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

All the posts on this blog are about one individual and one individual only.

Posted: 6:54 pm
September 10, 2007

Gaypile
5 Comments

There, feel better? Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

Microsoft v. Google Apps: Fact or Fiction?

Posted: 4:01 pm
September 10, 2007

Google, Microsoft
1 Comment

Although this was to be expected eventually, Google seems to have jumped off their Application plank a little too prematurely in announcing that they are going after the enterprise market which what is arguably the feature set of an entry level web hosting provider. Mary Jo Foley offers an excellent “top 10 questions” any enterprise customer should ask before switching to Google Applications and they are literally shaming Google in a way that is just spectacular:

“1.      Google touts having enterprise level customers but how many “USERS” of their applications truly exist within the enterprise?

“2.      Google has a history of releasing incomplete products, calling them beta software, and issuing updates on a “known only to Google” schedule – this flies in the face of what enterprises want and need in their technology partners – what is Google doing that indicates they are in lock step with customer needs?

“3.      Google touts the low cost of their apps –not only price but the absence of need for hardware, storage or maintenance for Google Apps. BUT if GAPE is indeed a complement to MSFT Office, the costs actually become greater for a company as they now have two IT systems to run and manage and maintain. Doesn’t this result in increased complexity and increased costs?

“4.      Google’s primary focus is on ad funded search. Their enterprise focus and now apps exist on the very fringe and in combination with other fringe services only account for 1% of the company’s revenue. What happens if Google executes poorly? Do they shut down given it will them in a minimal and short term way? Should customers trust that this won’t happen?

“5.      Google’s apps only work if an enterprise has no power users, employees are always online, enterprises haven’t built custom Office apps – doesn’t this equal a very small % of global information workers today? –On a feature comparison basis, it’s not surprising that Microsoft has a huge lead.

“6.      Google apps don’t have essential document creation features like support for headers, footers, tables of content, footnotes, etc. Additionally, while customers can collaborate on basic docs without the above noted features, to collaborate on detailed docs, a company must implement a two part process – work together on the basic doc, save it to Word or Excel and then send via email for final edits. Yes they have a $50 price tag, but with the inefficiencies created by just this one cycle, how much do GAPE really cost – and can you afford the fidelity loss?

“7.      Enterprise companies have to constantly think about government regulations and standards – while Google can store a lot of data for enterprises on Google servers, there is no easy to use, automated way for enterprises to regularly delete data, issue a legal hold for specific docs or bring copies into the corp. What happens if a company needs to respond to government regulations bodies? Google touts 99.9% uptime for their apps but what few people realize that promise is for Gmail only. Equally alarming is the definition Google has for “downtime” – ten consecutive minutes of downtime. What happens if throughout the day Google is down 7 minutes each hour? What does 7 minutes each hour for a full work day that cost an enterprise?

“8.      In the world of business, it is always on and always connected. As such, having access to technical support 24/7 is essential. If a company deploys Google Apps and there is a technical issue at 8pm PST, Sorry. Google’s tech support is open M-F 1AM-6PM PST – are these the new hours of global business? And if a customer’s “designated administrator” is not available (a requirement) does business just stop?

“9.      Google says that enterprise customers use only 10% of the features in today’s productivity applications which implies that EVERYONE needs the SAME 10% of the feature when in fact it is very clear that in each company there are specific roles people play that demands access to specific information – how does Google’s generic strategy address role specific needs?

“10.     With Google apps in perpetual beta and Google controlling when and if they rollout specific features and functionality, customers have minimal if any control over the timing of product rollouts and features – how do 1) I know how to strategically plan and train and 2) get the features and functionality I have specifically requested? How much money does not knowing cost?

“I invite you to speak with customers, partners and analysts who can validate Office’s business model.”

I must admit that I’ve been on the receiving end of Microsoft muscle at times, but my hat is off to whoever put the top ten questions above, they are head and shoulders above the tired FUD Microsoft uses against free and open source software and are just dead on attacks on the way businesses rely on software.

Will “GAPE” be another “Google Pack” or will it be a “Google Search”; Judging by whats on sale Microsoft and Microsoft Partners that relish on the complexity of these systems to provide value-add it’s good times ahead if this is the type of competition Google was thinking about bringing. A webmail & pop3 account. Yah, right.

Case of Mondays: There is no such thing as an SBS community

Posted: 7:18 am
September 10, 2007

SMB
Comments Off

Pistol Pirate Bust I feel awesome, however: Here there be truths to which thee might not find comfort in. I’ve said last year and I will say it again:

There is no such thing as an SBS community.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are a handful of people who selflessly share their knowledge of SBS and (whether right or wrong) consider it their duty to talk about a product that has made great things possible for small business. There are also a handful of people that choose to organize monthly events in their local region, and given their absence the whole thing would and usually does fall apart. There are a handful of vendors who have also effectively gone after this “hidden secret of engaged leads” either for direct sales or as a way to keep their most vocal customers happy through a “community hugfest roadshow, thank you for your feedback.”

Now that you know what is there, allow me to clue you in what its not: SBS community is not a group of like minded individuals who have realized that they are stronger together and through sharing of knowhow and past experience manage to elevate all the participants businesses as a whole under the flag of “together we’re stronger, together we matter.”

Mrteeny What it really boils down to is a loose network of casual acquaintances (if you’re lucky, “friends”) who from time to time share items of common knowledge and keep every bit of competitive insight deep inside their pockets. It is a collection of at-best defunct IT shop owners who figured their only way to salvation is not by doing IT but by telling others how to do it. It is a pile of forums where a group of largely defeated people gets an outlet to moan about their troubles, provoke a response and still get a feeling of belonging, as if someone still cares about them. At its best and finest, it is a collection of defunct technicians stabbing in the dark for a business plan that promises not to be a failure, unlike everything else they have tried so far. There isn’t a whole lot of success, but there is a lot of hope…..

But while there isn’t much success to speak of, there is an opportunity. Oh, can you smell it? What’s that smell… Bullshit? No, but close. It’s ink, drying on the pages. It’s of plastic, swept through a credit card terminal. It’s of a cheap breakfast followed by a sales pitch pretending to be a conference. It’s of a way to make a ton of money without spending a ton on the marketing. It is of a way to convert your local influence over an independent group of resellers into a really cushy job as far away from the said group as possible.

And, in the crowning confirmation of all of the above, a flourescently fairy will get in front of the audience that paid $500 a ticket to hear shit it ought to know already and proclaim: “SBS community isn’t dead, it’s bigger than its ever been before!” now go pay my vendors!

So this is my final post of beating that mythical dead horse that is the SBS community. That dear friends is the sound of inevitability that the sooner you hear and accept the sooner you can focus on the things that can actually make a material impact on your life, business and career: that of building relationships with the decent people and thanking the folks that make you more successful, even if its their job to do so, not the smiling middlemen that try to give you a hug while they reach around for your wallet.

-Vlad

Angry mob1 P.S. This is my last and final post about the supposed SBS community. Last night a little birdie forwarded me a pst of the discussion threads from a group I abandoned a long time ago as an irrelevant pursuit of the inevitable: that aside from maybe two dozen charismatic and energetic IT people with really good hearts and the willingness to teach it is just a fruitless enterprise of people trying to sell their stuff to one another or stand in the way of any bit of progress as a moral obstacle. Everything else just proves to be a marginal success until the main person realizes their efforts go to waste and they finally move on. The only thing left over is the bunch “despite all my rage I’m just an SBSer in a cage” that hasn’t realized all of this yet. Comments closed as it simply doesn’t matter what you think, it only matters that you accept it and find a positive way to continue instead of banging your head against the wall about why the community isn’t working the way you think it ought to.

Review of $89 Web Power Switch

Posted: 10:01 pm
September 9, 2007

Gadgets
9 Comments

The following is my personal review of the Digital Loggers, Inc Web Power Switch. Own Web Now Corp is a Digital Loggers, Inc customer that has paid for all the units in use, we/I have not been compensated or enticed to write this review in any way, it is offered to the general public as-is with no warranty.

I first found out about the Web Power Switch from Randall Richardson from our partner MicroLogix Information Systems. He spoke about this $89 power switch on one of the forums and I initially dismissed it as a joke as we’re an all APC company. We have tried a number of power switches over the years but only APC ever lived up to the promise, even given the price tag. But less than a $100 for an industrial quality 15 AMP power switch? Might as well give it a shot.

And I did. Ironically enough, we already used DLI products in one of our remote data centers. One of our DC partners provides a Digital Loggers, Inc Ethernet Power Controller II which has a number of cooler features albeit at a higher price. So, what do you get for $89?

First, the Web Power Switch comes with a standard plug, meaning you can just plug it into your current battery power supply or other PDU. It includes 8 remotely controllable ports and two unswitched (always on) ports that are not controlled over the web. The unit itself is sturdy and loud, believe me, you hear it when the port is switched on/off. Top of the unit has several controller lights, indicating system status, remote access and power. Side of the unit has a 10/100 network port and a power switch. Aside from a registration postcard, that’s all you get.

The main screen (Outlet Control) is pretty simple and self-explanatory. It shows you a list of what is connected to each switched port and gives you an option to either switch the port on/off or cycle (reboot). You can also shut off/on all outlets or cycle the outlets sequentially one at a time. On the cheap ($89) unit I found that the cycle does not work – it shuts the server off but does not power it back on. However, on/off works. Cycle also works perfectly on the more expensive power switch.

Wps3

Setup is straight forward as well. First, you can configure outlet names so you know what is connected to which switch port. Network configuration and authentication credentials are also pretty simple to configure. One caveat is that the switch is HTTP only, meaning all data sent to it is sent in clear text. If that bothers you, you can always put the power switch on the private network and there is a setting in network configuration that allows you to only accept connections from the local subnet.

Finally, there is some control over the behavior of the device itself. You can enforce password lockouts. You can control how the device behaves after it comes back from a power loss state. There is also a handy list of links.

On an upgraded model, one with Autoping for $37 more, you can also setup the web power switch to ping the target host and reboot it. As you can tell from the reboot counts, we’re making ours pay for itself.

In closing

If its in the budget, go for the more expensive switch. The more expensive switch has all the features described here along with an auto reboot built in plus it gives you access control. The device is simply accessed with an htaccess authentication prompt and can be easilly scripted whereas the $89 web power switch requires you to to authenticate as a form post first.

The verdict: You’ve got to be kidding me, right? First, a 15 AMP switch tends to cost well over $100 even for the ghetto brands like Triplite. To have those ports remotely controllable, with authentication, with autoping.. $89 is a steal. If it even saves you one after-hours emergency trip to reboot a server it will more than pay for itself. No, it’s not APC but you can’t spend $89 any better than this.

Throttling Session Concurrency with SBS / Exchange 2003

Posted: 10:23 pm
September 8, 2007

Exchange, ExchangeDefender, Vladville
2 Comments

I have really slacked off when it comes to my Technical Articles but I have to say that last two weeks of direct involvement with ExchangeDefender and fighting spammers has really reinvigorated my passion for helping people deal with this scum. So, what’s the problem?

Having any email troubles as of late? Email messages delayed? Coming in out of sequence or with a large delay? How about peers asking you why you haven’t responded to an email they sent you (and you explaining that you’ve just never seen it?)

If that sounds familiar, you have been a victim of a latest botnet, which whether intentionally or inconsequently, launched a large scale DDoS attack against many mail servers on the Internet.

This post shows you how to throttle down session concurrency with SBS / Exchange 2003.

I would like to thank my good friend Karl Palachuk for being a true leader and writing a series of blog posts on managed services that really encouraged me to start sharing my technical expertise with my audience. I hope you guys enjoy it.

Note: I wrote the post completely and totally drunk. I hope that is enough to excuse any typographic errors.

Two Factor Authentication for Shockey Monkey?

Posted: 9:36 pm
September 8, 2007

Shockey Monkey
Comments Off

As mentioned several times on the Shockey Monkey mailing list, towards the end of the year you will have an option to run Shockey Monkey on your own network (we will distribute a VM so you can have your data on your own network instead of on our hosted servers). It has been a huge area of interest by the partners that wanted total control over their data and did not want it “in the cloud”

So along the same path, I am talking to Dana Epp about potentially integrating Dana’s AuthAnvil two-factor authentication with Shockey Monkey. Basically, in addition to the username and password authentication to gain access to the portal you will also be be prompted for an OTP (one-time-password) to gain administrative or staff access to the system. The big idea? You would be assured that only the users with an authentication token (aka fob, aka hardware token) can gain administrative access to your Shockey Monkey deployment.

If there is interest in this please let me know. Depending on the interest, it would either be your server or our server as far as the AuthAnvil server is concerned – same thing we currently do for mapping, MSN and Google Maps integration – you are asked to provide your Google Services key or MSN uid/pw… and consequently an AuthAnvil server to authenticate against.

If you are interested (in particular, IF you already have AuthAnvil server deployed in your organization) I would like to explore the possibility of providing this. Things are pretty easy with Shockey Monkey so it wouldn’t take a lot of resources to get it done but there are a lot of features that people want in and only so much Vlad to go around.

So, got AuthAnvil? Want it to work with Shockey Monkey? Let me know. I am easy to find.

Google Reader Sucks

Posted: 8:55 pm
September 8, 2007

Google
6 Comments

Ok, I’ll say it. Google Reader’s recent update sucks. Big time.

Google Reader team decided to get cute and give me more real restate on my screen – at an expense of the nagivation and efficiency. Instead of having a bar at the left side of the screen so I can quickly scroll through my blogs and categories, Google decided to remove it completely and make it a slide-in <div>.

Congratulations. So now instead of being able to click on different feeds and quicky catch up I have to click once on My Subscriptions link and look at the shrunken list of my blogs. Then I have to scroll up and down the list, add a click or two, and then click again on the feed I want to read – just to have my feed subscription list disappear.

And nobody at Google figured to say.. “Hey, this might piss off a lot of users, how about we add 2 lines of Javascript code for a “dock” function? What good is revert to previous version when it reverts to the same crap?

But Google shouldn’t be too down on itself, I am still using Google to find myself a new RSS reader.

Berries Out Of Touch

Posted: 9:54 pm
September 7, 2007

Web 2.0
Comments Off

Third time in about two weeks that Blackberry went off the deep end. Second time in two months that the outage was global, with no ETA on resolution and no notification at the time of the outage.

As much as the ExchangeDefender v3 LiveArchive scaleout has sucked, Blackberry is still making us look good. How the heck do you shut down a global network completely?

Rewind: Rebuilding Own Web Now

Posted: 4:41 pm
September 7, 2007

OwnWebNow
2 Comments

This has been on the radar for months but I am now glad to announce that we’re (or rather, I am) going to be publishing the process of how we’re rebuilding Own Web Now. No company is perfect, no product is perfect, but it takes a long time to design something that is phenomenally successful. I’ve managed to do that, OWN is currently far ahead anything I even imagined when I started it. However, with tremendous growth come a number of changes and adjustements a company has to make in order to survive and to thrive.

Over the past two years I’ve gone out of my way to attend many IT conferences, learn from my peers, learn from my partners and learn from the people who run the orgainizations that I wish OWN was. So, over the next year I am going to be taking you through the good and through the bad of rebuilding Own Web Now Corp. We’ve identified the following big areas of improvement that we need to focus on:

Billing – We need to get the financial systems up to speed with everything we do as soon as possible. Like yesterday.
Communications – Communication with our partners and our clients needs to be improved. We do a lot already, prehaps better than 99% of the companies we get to deal with, but thats our mark and we are going to work on a better site, more podcasts, more video blogs.
Sales – We are working on improving how we handle, compensate and bill for the products and services we sell. It’s not a matter of “how do we help you sell more” but how do we get people to have a positive purchasing experience.
Documentation – My bag. Our products are ridiculously complex but we make it very easy to purchase, setup and take advantage of things like Exchange, Virtual Servers, Offsite backups. Yes, they are easy, but I can make it easier for SMBs to train their staff to work with our products. This indeed will be the major aspect of Vladville as well.
Partner Promotion – Two words for you: Thieving Weasel. Even though thats not the name of the network, partner promotion is going to change the landscape of the type of business we do and just how profitable we all are. I’ve been very fortunate to be promoted by many, many, many, many IT solution providers who truely became our partners. Now we get to turn the tables and promote those partners instead.

This years WWPC and TechEd were easilly the most valuable conferences I have ever been to. They gave me the technical knowhow to execute what I needed to and WWPC along with its many attendees really cemented my blueprint and put it into action.

So, I hope you enjoy it reading about it, I hope it is as much fun executing it.

What Dell is up to with SilverBack:

Posted: 1:36 pm
September 7, 2007

IT Business
Comments Off

Reprinted with permission:

I just met with my Dell Account Executive who was in town today and
addressed some small concerns I had. Here are a couple of notes from our
meeting that might be useful:

1. By late 4th quarter, there will be an official “Dell
Authorized Reseller” program that you can be part of as a Channel Direct
provider. This will allow use of the Dell logo on website, etc. There
is no firm details on if you’ll have to have a minimum sales volume or
not. My rep said it may be $200k/year, but that it could

2. The only calls end user customers of Channel should get
are for warranty renewals. There should be no direct solicitation of
customers. Dell wants to increase channel sales from 10% now to 30% in
the next few years.

3. Though the Solution Provider agreement says otherwise, the
channel program will accept up to 5% of total sales/year in returns if
it is crucial to you.

4. Regarding Silverback, my AE is being told by his
supervisors that the main focus will be on enterprise customers in
assisting with diagnosing hardware issues. I asked about soliciting my
customers, sending brochures to small biz customers with ads for “free
managed services” etc and he said that wasn’t in the plan. He said the
most we should see is an app preinstalled on a desktop similar to Dell
Support app that you can uninstall if you wish. Also, he said we might
see it as a system config option just like you do for installation
services when configuring a machine now. I ignore that box as do my
customers when configuring a machine because they know they want us to
do the work. That sounds ok to me.

My concern was that they were going to get brochures that offered
Managed Services at a huge discount, and then my client would come to me
and ask what the skinny was. Then again, I’ve surveyed my clients and no
matter what, they like dealing with us as we are their trusted advisor
that they rely on. So take the above for what it is worth. It could be a
load of crap, or maybe this whole conspiracy “Dell wants to take over
the world” thing is a little overblown. I guess we’ll find out, right?

This came courtesy of one of my partners that met with his Dell Account Executive. I heard similar stuff from Judd Spence whom I am hoping to shame into starting a technology blog.

Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog