Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog | Vlad Mazek on IT, Business and Technology

Centro Gets A Name: Windows Essential Business Server

Posted: 9:29 am
November 7, 2007

Microsoft
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Microsoft Centro has been an interesting beta so far, of a midmarket software suite and just how it could make sense. Today, it got an official name: Windows Essential Business Server:

REDMOND, Wash., Nov 7, 2007 – There are approximately 1.2 million midsized businesses in the world and their IT needs are unique. Midsized businesses are typically short on IT staff and resources. But in order to maintain growth, they require the same powerful technology solutions used by large companies. To address this need, Microsoft is developing an integrated IT solution for midsized organizations, previously known by the codename “Centro.” Today Microsoft unveiled the product’s official name, “Windows Essential Business Server,” and announced its key components and features, as well as an initial set of industry partners planning to support the new solution. Next week at TechEd: IT Forum in Barcelona, Spain, Microsoft will be demonstrating Windows Essential Business Server.

Steven VanRoekel, Director, Windows Server Solution Group, Microsoft

Click for high-res version

PressPass spoke with Steven VanRoekel, director of the Windows Server Solutions group at Microsoft, about today’s news. He oversees product management of the family of server products that are tailored to the specific needs of distinct customer segments, including home users, small businesses and, now, midsized companies.

PressPass: What are you announcing today?

VanRoekel: Today we gave Windows Server codename “Centro” an official name: Windows Essential Business Server. We are also communicating the key features and technologies customers will find in Windows Essential Business Server to increase the manageability and reliability of their IT systems, and to help them boost businesses productivity and growth.

In addition, we are announcing that hardware partners, including HP, IBM and Intel, will support Windows Essential Business Server, and that software partners such as Citrix, CA, CommVault, Trend Micro, FullArmor, McAffee, Quest and Symantec plan to provide ”Add-In” solutions for Windows Essential Business Server to enhance the product’s benefits.

PressPass: What exactly is Windows Essential Business Server?

VanRoekel: Windows Essential Business Server is an integrated server infrastructure solution designed for the unique needs of midsized organizations. Windows Essential Business Server combines the technologies of Windows Server 2008, Exchange Server 2007, Forefront Security for Exchange, System Center Essentials, the next version of ISA Server and SQL Server 2008 into an “all-in-one” solution.

With Windows Essential Business Server, IT professionals will find that the acquisition, setup, and ongoing management of IT is vastly simplified. It provides a unified console for management of key IT workloads, it is pre-configured with a tremendous amount of built-in best practices, and it will be licensed – with a Standard and Premium Edition – in a way that makes IT budgeting and purchase simpler and more predictable.

In addition, Windows Essential Business Server provides a single Client Access License for all included products and offers new technologies which simplify license management. Within the administration console, IT professionals can easily ascertain how many licenses they have, who the licenses are assigned to and – when an employee leaves the company – easily re-assign licenses.

We have extensively researched the needs of IT professionals in mid-sized organizations through studies and surveys, and talked with them directly through hundreds of customer visits, focus groups, and meetings with customer and partner advisory boards.

PressPass: What have you learned through this research? How is IT different in midsized companies, versus small business or the enterprise?

VanRoekel: Midsized companies – organizations with up to 250 PCs or so – typically have one or very few IT pros managing the breadth of the company’s needs, including networking, servers, messaging, line-of-business applications and databases, as well as desktops and end user help. Suffice to say, these IT professionals are commonly stretched very thin on time and resources. They are often in reactive, “fire fighting” mode with little time to focus on strategic IT projects, or even to develop consistent processes. I have heard more than one say their role is “a mile wide and an inch deep.” They want to do more to really contribute to their company’s bottom line, but they are just too busy keeping systems up and running.

Windows Essential Business Server is aimed at turning this around for these customers. It provides a new, unified management experience and integrated infrastructure that is easy to ”consume,” as they say, versus having to manage, install and maintain individual products or technologies . Tasks that currently take hours, if not days, are going to be much simpler and faster with Windows Essential Business Server. This will really help IT professionals be more proactive in their planning and efforts. For example, Windows Essential Business Server will provide the platform and the IT reliability to deploy new line of business applications that contribute to business success.

PressPass: How do Microsoft’s partners play a role with Windows Essential Business Server?

VanRoekel: We have been working with our hardware and software partners since we began development of Windows Essential Business Server, and they are excited about the opportunities it presents to help our joint customers in midsized businesses.

Next week at TechEd: IT Forum we are demonstrating Windows Essential Business Server running on the upcoming Intel Modular Server, built on Intel Multi-Flex Technology. It is a simple-to-use, flexible, all-in one server and storage system for small and midsized businesses, and a great way for channel resellers to help customers better manage their IT needs.

At the conference we’ll also be demonstrating prototypes of software partner “Add-Ins” that customers will be able to deploy and manage through the Windows Essential Business Server unified administration console.

CA ARCserve Backup’s integration with the Centro Administration Console enables mid-market IT staffs to more easily manage essential data protection tasks – enabling them to launch, monitor, and troubleshoot backup jobs from the same intuitive interface they use to fulfill their other management responsibilities.

The Citrix Access Essentials Server will allow IT professionals to easily provide the on-site experience for offsite workers, offering wizard-driven installation and configuration as part of its integrated setup.

FullArmor’s Workflow Studio allows IT administrators to automate day to day administrative tasks and Endpoint Policy Manager provides endpoint compliance, reporting, and policy enforcement for Group Policy.

Symantec’s leading security and backup portfolio will also be integrating with the Centro Administration console, offering users the benefit of added simplicity and flexibility for managing Symantec Backup Exec and Symantec Endpoint Protection native consoles.

IBM views its IBM BladeCenter S and System x servers as an ideal platform for Windows Essential Business Server. Geared for smaller offices, Blade Center S offers an integrated business-in-a box foundation, with configurable shared storage and office-friendly 110v power. And the System x line provides advanced availability along with a price advantage that works for small to midsized business.

HP views its C-3000 BladeSystem or “Shorty” as an ideal platform for Windows Essential Business Server because of the ideal form factor, flexibility of configurations and design leadership.

Also, for many solution providers and consultants, Windows Essential Business Server represents a great way to serve the needs of midsized clients. The many solution providers that implement Windows Small Business Server or Windows Server for their customers see Windows Essential Business Server as “a new arrow in the quiver” to extend their business into the mid-market, where IT spending is growing fast.

PressPass: When will Windows Essential Business Server be available?

VanRoekel: Windows Essential Business Server is slated for availability in the second half of 2008, as part of the Windows Server 2008 wave of products. The product is currently in private beta. We anticipate making a public beta available in the first half of 2008.

PressPass: You also oversee product management for Windows Small Business Server. Is there any update on the next version, code-named “Cougar”?

VanRoekel: The next version of Windows Small Business Server is currently in its first, private beta release. We couldn’t be happier with how the beta program is progressing. The passion for this product within the small business customer and partner community is incredible. We are looking forward to providing additional details on this product in the coming months.

Interesting… So far, at least according to public commentary, SBS 2008 and Windows Essential Business Server will launch at the same time….

Aggregate or Buldoze: Respecting the value of your time

Posted: 2:45 pm
November 6, 2007

IT Business
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Karl wrote an excellent post about his desire for the aggregator of all the information one would want to keep track of. While his point is great and I encourage you to read it in its own context, there is one “big picture” view I wanted to offer to all of you that may be overwhelmed with the amount of “stuff” that is available out there that perhaps does not deserve your attention. That big picture view is:

Stop. You do this to yourself. You can stay as informed as you need to be just reading a single source and browsing through the headlines of a few of the people whose opinions you respect. If you feel overwhelmed, step back, then take a chainsaw to your e-life and clear out the clutter.

Why? Because you are human and as far as humans go there are only 24 hours in a day, most of it absorbed by sleep and wishing you didn’t have so much to do which eventually turns to boredom and pending paralyzing panic from perpetual “catch up” syndrome. Crowd your plate enough and your life will simply be reduced to continuous “catch up” with things and people, as you ignore other burning fires until they need to be “caught up” with….. completely destroying any priority, process and importance of people and tasks in your life.

Now that we got that brief bit of sunshine out of the way, let’s hear from Jimmy Joe Bob, the overwhelmed IT consultant:

“I can’t handle this anymore! I can’t keep up with the mailing lists, blogs, podcasts, video blogs, user group meetings, vendor webcasts, documentation, books, betas, advisories and now broken patches every month… I am going to stop patching and reading so I can spend more time on freeones.c… “ – JJB, Antispyware MSP Titanium Certified

I see it’s time for some motivational speaking. Bite your lip, this is going to hurt a little:

Shut the f*** up you worthless “barely qualified to answer helpdesk questions at AOL but posing as a technology/business consultant” sack of s***, you picked a career with a vertical learning curve and you’re making 6 figure salary despite being worth $35,000 tops on the market so thank your lucky stars for being able to be alive now and here and your only problem being the overwhelming amount of resources thrown at your feet for free. Grow some balls and take some pride in your profession.

Now that I’ve got your blood pumping, pick up that chainsaw and wack out the distractions from your daily life. I am always in search of things to free up my time, reduce distractions and unneccessary stress. I dropped all the Yahoo groups and haven’t missed a thing. I tuned out of the SMB community soap operas. I handed the SBS group to the new leaders. I dropped the projects I was working on that were not benefiting enough people in the intended ways. I consolidated my RSS feeds to “Important” and “Others”. I haven’t been to an IT conference in two months and I am still alive!

Point is, there are resources out there and they will eat up your life if you let them – so don’t. Find the leaders, find the people you respect and rely on them to lead you to what is truly relevant. Or lead yourself, but its harder to complain when the pain/problem is self-inflicted. As Karl says, relax FOCUS succeed.

OWN: Fixed

Posted: 8:01 pm
November 5, 2007

ExchangeDefender, OwnWebNow
1 Comment

As promised, this is the first public showcase of what we’ve been up to for the past two weeks and what we are doing to improve communications, relationships and documentation over at Own Web Now. I’m the CEO so you get to hear it directly from me, first. It is not quite as simple as a single blog post so I will take the rest of the week to explain the changes in detail because for every person you please you’re bound to piss off another. I am not necessarily concerned with wheter you like me, but at the very least I hope you understand where I am coming from and at that point its your call whether you become/quit/stay our partner.

The big picture: The goal at Own Web Now Corp, over the past year and over the coming months, is working to further the global network presence, both in terms of hardware and its partners. We will do this by making significant improvements to our systems, centralized management consoles and both partner and end user training.

In terms of infrastructure, we’re there. 14 data centers, full staff, products and services in R&D. We’re moving forward in a very big way. Three weeks ago a number of things became very apparent as huge problems, something we have moved very quickly to address and fix. Broken is broken, we picked up and glued back a lot of pieces.

So, here are the improvements, in a nutshell, I will break them down over the course of the week:

Communications: Corporate Blog: Corporate blog will be the main information site for the OWN business in terms of product announcements, major service items, opportunities, etc.

Communications: Network Operations: Network operations blog focused on the service aspect of Own Web Now: What we are doing, who we are doing it with, what the problem is, what the resolution is, etc. Your day-to-day OWN operational problems.

Documentation: ExchangeDefender Web Site: Our flagship products first update in over two years and two major releases. It brings the long demanded “trial signups”, documentation, feature descriptions to explain benefits of the service to customers, etc. Most importantly (and in highest demand) this site makes it easy to get started with us.

Documentation: OWN Documentation Center: New wiki that we will be brining most frequently asked questions to. Nearly all of our products behave just as you would imagine and as the documentation indicates – but whenever there is something left to the interpretation we will throw it up on the wiki.

Business: Updated Partner Guide: For close to a year we did not have an updated Partner Sales guide, which resulted to a lot of people asking for a resend, current information, etc. Now the most up to date partner guide will always be available online, on demand, in our support portal under Services.

Business: Price List: Also embedded under our partner portal under Services is the Pricing List that you can use when putting together quotes. These are the latest, most up to date prices on our key products.

Almost last, but definitely not the least:

Business: SUICIDAL?: Public feedback: Every now and then you’ve got something to say but you don’t want to say it out loud and have it associated with your own name. While your best friends will always level with you and give it to you exactly how it is, most people are not comfortable with that level of intimidation. So, we have a public feedback link. I am not posting the public side of it here (will be emailed to you in the newsletter) but you can see the public results of the feedback here. Any submissions to the public site are reflected on the private support portal side in realtime, we do not block anything, even if you’re filthy. We have a 72 hour response time guarantee on every piece of feedback left, so hopefully it will give us better insight for the problems as they happen as they affect you, not six months down the road when its too late. The feedback is totally anonymous, we do not even collect the IP address, just subject, feedback and product category. We stole this from NewEgg.

Finally,

Newsletter – Emailed, every month, every third or so. I will be mailing the first issue this week.

So as you can tell, we’ve been busy.

Let me repeat – OWN is not a bunch of bored hobbyists who got tired of the VAR game and decided to branch out into services, we have a decade of infrastructure knowhow, the funding, flexibility and one of the largest partner networks in the world. So yeah, you can bet that I will personally do whatever it takes to make our partners better, our clients more informed, listen to that feedback and make you better off. There are thousands of people making a living off of what we do, have done for a decade and will do so for decades to come. We’ve been doing this for a long time, and will do it bigger, better and uncut….

This, however, is just the first step. Look at the above, and watch it grow.

P.S. More details on all this over the coming week.

Google does it again, Gphone slays the naysayers..

Posted: 4:55 pm
November 5, 2007

Google
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Ok, I was with Google when it came out with the Google Pack. Sure, it was a fantastic disappointment of a shareware garbage bag dumped out on your doorstep when you were expecting an operating system. Then came Google Talk, winning Google an award for the “Halfass Attempt of the Century” in the area of computer software.

And we were still sitting around talking about Google, enjoying the freebie services, liking the competition it was giving to Microsoft to keep them on their toes, looking forward to the next big thing. Many of us naysayers claimed Google would never do something so pointless again.

Wrong again. Gphone got announced today! Except, its not a phone. Oh, and there is no SDK. Umm, no real screenshots or demo. All in all, nothing.

So here is the $700/share question…

Google appears to have become a company that is in business of selling dreams and possibilities to shareholders, not really delivering technology solutions, especially not past the beta stage at which over half of its projects sit in limbo of perpetual lack of business sense and plan.

There are two Googles. There is the Google the advertiser and Google the dreamer. Google advertiser is making $$$ off the adsense. Google the dreamer is building frameworks, crappy Web 2.0 applications, laying down fiber under the Pacific, flying to the moon, buying landing rights to the NASA airfields and is the neverending warchest for those who have been disaffected by Microsoft but could not adjust to the alternative lifestyle that comes with a Mac..

In the long long ago, Jim Cramer said that he was paying the press release to earnings ratio – this seems to be back, much as it was back during the dotcom boom. We seem to be completely ignorant of anyone who is truly presenting a solution to a problem that is here and now and are simply betting these vapor companies will exist solely on their advertising to a consumer that will be doing what? Writing Web 2.0 apps and buying iPhones?

Maybe in San Francisco… Maybe three years ago… But not today, what will Google do to prove that its more than a one trick pony?

Windows Home Server Revolution

Posted: 10:38 am
November 5, 2007

Windows Home Server
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Windows Home Server finally hits the shelves today. There is a ton of news coverage over it, everything positive. Two models are on the street already, the product is easy to use, price is very attractive (starting at $599 for the HP MediaSmart Server that showed up at CES).

The most interesting summary comes from Nick Mokey at Wired:

“Windows Home Server gives users access to the features of having an ordinary server without needing the expertise to deal with it.”

And with those two lines comes the end of SMB server computing as we know it – the complex setup, overinvolved options, expensive maintenance and convoluted licensing are coming in a $599 plug-and-play box which at its core runs…. yup, SBS 2003.

For the riff-raff, this is a tombstone. For the true solution providers though, this is nothing but a godsent opportunity from Microsoft to target new markets and open up new possibilities where they were too complex and too expensive to ever stand a chance before. To those of you that think “Home”, that’s not “Business” I dare you to find me one SMB business owner that doesn’t do a ton of work at home. How is that computer managed, backed up, secured, monitored, accessed… This is the answer.

Off to the new Atomic Tangerine Office

Posted: 7:59 am
November 5, 2007

SMB, Vladville
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I’m off for the first full week of work in my new downtown office, and it’s Atomic Tangerine room! Smack down in the middle of downtown Orlando, “The City Beautiful” (our founders couldn’t speak English good) and off to start a new company.

It’s very exciting time in the Mazek household… I hope to be able to talk about it all soon.

Lovin’ The Cocks This Week

Posted: 9:03 pm
November 4, 2007

IT Business, Vladville
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(Great blog posts deserve great titles. This is neither – a friend of mine told me she would really prefer it if I could use cleaner, more appropriate titles to my blog posts so she could read them at work. Here you go dear, hope it gets you fired for clicking on this one, pervert)

A_spurrier_hi One of the rare, yet priceless, things in business is loyalty. You know, that thing that no matter how badly you screw up there are people that will bail you out, give you a hand when you really need it, even when you don’t ask for it, stick with you through the good, bad, ugly and great. To people that poses this unique and rare quality that take you to that next level, you owe your total and absolute devotion to.

Loyalty goes both ways….

So after one guy won a Heisman and put your organization on the national stage, won six SEC championships, one national championship it won pretty much every award possible in the college football… you take that guy back the moment you’ve got a gig for him and he is available.

I’ve been a Gator since the day I graduated from the University of Florida and I was there from the national championship to the day Spurrier went to NFL. Spurrier built The Swamp into what it is, and University of Florida told him to suck it.

And while I love the Gator Nation and all its might 364 days a year, there is that one day a year that I am a the biggest fan of University of South Carolina. Go Gamecocks. I hope you crush the Gators, and their SEC championship dreams, for putting their arrogance in front of their loyalty.

There is no font that fixes stupid

Posted: 11:22 pm
November 2, 2007

IT Business
1 Comment

Have you ever done something so stupid, that became apparent to you in such a way that you figured the level of stupidity you just experienced better be followed by a quick death so you can at least get the Darwin Award?

Here is how someone learned the hard way why I say: “We suck.”

Monkey Lovin'

Little bit of background: Few months ago one of my partners, and a really great friend, had one of his monkeys open a support ticket that really had something urgent in it. We updated it a few times under the auspices that we were troubleshooting the issue with no really useful data he could take to his client. We’ve learned better since then. Anyhow, the case finally boiled up to me and I fixed it but the mistake was so stupid, so idiotic, only I was dumb enough to have made the similar mistake in the past that I was naturally the only one that would even check it. After all, no sane / literate person would ever try something that dumb. So really, the triumph came from been there / done that which really just means “I am so much dumber than I appear, put a warning sign on me.” – Thing is, I was so ashamed to admit what the mistake was and I just updated the ticket saying: Fixed it, sorry, we just suck.

This was apparently quite a hit at his office, as his engineers used it for weeks on end. I got to hear it first hand at the conference and it apparently earned me quite a reputation over there. Got a Vlad problem? They suck.

The real problem was that even though we fixed it, he had nothing to take to the customer to justify the outage. What do you go back and say? “Sorry, the people we sent you to suck. But its all good now..” Of course not.

Fast Forward To Today..

Earlier today, during DFWVF and me just getting ready for my afternoon ride I get a phone call, on my cell phone nonetheless, with the partner I just told you about saying the following:

“Dude, I need to cash in a favor. I have a screaming customer on the line and ….”

So I ask him about the ticket, I look at the work request, I look at the order, I look at the configuration. Looks good. I mean, everything by the book, I do the nslookups, everything looks right. I tell him its all good on this end, let me see what more thorough troubleshooting turns up and ask him to give me a call back.

His engineer updates the ticket, gives me bounce details, boss calls back and says: “It happens in your cloud.” FMR.

So, I isolate a node and start troubleshooting. Is it in the access lists, in relay lists, in routing tables, in ExchangeDefender. grep for “pattern”, find it, cut and paste, start testing. (more skilled of you are probably seeing where this is going… neither of us did).

I try everything under the sun, it works, I call him insane and ask him to do a run on his side and I’ll tail the logs on this end and see if I can catch it. It takes foreeeever for it to hit our outbound relay so I sneak in a cheap shot about virtualizing Exchange… don’t do it kids.

Anyhow, I see his message go through and bounce. Wtf? Ok, clientadmin@<paste in my domain>… Test passes, no bounce.

WTF am I doing wrong. “Dude, I can’t replicate this. It’s broken, but you’re the only one that can break it. “ – His response: “Yeah, I hear that a lot lately.”

Fast forward 14 minutes later, I look in every table, database, config file. What I am cutting and pasting, which is identical to what he is doing, works. When he does it, it fails. FMR. How? Then I finally decide to test with his email. Cut & paste the entire thing. Poof, NDR! WTF?

Let’s say for the sake of the argument that the name of the domain was vladh2o.com.

The problem? Customer had both vladh20.com and vladh2o.com. They only submitted h2o.com one, not the h20.com one. All this time I was copying and pasting the one from our database, from our config files, from our routing files… and it worked and I’ll be damned if there is a big difference between vladh2O.com and vladh20.com.

Yes, reading is fundamental. And, being from the great State of Florida, no child left behind -1, I failed that test.

Thats where you lost da ball game..

When I finally figured out what actually went wrong I was on the line with the boss and I just could not believe it. I didn’t tell him immediately, but I eventually explained. By my count we both spent an hour of each others time troubleshooting our lack of literacy. Add on to that however much time our guys spent. That was perhaps the most expensive support ticket ever entered in the system, I don’t know how much he makes but as TI says “imagine a lot.”

So I go back to my portal to update the ticket and thats where, as my buddy Los says, I lost da ball game. I said something so dumb, so cheap, so low… that I will have my ass handed to me for it for as long as these people are alive. The ticket update was:

“Yeah, ignore this please. We were troubleshooting a domain that wasn’t added to ExchangeDefender to begin with. They added ****20.com but not ******2o.com which is the one that wasn’t working to begin with.

We need to pick some font that makes 0’s and o’s stand out a little bit better.

Also, it appears that *****2o.com accounts have been provisioned, thanks for the giddyup on that.”

No, dear Vlad, there is no font that can fix stupid. Oooooooooof.

Music to my ears..

Posted: 12:36 pm
November 2, 2007

System Admin
2 Comments

The joys of owning a business and the coolest thing your employees can ever say to you (boldfaced):

“Subject: RE: Update on project Demotivated Shepherd“

I know its DFWVF but here is the situation..

Everything works.. (functionally speaking unless you get creative)

We could use a day or two more.. Any chance we can hold off the announcements till Monday? We’ll work for free through the weekend to make it work perfectly.”

Now… The flight from SNA to DFW on the 5th is less than $400. And below is his message to you:

“Third prize is a Microsoft shirt. You can’t meet deadlines so perhaps there is another company you can work at and be unaccountable to its partners. You can’t meet deadlines for ****, you are ****, take a left on I35 and right on 114 and go ruin someone elses company!!!”

–Erick Simpson, November 5th, 2007.

Ok, all joke aside, I am incredibly proud of what we’ve been able to do in the space of just two weeks and I know all of you watching this very public progress report over the last couple of days can appreciate the amount of effort we have all gone through to fix the problems you have identified. I too have lost some sleep and have been working like a maniac to do my end of this bargain, and while we have scaled down some of the ambitions we had, the items being delivered right now will make a material impact in your business if you work with us. Everything that I’ve promised is being tested and brought to perfection, just because we couldn’t get everything we planned for a few months done in two weeks doesn’t mean that what we are bringing is going to be halfassed. This certainly won’t cover all the problems, but its a great start and I really appreciate all of you that have sent me in the stuff that must have been very hard to write because it helped me explain the urgency and justify what why and what is happening. I truly appreciate it and I thank you for your business.

Microsoft Zune 2 to launch in two weeks?

Posted: 7:40 am
November 2, 2007

Microsoft
Comments Off

According to this decal in the local Walmart, Zune 2 will launch on November 13th, 2007. Right in time for Christmas, and now with the 1–click podcast subscription I have to admit I want one.

Now if you’re looking at the timestamp thinking “WTF is Vlad doing at a Walmart at 6AM” – I like to get my Christmas shopping done early… yumm.. $2.99 for a 10” smoked turkey sub! (or wife is going camping and made me go get her a camping chair, whichever is easier to believe).

Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog