Cheers Harryb

Posted: 11:41 am
July 6, 2006
Misc
8 Comments

Untitled document

The beauty of this business is that if you're serious about it (and realize it takes getting out of your cave to learn and network) you can meet some wonderful people and talk to them about things other than shop. Most of the time they are wildly different from what you'd imagine from reading their books, newsgroup posts, emails… crazy blog rants. Such is the case with Harry Brelsford, famous small business server evangelist, author, conference organizer….. and well, the best damn food magnet out there. I'm always stunned how easilly he can find a good place to eat at, no matter where he is. So a few years back Harry introduced me to Texas de Brazil in Orlando. It's just slightly ironic that I live on the same street as this restaurant but never even saw it. So I had a pretty crappy dozen or so days, we've been working on a company-wide migration: the second biggest one ever. Let's just say the last time we had this big of a jump in infrastructure change was when I moved ownwebnow.com from a single server in a colo. All in all it was a very pretty migration but days of sleep deprivation, stress, uncertainty ("documented uncertainty", with the downtime expectations and all) is enough to crack anyone. But Katie was awesome and she took me to Texas de Brazil and things are all good now. Really, really looking forward to Boston though.

About the 4th of July post.. The phones have been ringing off the hook here. I think I may have, in all my ranting, somehow implied that unless you do business with me you're somehow a leach. Far from it, I'm a reasonable person, I understand there are business cases or previous contracts where you just couldn't do business with OWN even if you wanted to. Not to mention if you really hated my guts and didn't want to in the first place. Both are perfectly fine. But don't call me, ask for help with your Exchange box and then tell me that you're going to keep on looking at other solutions. Don't email me for help with Postini and get an attutide when I tell you that I have no interest in helping you. While I am honored that so many of you gave us a call and wanted to do business with us, please, it is absolutely not what I was trying to say and you're more than welcome to enjoy everything I put out here for free without a second thought. If I expected to make money off of Vladville it would be plastered with ads and I would charge you for looking at advertising, like ZDnet does. Publishing is not my business, I just do high end geek stuff. 

So hope to see some of you up at WWPC. I'll be there Sunday – Friday, 

To the three friends moving on…

Posted: 12:04 pm
July 5, 2006
Friends
2 Comments

First and perhaps geographically the closest, Chris Rue has finally moved off Blogger and to Own Web Now. Welcome to the club. His site is on Word Press now and markedly less flaming than it used to be. He however, still is. Check it out at his site

Second, RocketBoom.com’s Amanda Congdon is moving on. I am not sure of the drama but suffice to say I will dearly miss her on the daily RB updates. RocketBoom was one place I could go to day-to-day to get out of my little tunnel and see.. well, weird stuff.

Lastly, Harry is also jumping off the SBS Ship, dropping both his SBS MVP and his SBS newsletter. Don’t worry about Harry though, he is moving on up with the launch of the SMB Partner Community magazine which you can get for free if you’re an SBSC.

4th of July Vladville Reflections

Posted: 10:50 pm
July 4, 2006
Vladville
Comments Off on 4th of July Vladville Reflections

Untitled document

Fourth of July weekend is a great time to do major infrastructure migrations but also a time where even I get to take some time off and reflect on what I’m doing. I was, to say the least, struggling last week with work and all of my hobbies that turned into profitable lines of business and I talked to my mentor Albert who had this brilliant tidbit:

Albert: Are you making money?

Vlad: Yes…?

Albert: Then you’re not going to enjoy it. When you’re making money it is a job and you will have to deal with it even when you don’t want to.

Over the last year I’ve had the pleasure of doing a lot of fun things but many of those have had such phenomenal success, beyond my wildest expectations, that I now must find new venues to have fun with because the old “fun” has come not just with the incredible nagging but also with an occasional spit in my face. Such as this weekend, 218 email messages asking if I’m alive. 218 people wondering, among other things, where I’m at, how I’m doing, when the next SBS Show will be available, etc. For those of you lifeless bastards here is a little picture. It’s called “the outside”:

IMG_1869

This is the picture of space shuttle Discovery taking flight. Seeing the launch of a Space Shuttle is not one of the things you see often and with the way things are going over at NASA perhaps the last time a space shuttle has ever left Florida for space. This is very inspiring, not just for me but also for the community that heavilly relies on the space program.

Last week I had an enormous pleasure of hanging out with my partners and customers in South Florida. At one point I was attacked with a slew of features that they wanted in my product – I drove back home at 10 PM and between 3 AM and morning I had that functionality integrated into ExchangeDefender. I’ve shared before that one of the greatest pleasures I have is seeing people that benefit from my hard work and that actually solve problems. Code really is poetry, and when it all works as designed reliably and efficiently… it’s quite an amazing sight.

Now about this blog…

Vladville is both a blessing and a curse.

On one hand there are roughly 38,000 of you reading this page every day, excluding SBS Show and Vladville. One thing I do know is that we do not have 38,000 customers. Add another thousand or so downloads of the SBS Show a day and an ungodly number of RSS hits and you’ve got one big… Well, thats up to discussion but its quite clear I need to step up my game as far as articles are concerned, I’m glad they are helping so many of you.

It’s going to change…

As I have mentioned before this site came from the mailing list I ran for roughly 5,000+ partners Own Web Now Corp has. I’m not a fake person, to the extent that you know exactly what I think of you within 30 seconds into the conversation. I believe in honesty, call me crazy.

Over the past year or so I’ve covered major technology events, brought you some of the biggest movers and shakers in the SMB space and given you some op-ed pieces so you know how I’m lining up my business with the changing landscape of this industry. Every little bit of insight helps.

Close to a year ago I spoke to a friend of mine, let’s call her Beatrice for example, and she didn’t quite agree with my community ideas. There is nothing wrong with sharing, but at some point you need to get something in return too. How much work goes into becoming an MCSE? How much studying, books, videos and lab experiments does it take? How much time? And people expect you to give it away for free?

I shook that off because I honestly believed that by encouraging people they will turn around and become contributors. I also imagined I’d get something in return as well. Well, the SBS Show dental plan rocks but it does not pay the bandwidth bills. Still, I pushed forward.

But friend after friend came up and just smacked me in my face. Bryan, Scott, Scott R, Bob Belon, one guy after another seeing what happens to me when I hit these events and get surrounded by a bunch of leeches. They tried they hardest to ask me, Hey, are you blind?

Well, apparently I was. What kind of broke the back were the endless open hand asking for the next SBS Show, asking where I was, asking for help…. but never looking to do business with me. What’s worse is that there were even some with the decensy to call me and ask me to beat some competitive programs to ExchangeDefender…. You have no idea how much fun it is to hear this:

Oh, I love the SBS Show. I love all you do, it’s great. But you know, this is business, I have to do what’s best for the customer.

Anotherwords, screw you for doing all that free work and helping me out – I need to look out for myself.

No more talk

I’m done telling people that they need to be true professionals in this business. I am done with invitations to the local TS2 events. I’m done trying to constantly promote people and in Indy/TS2’s words: I’m not his daddy.

So as Vladville goes into its second year I’m going to work a little harder on actual professional content and less on talking about what is not professional, what is required to become one, what to avoid, etc. I’m going to work harder on more articles, some video stuff, meaningful event coverage, etc. But I’m also not going to let some of this stuff be taken for granted. Make no mistake, Vladville is not a business. But when there are business topics to be discussed you can rest assured they will only be open to the Own Web Now Corp partners and customers. I’m very dedicated to my business and very willing to help you get better at yours. But for that to happen this needs to be a two way street. In 2006/2007 Vladville just expect a little more, and if you’re with me, expect a lot more.

Microsoft’s Best Marketing Pitch EVER: It’s One Louder.

Posted: 6:30 am
July 1, 2006
Microsoft
7 Comments

WMP11_4_10The key to being “louder” is great marketing. Microsoft often gets beaten up over their poor consumer product marketing (sans the Xbox of course) so they either intentionally or most likey unintentionally produced the following pitch for Windows Media Player 11 (image to the right).

Nigel, director of WMP11 marketing team told me about the marketing concept behind Windows Media Player 11:

“You see, most blokes will be playing at 10. You’re on 10, all the way up, all the way up…Where can you go from there? Nowhere. What we do, is if we need that extra push over the cliff…Eleven. One louder.” 

Hello Cleveland! God I love Brits. The maketing strategy? Brilliant! I can really go on forever, sleep deprivation is really making everything funny.

ExchangeDefender Updates: So this is what its like to work on Microsoft Vista?

Posted: 8:49 am
June 30, 2006
IT Business
6 Comments

Yesterday I had a pleasure of hanging out with half a dozen of our customers and at some point I got the Vista treatment:

We really love your product, but the file rules blow.

This is Vlad’s version of UAC. ExchangeDefender filters based on content type (tnef expanded Outlook attachments widely used in the exploit land), content name (things ending up in .bmp) and a few hundred other manual checks. Here is the problem. Microsoft’s .bmp, .pif, .scr and so on are widely used to propagate trojans, worms, etc. Users are stupid. So although Bob the sysadmin wants to get a zip file that has codebase or executable content inside of it, we cannot allow that to go through because then the user gets the message such as:

Dear Quickbooks User,

Attached is an archive with the software upgrade for Quickbooks. Double click on the zip file and launch the setup.exe program.

Sincerely,

Intuit Security

And, well… poof. They are 0wn3d. So one of the really useful features ExchangeDefender allows for is managed security – we sit on top of major infosec lists and watch for exploited extensions / filetypes. We look at our internal reporting and constantly program in attack patterns, etc. But every now and then we get this:

My user didn’t get my email because I inserted my .bmp signature. I don’t care its dangerous, works everywhere else, I demand you drop down the entire site security.

I need to get these files. I don’t care about security.

I am sick and tired of you blocking all the useful stuff. Open it up.

But after sitting around yesterday and listening to the feedback, I understand that ExchangeDefender may at times be more of a nuisance than a beneficial security layer. If it causes you more overhead and you’re willing to compromise your security (and set your own tradeoff level) I am willing to make that compromise.

And since I don’t work for the blue badge of inefficiency, I would like to let you know that we have worked overnight and that this feature is available in ExchangeDefender right now. How’s that for a major feature deployment in under 20 hours?  And no, this is not something we have been working on for years, this is something I started cranking on at 4AM and it’s functional against my domains now.

    • Provide your own extension blocklist
    • Provide your own filetype blocklist
    • Provide your own malware preferences (block, reject, bounce, forward, redirect, disarm, convert-to-text)

No pretty GUI right now, but if you’re banging your head and the users are screaming because they cannot get mail from point A to point B I can get this going for you today. The infrastructure is very granular, it can be implemented against a domain, email address and supports full RegExp (though if you don’t know how to write regexp this will absolutely break your mail delivery) and is implemented as an eval against an evenlope recipient (rcpt to) first and then inline second (“To: “). Want it today, drop me an email. GUI will follow by the end of Q3, we’re redesigning the way GUI works to begin with.

How to learn Exchange?

Posted: 2:44 pm
June 28, 2006
Exchange
2 Comments

Every now and then we get an onslaught of newbies coming into the SBS world and trying to learn about Exchange. Unfortunately, they try to learn in the exact opposite way than the way Exchange is supposed to be deployed. Notice the word deployed, not installed. You install Office, you tweak around ribbons, clippies, chm files and you eventually figure it out. If you don’t, you clear the profile and try again.

Servers are different folks. There is a lot of planning involved. You need to learn. You need to consider the things below the surface before you start your building. That means understanding infrastructure. Understanding topology. Understanding permissions. Understanding protocols.

Understanding is not something we are born with. It takes education, layer upon layer of core competencies, experience good and bad. No matter how much Microsoft lies to you, these are not attainable in a day. No, you can’t get them from a two week boot camp and four letter acronyms do not equate to a competency. So where does one even start?

First, read about Exchange deployment, configuration, troubleshooting, etc. There are many great books, most of which you could read online in the comfort of your laptop from safari.com for $15 a month.
http://safari.oreilly.com/

Get familiar with Exchange team and ongoing developments:
http://blogs.technet.com/exchange

Find out how the SBS team is integrating it:
http://blogs.technet.com/sbs
and troubleshooting it:
http://blogs.technet.com/petergal

Look at a number of great SBS books.

Finally, go to TechNet virtual labs to get hands-on experience with Exchange:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/traincert/virtuallab/exchange.mspx

For the most part, Exchange is a solid product that breaks very quickly with a hacked-up network (dynamic DNS, port blocking, high latency) so trying to learn against those odds will be very frustrating. I have customers that spend their entire days banging their head against the wall with Exchange problems that have nothing to do with Exchange and everything to do with the connection and topology. You will save yourself a lot of time and your clients a lot of productivity if you went through the resources above instead of tzo/dyndns/etc.

Microsoft Re-releases MS06-025 Patch

Posted: 1:59 pm
June 27, 2006
Security
1 Comment

Microsoft is releasing an update to the patch it provided earlier this month, vulnerability in Routing and Remote Access blah blah (911280) where blah blah means remotely exploitable, patch now. 

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS06-025.mspx

Busy News Monday: To Q or Not to Q, Dude, you’re getting an AMD

Posted: 6:06 am
June 27, 2006
Vladville
9 Comments

I’m wondering if it would be better to stick this into the upcoming Vladville Vlog or keep it in the blog for my partners but every week I find a lot of info that I don’t have any particular opinion on (though I do find it somewhat interesting). I tried doing this with Quick Vlad blog but I really don’t have the time/energy to run another blog. Anyhow, Monday was a big news day so here is what may have slipped through the cracks.

Dude, You’re so Qucked

So you’ve never heard of Motorola’s track record in making bad SmartPhones based on Windows OS? Whatever prompted you to make the stupid decision (shiny advertising, needed a new phone, but dude my m0to r0x!!!) get ready to join an army of unsatisfied Motorola Q owners.

AMD does Texas

Supposedly AMD <> Dell partnership is getting hotter and hotter. Makes you wonder if this is just a part of Dell realizing that AMD technology is better in certain circumstances or if they just figured they can make more money offering a wider range of products. Given that their moto was JIT for so many years and that the company is maturing.. who knows. One thing is for sure, this looks more and more like a guy bitter that his ex-girlfriend is dating again (Intel – Apple relationship)

Heading to WWPC?

Nobody has taken the $5 bet that SBS R2 launches at WWPC which probably means SBS MVPs know something we all don’t. So if you’re around on Monday at WWPC (the day before) check out the small biz event. If you’re getting to Boston late on Monday, Eric has a list of top 15 small business sessions at WWPC, along with an invitation to the yellow lounge. If you’re curious what a “chat” is think of a guy in front of a whiteboard with about a dozen people chatting.

New Digg

Digg is now v3. In summary, Digg == Slashdot++. New Digg == Old Digg + More Categories. It’s my homepage, there is no better place on the net to get a quicker grasp on whats going on in IT.

Get a free copy of SBA

Get a free copy of SBA 2006. I’ve got to hand it to them, they are working on SBA really hard. It must be a frustrating effort, working so hard on a product nobody uses or respects. I guess they are motivated at taking Quickbooks down from its pedestil but so far not a single person I’ve met has anything good to say about SBA 2006. It is interesting that the ones who half-like it complained about the lack of literature for the product — well, I was at B&N over the weekend and actually saw a book on Small Business Accounting! Microsoft Press, one of the entry titles, but its a start!

Publishing SharePoint to External SBS users

Tavis found a link to a whitepaper on Microsoft’s site covering the publishing of SharePoint on SBS to external users. While I would love to praise them for doing this… just whats the point? The appeal of SBS to the small business owner is the ability to configure the server without understanding the details – this document would scare them. Targeting an IT consultant? Ouch. Dear Business Owner, if your IT consultant is reading this printout to configure your server you need a more competent consultant.

Microsoft Shows off Unified Messaging

Posted: 1:11 pm
June 26, 2006
Microsoft, Mobility
Comments Off on Microsoft Shows off Unified Messaging

Untitled document

So I got the usual slew of “you’re selling out, man” from my Linux friends by saying my company is pushing Microsoft software. I’m sorry guys, but the world demands more – more than IRC and GAIM. No, those are not the same as what Microsoft is building, not by a long shot. Take a look at this video to see what Microsoft is doing for communications.

IMG_1853

Above is a demonstration of the new integration of LCS, Office and Unified Messaging. They are showing an integrated system of multiple presentations, multiple presenters and the camera that swings to the person that is actually talking or whose presentation is currently on the screen. Yes, they are working on something really important

But this kind of underscores just what Microsoft is working on and what is coming out. Yes the basics could be pulled off on Jabber, and Skype and eventually thrown together – but virtually anyone involved in software development will tell you that its cheaper to just buy than to sit around and reinvent the wheel over and over again. These will be expensive, thats for sure, but I for one don’t want to spend more time listening to screaming todlers on airplanes.

Has the Small Business Specialist Certification Failed?

Posted: 11:27 am
June 26, 2006
Microsoft
17 Comments

There has been quite a bit in the community about the revised Microsoft Small Business Specialist certification exam 70–282. Why? The idiots are complaining that Microsoft made it too hard. As a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer I can tell you that if you have even the slightest problem passing 70–282 you outright have no right to consult small business on their IT decisions. Plain and simple.

Today a friend of mine called with a question and, in finest Monthy Python tradition, reached abuse:

Ryan: Hey Vlad, can I pick your brain for a moment?

Vlad: Real quick, whats up?

Ryan: What would you suggest in terms of RAM for SBS running Virtual Server running Terminal Services? I just realized Virtual Server 2005 is free.

Vlad: 4 GB.

Ryan: Oh, ok.

Vlad: Yeah, might as well go all the way.

Ryan: I was thinking about perhaps using another board, so I can add more RAM later – 6 or 8GB?

Vlad: Ryan, How did you pass 70–282?

Now it is true that there are many people out there that passed 70–282 but have no reason, ever, to be near a server. You see examples of such in newsgroups every day. But does that invalidate the entire certification, Microsoft’s effort to build a recognizable branding for legitimate small business consultants, official training materials (books, webcasts, coursework, etc) and further promotion of those that pass? Absolutely not.

I get blamed for being hard on Microsoft but at the end of the day our business is promoting and selling Microsoft solutions – I try to beat them up when I see them making decisions that will negatively impact our customers. But you cannot blame the company or the program just because people are dishonest and cheat their way to certification. You cannot blame or look down on a certification just because some who choose to participate are dishonest. That only reflects poorly on those that cheat, not the program itself. Let’s not focus on the crimes of the few and instead look at the triumph of those who succeed with Small Business Specialist badge. Many, present company included, have been more successful with it than the Microsoft Certified Partner badge.