Where in the world is Vlad?

Posted: 11:27 am
December 5, 2005
Misc, Vladville
Comments Off on Where in the world is Vlad?

Can't a brotha take a break? Thanks to all of you who wrote, emailed, IMed and so on – I am alive and well in Orlando, FL. It's been a rough few weeks trying to juggle everything and frankly I've been having that burned out feeling for a little over a month so the weekend was all about rest and Monday just came far too soon. I'm postponing all the user group planning, events, Exchange documents and user group leads business for about a week until I can catch my breath… For those of you that know what I've been up to over the last week or so this is a little preview of whats coming. 🙂

This Weekends SBS Show & Updates

Posted: 8:19 pm
December 2, 2005
Podcast
16 Comments

This weekends show, at least for Chris and me, is somewhat of a religious experience. The one and only Susan Bradley is going to be a guest on our SBS Show and I just cannot believe the response we have received so far. I've literally received questions from all corners of the world – UK, Germany, Russia, USA, Australia and Japan. (407) 965-2945 The SBS Show voicemail was flooded and I will be spending Sunday writing them down, categorizing and putting together a show worthy of her holiness. We're going to (try) structure the show around patch management. The Wednesday show appears to be gaining a lot of popularity. I appreciate all the nice things everyone has to say. We're also very happy that Susanne Dansey of SBSBPI is joining us when time permits. She is not an MCSE but has a good deal of experience in business, community initiatives and understanding the retail channel so hopefully you like how she complements our tech conversations. That and she adds much needed class to our show. We will be renaming and separating the SBS Show mid-week broadcasts to give everyone the ability to subscribe to the one you wish to hear the most. Ever since I offered to do that I've received so much praise that would make you think I actually did it 🙂 Not the case. We need a name for the show. I've kind of been calling it the "This Week in SBS" but I can imagine that there are other ideas. I sort of hope there are. So, what do you like, or rather, tell us if you can think of anything better: This Week in SBS Wonderful World of SBS World Wide SBS SBS and 20 Fun'N'SBS Small Business Tech Lunch SMB Tech Talk SBS Bash SBS Smackdown Specify your own value: SBS Roundup SBS In A Minute SBS To Go SBS Fast Chat SBS Chat SBS Now SBS Roundtable SBS Report Choices, choices everywhere. Which one do you pick?

Define Innovation: Reboot Manager

Posted: 8:11 pm
December 2, 2005
IT Culture
2 Comments

If you've been following this blog or my seminars you know that one pet peeve of mine is the constant redefining of "innovation" – and Microsoft seems to be taking the cake as of late. For as many times as Microsoft engineers have pointed at Linux and claimed it copies them they are stealing ideas and very principles that have been available in Unix for… well, decades. The latest one is the "restart manager" which on the surface appears to be a simple killall -9 processname before an update. As Jim Alchin explains in this eWeek article:

"If a part of an application, or the operating system itself, needs to updated, the Installer will call the Restart Manager, which looks to see if it can clear that part of the system so that it can be updated. If it can do that, it does, and that happens without a reboot," he said.

Yup, killall and insmod/rmmod alright. But when you dig a little deeper there is more going on in there:

"If you have to reboot, then what happens is that the system, together with the applications, takes a snapshot of the state: the way things are on the screen at that very moment, and then it just updates and restarts the application, or in the case of an operating system update, it will bring the operating system back exactly where it was," Allchin said.

Now its a little more interesting and sort of puts Windows Vista on the same page that Redhat Enterprise Linux hopes to get to with Xen virtualization. While this is not quite on the scale of innovation that Monad/MSH seems to be, it is nice to see that open solutions are forcing Microsoft to be more competitive and innovative without constant acquisition and butchering of stable products. I for one commend them on this one and am glad to see Microsoft is hiring developers for change.

Inside SBS Podcasts #9 and #10

Posted: 6:57 pm
December 2, 2005
Podcast
1 Comment

Mark Stanfill is updating us on the status of the Inside SBS podcast. As you recall, they took a 2 week break during which we were lucky to get them to come on and talk a bit more about business with PSS than straight geeketry (yes, I'm making up words today). These podcasts are taped versions of the webcasts that were delivered with TS2 this week (who have the best webcasts at Microsoft, sorry Technet) so if you haven't seen the webcast perhaps you'll catch the podcast. And they show their faces, something I still can't get Susanne Dansey to do due to a multitude of excuses.

Apache 2.2 Is Out, as is MS-CRM 3.0 but in a completely different way

Posted: 11:40 pm
December 1, 2005
IT Business, Open Source
1 Comment

Now this is turning out to be a huge week for open source: Apache 2.2 has been released today and it brings a lot of new (great) features: Smart Filtering, Improved Caching, AJP Proxy, Proxy Load Balancing, Graceful Shutdown support, Large File Support, the Event MPM, and refactored Authentication/Authorization. Apache is worlds most popular and widely used web server and if you have not played with it, you really should. You can run it on Windows 2003 (and 2000, and XP) concurrently with IIS 5/6, just make sure you don't bind to all on either server and you'll be set. Great way to test your new web sites or get familiar with different platforms and software. A little birdie from Omaha sent me some business slides on Microsoft CRM 3.0 which was launched and… well, lets say that more than a few little birdies have told me the pricing behind it will make very few people bite. Come on Microsoft, you are NOT the dominant CRM player. When you're coming from behind, you have to offer a better product, better pricing, better incentives.. Eric better walk over there with a size 16 boot and bang out some incentives because at these prices small business will keep on going to salesforce.com.

New Addiction: Social Bookmarking

Posted: 2:27 pm
December 1, 2005
Web 2.0
4 Comments

The guy on the right is Stefan Weitz from the Microsoft Windows Server group and he is cool for two reasons: He bought me lunch the last time I was in Redmond (so there, I got at least something from Microsoft) and he is responsible for a lot of the cool stuff we get in the user group world, namely, the 150 seat livemeeting accounts for remote presentations. However, Stefan is also responsible for the social bookmarking, tagging, noting and sharing project at Microsoft: theworkingnetwork.com. The goal of The Working Network and its distributed opml gadget (or widget or whatever they call it) is to give IT Professionals access to reputation-ranked blogs and community sites so they can find out if a person is a reputable provider of information based on the ratings of others in the community. Check out the OPML-meter video that Scoble did with them to find out what its all about. But outside the beta developing world, I've really hooked myself up with del.icio.us and spent more time browsing in the past two days than I have nearly year-to-date. The first thing I did after opening my account was to hit up my Tampa barbie girl and see what she's up to. After her, I started looking at popular stuff and got around to tagging a bunch of newbie sites on AJAX. Check it out: http://del.icio.us/vladmazek and get your own. For a more distributed one check out theworkingnetwork.com and look for the Community Bar. Video itself is fascinating but almost 40 minutes long.

SBS Show #7: This Week In SBS

Posted: 10:37 pm
November 30, 2005
SBS Show
4 Comments

SBS Show 7 is out and we cover this weeks events in SBS. For your easy consumption it is only 22 minutes in length as promised and we just go over some of the things you may have missed in the SBS community this week. On the table were: – Exchange 2003 SP2 reboots faster than usual (kb 555526) – Exchange 2003 SP2 IMF does not scan messages bigger than 3MB (thanks Philipp Kohn) – Can I install Exchange SP2 and SharePoint Team Services SP2 before I install SBS SP1 or do I have to install Exchange/SharePoint SP1, then SBS SP1 then SP2 of each? – (5:11) Firefox 1.5 – and reasons to upgrade – (12:14) Microsoft OneCare Live goes global – (15:19) What a (British) girl wants: Suede Laptop! – (18:00) SBS group meetings and sbsgroups.com Susanne Dansey of Readycrest Ltd. joined us today after some convincing and will be with us regularly during Wednesday's editions of the SBS Show (This Week in SBS). I explained the reasoning for this previously but we intended to keep a very high standard and make weekend shows useful. We understand nobody has an hour (or more) to sit down and consider all the braindumps offered on the weekend show and we still want to inform you. So during the week well have a little 20 minute show that brings you up to date and tells you what you need to know. Susanne will give us the global perspective, so while Chris and I represent the SEC, Susanne is tasked with representing the rest of the world. Hopefully a balanced and informative show for everyone, as a great man once said: "The SBS world is flat." SBS Show #7 – Download it here. Up next: THE Susan Bradley talking about patch management. Wanna talk to her? (407) 965-2945.

Firefox transition and IE preaching abstinence

Posted: 12:49 pm
November 30, 2005
Security
4 Comments

Since Securnia cracked the camels back I've been playing with different things Firefox has to offer. First of all, the major problem is rolling this out in the Enterprise through group policy and Sarah was kind enough to point me to a Firefox MSI repository. So far so good, until I hit the Microsoft Partner site – not very Firefox friendly I'm afraid, but there are two good things that came out of it. Number one, its the only IE-needy side (outside of our corporate internal SharePoint/CRM/GP sites) and it sent me off searching in the Firefox plugin land where I found IE View extension. Thats what the picture below is all about, you just right click on the page that doesn't render properly and select "View This Page In IE". There is even an IE Tab which makes it easier for people that don't like to right click – it adds an icon next to the address bar that opens the page up in a new tab using Internet Explorer as a rendering engine. Reduces desktop clutter! And it can be pre-configured so you can add the sites that should always render in IE. This is simply amazing. Now back on the Internet Explorer side, Microsoft has published an advisory regarding the severity of the exploit published months ago. The statement? "Microsoft encourages users to exercise caution when they open links in e-mail. For more information about Safe Browsing".. so they are basically preaching abstinence. That worked out great for the religious freaks (hi Jen) I'm sure it will have similar consequences for Microsoft unless they straighten this out fairly quickly or they'll end up getting (what happens when abstinence fails) by Firefox. Come on guys, IE 7 "beta" ain't the answer we're looking for here.

Technet Magazine

Posted: 12:01 pm
November 30, 2005
IT Culture, System Admin
1 Comment

Perhaps I've been under a rock lately but there appears to be an online Technet Magazine and its available in both HTML and help (.chm) format for portability. And oh, it is worth the read, for example check out SharePoint disaster recovery article by Jeff Centimano. I'm sure some of our seasoned veterans would also like to take a look at IIS performance tuning article after everything we're going through with Yoda.

SBS Show #6: SBS PSS Crew shows you how to troubleshoot SBS

Posted: 5:47 pm
November 29, 2005
Uncategorized
13 Comments

Mark Stanfill and Peter Gallagher from Microsoft SBS Product Support Services joined us this weekend to share some of their SBS support skills. We talked about basic troubleshooting, performance as well as leveraging PSS for your business whether you’re a partner, consultant or an SBS owner. Topics include troubleshooting performance issues, performance monitor, PSS call experience.

As a special treat you’ll find out how to get your calls answered directly by the US PSS support crew without a Premier support contract and some SBS troubleshooting best practices. It’s so good even Arnold Schwarzenegger called in!

Get SBS Show #6!
Subscribe to the podcast xml (for iTunes, podcatcher, etc)
Subscribe to the SBS Show blog

P.S. To do justice to this podcast please don’t blog about it until you’ve had a chance to listen to it. I promise it is far from what you’re expecting. This is the biggest and most entertaining podcast in the long and prolific 6-week history of the SBS Show.

Correction: We hinted to this during the show but just to state it clearly again: What Mark Stanfill refered to was “Microsoft Small Business Specialist” and “Microsoft Certified Partner” programs. (not Small Business Partner or Microsoft Silver Partner); to find more about it please go to http://www.microsoft.com/partneradvantage. They also talked about Performance Monitor Wizard and how it can help you find bottlenecks and establish performance logs with some very telling counters.