What playoff? Florida Chomps Ohio!

Posted: 12:52 am
January 9, 2007
Vladville
4 Comments

IMAGE_007There is no secret that I’m a Gator. Having been at UF during the Spurrier years I am happy that we can finally assume some of our ol’ ball coach arrogance. Yes, there are 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter but I’ll call it. Florida destroys Ohio! For the record, Vanderbilt put up a better fight against Florida than the former #1 team in the nation.

And yes, I’m putting my mouth where my money is

Update: It’s great..to be… a Florida… Gator!! Check out the following game summary by Randy Hill, it is absolutely hilarious. Totally inappropriate Vlad-like humor. Get your Gator Championship merchandise here; It’s obvious they expected Florida to lose, they don’t have visors in stock. No need to do anything if you’re an OWN partner from Ohio, a quality shirt from Walmart is on its way, courtesy of OWN.

Windows Home Server – It’s real, I want one.

Posted: 1:51 am
January 8, 2007
Vladville
Comments Off on Windows Home Server – It’s real, I want one.

Wrote about this earlier today and sure enough, its at CES. So Microsoft, send me one!

It’s covered here and there is a pretty impressive vlog post here. Not only could just about everyone I hang out with use one of these but with the critical SMB services being outsourced to the networks that can actually support the likes of Exchange and SharePoint, this looks like a perfect office central storage and security appliance. Looks like Christmas gifts for next year are already taken care of at Casa de Vlad.

Just don’t let the Zune guys do the marketing.

I’m no longer an SBSer

Posted: 12:31 am
January 8, 2007
Vladville
Comments Off on I’m no longer an SBSer

It’s a sad day but let this serve as an official announcement that I am no longer “an SBSer”

Earlier today OwnWebNow finally decomissioned our cornerstone SBS server (and domain) that has grown us to this point. The release of Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 3.0 was too hard to resist and we’ve taken that next step to bringing our little enterprise into the.. well, enterprise software.

I will continue to run more SBS servers than any other sane human being, continue to work with Microsoft on the next versions of SBS in Cougar and Centro, continue to write about it, continue to do the SBS Show and all the SBS things.. I just won’t run my business on it… It’s certainly a crowning achievement when a business outgrows SBS but I can’t help but feel sad for the SBS network that powered our growth to this point.

This 40 is for all my dead wizards…  

Windows Home Server?

Posted: 11:14 am
January 7, 2007
Microsoft
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Now this would be interesting. Ars Technica and Mary Jo Foley speculate about a Microsoft Home Server. Sounds interesting, with the amount of media and data floating around the home most of us already run servers or at the very least those SFF NAS appliances. Speculation is that this beast will show up at CES.

Will someone PLEASE cut their crack supply?

Posted: 9:21 am
January 5, 2007
Microsoft
8 Comments

P.S. You may be offended by this post and by its contents. If you are easily offended I suggest you close this window now. The blog post depicts and criticizes new Microsoft advertising which you are also likely to find very offensive. I have thought twice about the strong language used in this post, I feel it is justified and necessary. Either way, you’ve been warned.

Microsoft marketing has not been the same since they poked fun at themselves with the Microsoft iPod Parody.

What’s worse is that as cluttered as Microsoft marketing was before, it was still very business appropriate and useful in approaching serious business customers. While as the author of this blog I am perhaps the last person that should criticize Microsoft advertising gimics – as the partner that sells a ton of their software I must. Microsoft, it’s time to cut off the crack supply. Immediately.

First, but less concerning, are the supposed Microsoft ads for Zune. Straight out of an acid trip of a confused art school student, these short videos for Zune…. You just have to look at them. Let me use my business and engineering degree combined powers to interpret this one for you:

A walking, sniffing penis stumbles around the screen. It bumps into a far larger, thicker yet severely infected penis with many eyes. The bigger penis picks up the little penis, and with a squeeze of its ass cheeks shoots an eye into the smaller penis. The smaller penis then blinks back.

Microsoft Zune.

I am NOT kidding here. I dare you to watch the video. Then watch other videos.

What I am concerned about is the advertising for Office 2007. Titled “The Enchanted Office”, this cute cartoon uses a fantasy fable to ridicule away the business owners concerns, IT managers and virtually all IT support workers and staff. “Can’t find things – why don’t you hold on to this map.”

It is not that we’re dealing with customers that have no sense of humor. Not at all. However, these are serious topics concerning company’s productivity, budgets and IT staff retraining. If I approached them about a new product, proposed an upgrade and then proceeded to collectively ridicule every single one of the IT decision makers I would sincerely hope they would just throw me out. Having seen this cartoon the likely alternative would be a beating behind the company dumpster along with telling every one of their colleagues about a jackass that came in and tried to sell them software using insults and cartoons.

Get to know Exchange 2007

Posted: 8:17 pm
January 4, 2007
Exchange
3 Comments

Short notice but worth it.

I’m presenting on Exchange 2007 tomorrow morning to Alamo PC SBS SIG (the taco people). The event will be webcast, if you have some time from 9:30 AM – Noon EST hope you join me. The presentation will be relatively basic, somewhere around level 200. 

Meeting URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/winserver_usergroup/join
Meeting ID: GS9BQW
Meeting Key: M8@P_fN

Many of my peers have dismissed Exchange 2007 in SMB but I think mostly because they have not seen it / experienced it. The amount of work Exchange team has put into this product literally makes comparisons to 2003 and other third party products nearly impossible, and the changes in the deployment and management are significant enough to entice even the smallest of IT shops to consider. While 2000 to 2003 was a tough sell and took close to a decade to get people off 5.5, the 2007 release is IMHO significant enough that anybody in this business needs to start learning before they are left back in the dust. I’m giving you that opportunity tomorrow morning, hope you join us.

Take Care Of Your Ass

Posted: 9:24 pm
January 3, 2007
Deals
1 Comment

On that subject, thanks to all of you that sent us Christmas and New Years cards. Very much appreciated.

So here is a deal for you. You are no .com CEO until your butt is in an Aeron chair by Herman Miller. These pieces of furuture are medals of success in the IT world, and they are going up in price tomorrow – January 4th. So if you’ve got some extra $$$ time to bust it on a new shiny executive Aeron – http://www.homeofficesolutions.com

Your ass will thank you.

Second Exchange MVP Award

Posted: 5:59 am
January 3, 2007
Exchange, Vladville
2 Comments

I got the second Exchange MVP Award from Microsoft this year for my work in the Exchange technical arena and all the community work I’ve done this year. Speaking of which, I’m speaking at the Alamo PC Users Group this Friday and the event will be available over the web… for some of you this will be a first look at the final release of Microsoft Exchange 2007 and I’ll be showing off our first production deployment of the platform. The event is Friday morning, from 8am – 11am Central.

It looks some of my friends got their MVP awards as well, and many other deserving ones did not. Either way, I thank you all for your expertise and willingness to share your knowledge. It is a rare quality, I for one wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today have I not had some great mentors in my career.

P.S. And quit whining about the Ferrari laptop Dana, your blog just isn’t sexy enough for one. Could be worse, you could be a CRM MVP

Selling the first day of January

Posted: 1:20 pm
January 2, 2007
IT Business
1 Comment

Today is the first official business day of 2007 calendar year in United States and for many companies the first day of the new fiscal year. That means new budget and more room for toys. Today is the day when the future SBSer (ie, the lowest guy on the IT infrastructure totem pole just itching for a pink slip so he can use his 6 weeks of enterprise IT experience as the helpdesk serf to destroy an SMB network with his inkjet business card) gets the task of researching the solutions and pricing.

So this guy (or girl) is browsing the web today, trying to get the pricing on all the possible alternatives and features and so on and so forth. He is not the buyer, not the decision maker, not the influencer.. basically, as far removed from the actual decision as the outsourced office cleaning crew that shows up at 10 PM.

If you are in business of selling software today is the day you will receive 8,000 phone calls out of which 7,999 you will never hear from again. All they want is a number so they can blindly compare you based on the cost alone.

Customer: How much is ExchangeDefender?

Vlad: $1.

Customer: Really?

Vlad: Yes. The cost varies depending on the features and all the stuff you need, how about I give you a demo so you can see all we offer and you can pick what you need.

Now Exchange is nowhere near $1 but you need to give them a jolt to wake them up. You’re likely on this guys list of 9,308,509,283,509,238 people to call today and he is just running through the script. First give them something to wake them up from their job, then let them get interested in what they are looking for – beyond the price.

Second, get them to look at the product. If they are not interested at looking in the product you have no chance in hell with this company, might as well hang up on him right then and there and save some toll free minutes. I’m not suggesting you do that at all but in terms of financial probability that you get a deal based on a script-caller is close to 0.

Third, when you are doing the demo – get their info.

As you’re setting up the demo, find out about their company.

As you’re finding out about the problem, tailor the demo to how your product will solve their problems.

Etc, etc, etc. If this person actually likes their job they will want to make sure the best products go to the top of the list thats presented to the decision maker. They will even go a step further and perhaps suggest why to look at you over your competition. 

The old saying “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” has long lost its meaning. Market leaders are no longer the quality leaders and the person putting their job on the line is not only concerned about the budget but about being required to explain why they selected your software when/if things go wrong. Make sure that guy gets that safety blanket because that is the selling point in 2007 – service, not just software.

The process of accomplishments

Posted: 11:50 pm
January 1, 2007
Vladville
Comments Off on The process of accomplishments

So how is 2007 going for you so far?

Last week I posted a few of my resolutions for 2006. But just like you don’t go from a buffet line to the marathon finish line in a day, new years resolutions take a whole year to fulfill. Unless you have an infinite attention span the only thing you need is discipline.

Discipline? For example, most Americans are making a resolution to lose weight (again) and probably walked, jogged or ran 4 miles today. Congratulations! Now will you be able to put in 4 miles tomorrow? How about on April 26th? If you cannot answer those question you need some discipline but more importantly, you need a plan.

What makes a good plan? For example, my task for today was to update a few dozen web sites that I run. Everything from business to fun to pleasure. On one I just updated the copyright, on the other I created an archive for the previous year, the SBS Show page got completely redesigned from the ground up and Vladville, being the most spammed form I own, got its own CAPTCHA protection from bots.

So what’s missing from this plan?

Well, for starters, it’s not a plan. It’s an agenda and a weak one at that. It answers what but doesn’t answer how? where? when? what is a failure? There is no time allocation or priority to the list above. It doesn’t identify resources, it doesn’t identify time lines, it doesn’t identify means? It doesn’t say that I got Judy to cut 10 hours from my day by fixing my layout for me.

So before you even start on your agenda, take a second to sit down, relax and think what it is you’re trying to do. Try to see the big picture in it all. I know January 1 is the action day, do or die, what your first day reflects how 2007 will pan out and the rest of the motivational nonsense that people who don’t deliver results often blurt out. The key to success is planning. The key to failure is planning as well, not everything in life is a win – sometimes you will lose but you can at least plan to minimize your loss and not get blown out.

So perhaps a project management book is a little out of the question… but planning, that ought to be front and center. For me, the first month is all about looking back, cleaning up and setting up targets, expectations and alternatives. I hope it can be a month of planning for you as well. So don’t run the 4 miles today, sit down and write down what you need to do this year. Get your plan together. Then in May you’ll be able to look back at that plan and adjust it accordingly so you can accomplish it… if you don’t, odds are you won’t even remember what your resolution was. 

So step back, relax. Spend more time planning than doing. Joseph Strauss didn’t just show up at the Golden Gate with a few guys and a bunch of steel, they spent more time planning the bridge than actually building it.