Vladfire #10, now in double digits. Appropriately enough, we’ve got the big cheese of SMB IT, Harry Brelsford talking about the changing landscape of SMB IT in USA, status of SBS and SBSers worldwide and a few tips about global business. Enjoy.
Runtime: 6 minutes, 57 seconds.
Download a WMV (Microsoft Windows Movie) | (36 Mb)
Stream Quicktime (Fast, Streaming, Requires Quicktime) | (12 Mb)
Note: Susanne rules apply.
Little tribute to my buddy Ze.. Anyhow, here is something from the comments that I thought deserved to be posted widely – See, every time I don’t keep it real I get emails like this one:
To whom it may concern…
As the inventor of the fabulous term “Vladfire”, I must complain when the term is used for interviewing old German babes who give you cookies.
The highest and best use for the term is when you’re popping off, like “Microsoft and Dell, Please stand closer together.” Now *that’s* classic Vladfire.
See ya buddy.
Brian
By the way, Brian writes emailbattles.com, check it out.
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.
Dear Mr. Stanfill,
I am writing this email to you to inquire about the opportunity you have at Microsoft PSS SBS Team in Balgladesh. I understand that the role of SBS Escalation Engineer requires little functional knowledge of English and that Indian labor laws allow for “time off” concept that I am not very familiar with.
Please forward further details on this role. I am an Exchange MVP and an MCSE but can run at a wall hard enough to forget most of what I know in order to meet the job description. As you can tell by the bags under my eyes I am stupid enough, ready for the challenge and have no fear of patching.
My resume is attached in the OpenDocument format. Please contact me at your earliest convenience.
-Vlad
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?
Phew, the patch Tuesday is done! Now on to the cool new stuff. Over the next four days I'm going to show you what an SMB Nation event is really like and who is behind it. I have three video's by SMB Nation's principals and will finish it off with the SBS Show #21 where Susanne Dansey chased people down at SMB Nation Amsterdam and interviewed them. If you are coming to SMB Nation (or if this is your first time or first time in a while) you'll really want to tune in for these shows:
Vladfire : Beatrice Mulzer
Vladfire : Nancy Williams
Vladfire : Harry Brelsford
SBS Show #21: SMB Nation East & Amsterdam
Look for the first episode today.
2:40 AM EST, 08/10/2006 Microsoft Tuesday Patchday comes to a close on a Thursday morning. It was fun.
As noted in my previous post oh… 18 or so hours ago… many things become funny through sleep deprivation. I was chatting with one of my friends/developers about the extent of our slavery and as you may imagine I had a few choice words for him as he told me he was about to go to sleep. Anyhow, he pasted the following back in the IM window:
richwalkup said: oh wait – definition link
richwalkup said: now that you know what it is – i'm gonna get me some (sleep that is)
richwalkup said: shockey
Clicked on the link just to humor him for a second, usually it is something very gross that we point each other to just to stay awake, I found a big body of text. Started reading… Interesting theory on this "sleep" thing. But then I come upon this definition of it:
Sleep is the fundamental anabolic process common to all life forms, plant and animal. In animals, the sleeping state is characterized by an absolute minimal degree of consciousness and decreased responsiveness to the surrounding world.
Perhaps its the lack sleep talking but "state is characterized by an absolute minimal degree of consciousness and decreased responsiveness to the surrounding world" is the very definition of technical support, isn't it? Somewhere north of Dallas someone just lost their coffee to their monitor.
The case is still open, still working on it. We've restored service to 100% of our customer base but have imaged a few to a standby server for further testing to isolate the case with Dell and Microsoft. The solution set was mentioned in the previous post and we spent the better part of the day dealing with it. For what its worth, we used a scaled down version of Knoppix to automate the process via USB thumbdrives. Still doing post-cleanup work and trying to get the backups in sync with the recent change. That however is just a part of the process.
On Courtesy
There is such a thing as Karma folks. I was out on Tuesday evening, drove down to West Palm Beach to do a presentation for the Palm Beach IT sbs group and then trekked back to Orlando. While I was down there I brought a stack of things from WWPC along with an excellent book that Karl recently published. Personally, this is one of the best books for the SMB consultants out there. The title is quite misleading so let me sum it up instead: This book is about how you run your IT business and CYA as a SMB consultant.
Now Karl didn't know I was doing this, although on an occasion I did mention to him that I really enjoyed his book. Earlier tonight I find that Karl nominated me for the SBSer of the year. Nice guy, huh? Whats even nicer is that he wrote a piece on his blog about how to attend conferences in response to my earlier articles on how to follow up with people after conferences. I sometimes look at my colleagues in the IT world and am quite disappointed to see how shallow the pool is. This is why when people like Susanne and Chris show up I am shocked and cannot stop raving about what professionals they are. Ditto for Karl, check out the blog post and read it a few times .
Dear partners, please stand closer together so I can get you all in the same shot. No, thats not the camera I'm holding.
Just wanted to alert you to a few things that have been going on at Casa de Vlad in our 11 data centers. We're having issues over a large portion of our Dell server base that has SCSI/PERC4 controllers installed and/or USB 2.0 drives installed. The behavior is as follows:
There are dozens of solutions of which we have identified the following so far:
We are seeing the above on Dell PowerEdge 800, 1800, 1425 systems only running the Standard version of Microsoft Windows 2003 SP1. Identical systems running Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition, Web Edition, Small Business Server and R2 editions of Standard & Enterprise do not seem to be affected. Will update as we go along. Working closely with Microsoft and Dell to recover, sorry for the inconvenience.
Comments closed, pings allowed. Believe me, I know what you're going to say "Micro$oft security blows, switch to Linux, switch to Mac, switch to Amiga, Ballmer is evil, this wouldn't have happened on an HP…" There, I saved you 20 minutes.
I’m presenting tomorrow night (Tuesday, August 8th) at the Palm Beach IT Association in Palm Beach, FL. Just wanted to save some of you a trip if you weren’t interested in what I’m going to be talking about:
I intend to spend most of the evening on that last bullet point, kind of offering some insight on the things going on at Microsoft and beyond in terms of how they view our space, how you can anticipate/respond/profit on top of what they are doing. Also a look at some other interesting events that are going to drive our sector and how they are changing just what we are able to offer our clients.
It will be a business presentation. Hope to see you out there, please RSVP.
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.
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