover-up and denial. No excuses. Just hold tight and we’ll fix it. Amen.

Download a WMV (Microsoft Windows Movie) | (2.6Mb) 46 seconds

Stream Quicktime (Fast, Streaming, Requires Quicktime) | (1.3Mb) 46 seconds

Hopefully other Microsoft groups learn from this humiliy and show the same care for their customers that the SBS team did. Microsoft makes phenomenally stupid mistakes. They also make remarkably good decisions. And that my friends is why they are #1.

Note: from her cold, dead hands is dedicated to the SBS R2’s sole evangelist through the thick and thin. Enjoy the video.

Note 2: Thanks to Tim Barrett & Associates, my PR agency, for scoring the Kermit song. Saved me a trip to BlockBuster.

Welcome to the second coming of Susanne Dansey. You can read (and watch) more of Susanne here on how the community she participates/builds helps her business. This second “in-the-dark” part of her presentation from Microsoft WWPC talks at great length how to establish relationships with the community members, how to leverage that against major vendors, how to be comfortable about doing business with your peers and a lot more.

Download a WMV (Microsoft Windows Movie) (73Mb)

Stream Quicktime (Fast, Streaming, Requires Quicktime) (21Mb)

Note: Shot in near complete darkness. Just experimenting with video. I know a few of you are going to SMB Nation to network and participate in SBS groups so its only fair that you learn how to do it from the very best. Oh, and you might want to watch all the way to the end to see what she is really like. Queenie rules with an iron fist. 

Ah, the tireless excuse of the slow and lazy. If I had a penny every time someone said the above to me about the SBS Show I would be bigger than Time Warner. I'm gonna try that line with Steve Ballmer next time we talk "Hey, I was going to build a multi-billion dollar conglomerate but you beat me to it"

But this is not a rant. Quite the contrary. My PR Agency, Tim Barrett & Associates is going to be vlogging concurrently with me. He's serious about it too, he even bought a Mac. He showed me his first episode last night, far more impressive than what I have in terms of production quality but he is not sexy enough for a widescreen yet. Great audio too, I am not brave enough to stand that close to the camera. According to his blog he will be focusing more on screencasts and helping people with the bits on pieces of SBS and related technologies.

I will hopefully remain the Paris Hilton of the tech conference scene and focus on the IT Pro lifestyle. It's a great source of entertainment for me - I get to talk to some amazing people, find out what drives them and what makes them successful. Let's face it, you can always buy a book to figure out Exchange, well over a 100 options. But you will lilkely never sit down with the guy that owns the entire SMTP stack and see the excitement about what he is working on now. Sometimes its more fun to find out why things are the way they are instead of how they are put together and sprinkled with marketing. I've been fortunate to meet some remarkable people in this business and it has changed the very core of what I believe as the definition of success, hopefully I can bring the same to you. Then Tim will show you how

I'm very happy to see this. The response to the two episodes on Vladfire has been amazing so far and it is empowering people in a whole new way. No, we have not forgotten about the SBS Show, this is just a whole new way to tell a story. Both will continue. At the end of the day it feels great to know that even your hobby can make a positive difference in someone elses life. Thank you, thank you, thank you for hundreds of emails and comments on just the first 3 episodes. I think I got more feedback than downloads, I am very happy you like them so much.

Ok, so I succumbed to presure to try and release the vlog in a .mov format. Let me know what you think, it is encoded as streaming with Fast Start so it should play almost immediately. The downside? It takes quite a bit of horse power to encode, this almost ran for two hours on a 3.0 GHz PC with 2GB ram. Also, not compatible with the old versions of Quicktime so hopefully you have a new one. On the bright side, it is almost the third of the wmv file.

Click here to start streaming

By the way, still going through the emails. I really did not expect this level of response to the first two videos. So far the favourite word seems to be "You made my day" Thank you, thank you, thank you. As for the tilted head - The camera itself is tilted so I try to compensate for it (unintentionally) and even seem to talk out of one side of my mouth more than the other. I've never really paid much attention to my mug until now, it's interesting to be self-conscious about the way I am at home. Should I shave? Do I need a haircut? Does this shirt look dirty? Weird.

Anyhow, the biggest complaint so far - enclosures. Considering that I haven't picked the default format yet doing enclosures would have been difficult. I create the enclosure feed for the SBS Show by hand so I am not 100% sure how to do this yet. Learning process folks, takes a while to nail down the distribution end of things but as usual, its all about the message.

By the way, set this beast up on the vlogmap . I'm node #1314

Hit the image above to download the movie or click here.

Susanne, Chris and I wanted to give you an idea of what it’s like to put together the most successful SMB podcast. Enjoy.

Update: Sorry about having to download these, I’ll publish the .mov/Quicktime later tonight to enable streaming – not 100% sure how to embed wmv (Windows Movie) into a player against WordPress but I’ll do the Quicktime.

Welcome to Vladfire, my new video blog.