Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

I got to sleep last night, a welcome change of pace from the disaster recovery that has been going on in South Florida. I would like to share a picture that I believe sums up the state of things down here:

Caption, courtesy of my friend Pablo: i love the fact it’s right over a gas station, “last photograph ever taken by photographer”

As Pablo so eloquently points out, you don’t get to be stupid just because you went through a hurricane and you have no cell signal. Step away from the live wire about to tip over into a pool of fuel.

But driving around South Florida and talking to everyone about what is going on really got me motivated to write an extended D&R article for small business. I think there will be a catchy title, something along the lines “Would you sell your business for $300” because this is precisely how much it would have cost to keep some of these guys online, in touch with their customers. My business is to never, ever, ever go down, but I’ve worked in places that have gone down, often and frequently, and I learned that customers are willing to tollerate incompetence so long as they know what is going on. In disasters, people fear uncertainty, not the actual problems they face. So there will be a beefy guide for the small business on here in about a month about how to do something sensible that will keep you around and no, it won’t involve a tape.

So stay tuned.

Speaking of tuned, the SBS Show will be recorded tomorrow and this time we are going world-wide. This will be a two-parter on diaster recovery: first one covering the value of community for business and education, second one (next weekend) covering the value of disaster recovery when you really need a friend.

I got to sleep last night, a welcome change of pace from the disaster recovery that has been going on in South Florida. I would like to share a picture that I believe sums up the state of things down here:

Caption, courtesy of my friend Pablo: i love the fact it’s right over a gas station, “last photograph ever taken by photographer”

As Pablo so eloquently points out, you don’t get to be stupid just because you went through a hurricane and you have no cell signal. Step away from the live wire about to tip over into a pool of fuel.

But driving around South Florida and talking to everyone about what is going on really got me motivated to write an extended D&R article for small business. I think there will be a catchy title, something along the lines “Would you sell your business for $300” because this is precisely how much it would have cost to keep some of these guys online, in touch with their customers. My business is to never, ever, ever go down, but I’ve worked in places that have gone down, often and frequently, and I learned that customers are willing to tollerate incompetence so long as they know what is going on. In disasters, people fear uncertainty, not the actual problems they face. So there will be a beefy guide for the small business on here in about a month about how to do something sensible that will keep you around and no, it won’t involve a tape.

So stay tuned.

Speaking of tuned, the SBS Show will be recorded tomorrow and this time we are going world-wide. This will be a two-parter on diaster recovery: first one covering the value of community for business and education, second one (next weekend) covering the value of disaster recovery when you really need a friend.

To all those of you who emailed me asking about my flu, thank you for your concern, I made it just fine. It was not a flu at all, it was a case of too many Hooters wings (or rather, too much grease accompanied by a wing or two) that took me out of comission. Playing the wedding planner for the SBS roadshow, trying to manage the D&R requests nearly statewide and figure out logistics for some other things at the same time didn’t leave much room for the blog.

But I’m back so there will be more stuff on Exchange SP2 stuff soon, thank you for your patience. Another show this weekend, and I’re going world-wide this time, Omaha, Alabama and Kent (UK) will be here along with Florida. But first things first:

SBS Roadshow: Microsoft takes to the road again
The presentation tonight was quite remarkable. They took so much input, I don’t think I’ve ever seen my group show that much respect for Microsoft in my entire life. They listened, took notes, opened up… it was kind of like hanging out in the parking lot after SBS shows, except with Sr. Microsoft people and it really gave the group a whole new dimension. This is not that far out of the norm, Orlando is pretty respectful of Microsoft (much more so than any place I’ve ever been to) but they also go far beyond and above the call of duty to show a good face here.

The event was exactly as promised – Senior Microsoft people, taking feedback on SBS and everything involved with it from SharePoint to WSUS, partner program, competencies, etc.

SBS Show
First of all, thank you to everyone for the very kind feedback. We’ve had 805 downloads at this point, which is roughly 8x as much as I had expected. So whoever had that faulty browser that kept on crashing and reloading the mp3 all of the 804 times, please hug your browser for me. 🙂

We are doing another one this weekend, and yes, we’re going global. I wanted to keep it in the SEC (Southeastern Conference) last week since Chris was so kind to help me test audio and phone stuff about 50 times to get it right. He’s coming back this weekend. We have a surprise (actually two very attractive surprises) for this show which will be all about the many communities that exist on the Internet and in your neck of the woods, whereever you may be. There are folks out there that enjoy to help people and not just for techie things – there are support communities for business initiatives, managed services, certification, small business, big business.. no matter where in the IT business you are, or how far up and down the business management chain you may be, there are people that want to help you – and we’ll talk to some of them.

If you have anything interesting please drop me an email or post a comment to this article and we’ll work it in. Look for it this weekend.

This came from a friend in West Palm Beach, they took the back end of Wilma:

WOW…. there is a mess down here! My home took a beating, but not as bad as some of my neighbors and co-workers. Of course I don’t have power, but I am writing you from my office in Lake Worth. Luckily we have a generator here, and since we do so much business with Bellsouth, they were nice enough to put a generator on their slick cabinet. So my office is up and running, but most of it is running in Houston. We have employees from Ft. Lauderdale to the Acreage, and only 1 place has power. The corner of Okeechobee and Jog seems to have power. At least the people north of the intersection are the lucky ones. They say they don’t have cable yet though.

My car took a hit, and so did my wife’s. We have some very stupid people on my road and they had their garbage on sidewalk. Well it’s not their anymore.. After watching a few pieces
ricochet off my truck, and cut through my neighbors screen porch it, a lot of their stuff is in a pool across the street! We have a nice ding in the garage door (hopefully it will work), and our pack patio is ruined. We lost all our trees except for the tree that holds my daughter’s swing. she was on it while we were out cleaning. We don’t have a generator @ the house so we are “camping” out. Thank God that it is cool out, and it was not like it was last year. We had no power for 4 days, and my wife was 9 months pregnant!. Needless to say, my daughter is a little over a year, and she has been through 2 hurricanes! I have lived in FL for almost 10 years, and have had 3… Time to move again?

Good luck to everyone out there!

Over 6 million people in Florida are still out of power, majority in South Florida which is serviced by FPL, the Florida Plunder and Loot power company. My girlfriend works for EOC and apparently none of the nukes were damaged – two in Port St. Lucie and Turkey Lake in Everglades. So at least the generation facilities are live. Power poles however, thats another story. It could be weeks before most places are restored, during the last outage (Katrina) it took up to 7 days to restore 90% of service. South Florida is officially a disaster zone.

Wilma made a landfall south of Naples today and quickly moved across the Everglades National Park to deal a big strike to Miami, Hollywood, Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton. At the writing of this message the local power company, Florida Plunder & Loot (FPL), has suffered massive failure in its powergrid and regions from Key west up through West Palm Beach are affected.

Click on the graph to the left to check out the barometer for Deerfield Beach, the extreme north tip of Broward County. At the moment over 5 million people are without power but thankfully the temperature is down which will prevent deaths usually experienced during heat waves.

The first SBS Show podcast is now live! Battling some food poisoning and a hurricane at the moment but the podcast is up and I hope you can all enjoy it. I was joined by Chris Rue (happyfunboy) and we chatted about a number of things that happened last week and that will be happening this week.

This is the very first show and I’m still figuring it all out. You can download an MP3 of it outright and drop it into your player, or you can subscribe to it using iTunes or Yahoo Music. This show was 45 minutes long and fit in ~12 Mb so it should not be too difficult to download. What did we talk about?

• Exchange 2003 SP2 features, documentation, and best practices
• SBS Road Show in Atlanta, Orlando, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale.
• Service pack installation best practices
• SBS 2003 NFR on Sale!
  and the pending spanking
• Farewell to Lewis Lin
• VSS Admin chat from the Official SBS Support Blog

The idea behind this podcast is to take a popular item of the week and discuss it with people that have an expertise in that area. Important items often get lost in massive email threads and the podcast is a more elegant way of spreading that information.

We want this to be a dynamic community property, give us your opinion or tell us who you’d like to hear from. So if you have something interesting to say, comment or if you want to talk to us during the recording – please let us know. There is also a number you can call around the clock [(407) 965-2945)] and we’ll edit you into the show if you’d like.

This needed to stand out on its own, because without support from gentlemen like Lewis Lin information sources like this one simply would not exist. Lewis (was) the Microsoft SBS Product Manager and was involved in support initiatives that allowed for the growth of many SBS user groups all over USA. One of the key people at Microsoft that encouraged feedback, moved quickly to correct mistakes, moved quickly to offer support behind many community initiatives.. is moving on to a new role MSN. Several of us got a chance to meet Lewis at SMB Nation so if you’ve never seen/spoken to Lewis rest assured that many of the things you see today are a direct result of his hard work.

So on behalf of us in Florida that have have benefited directly from your hard work, and the global SBS community:

And not just in Florida where we await yet another hurricane. It has been somewhat slow over the past few days at least in comparison to the frenzy surrounding the launch of Exchange 2003 SP2. I must say, things are going pretty well and I’m happy with everything, but here are a few problems that I see with my biggest partner that may snowball if they are not addressed soon.

Exchange SP2 Followup
Problems are starting to surface from people that waited to deploy it over the weekend, and most are related to SQL and XML issues that may have been present previously. Thankfully these issues are recognized during setup before serious problems can hit your Exchange infrastructure. I think one of the fundamental problems, and disappointments, with the launch of Exchange 2003 SP2 has been the lack of documentation. While I can appreciate the more urgency Microsoft is taking to bring their next generation of servers online, but if that rush is at the cost of poorly documenting the new technology I for one don’t look forward to it happening. You can’t close the source, not release documentation, and ignore questions. You can’t expect to feel it is good enough to burn CTP’s and expect your customers to be your beta testers and buy, lets face it, poorly written books that come out too late.

OpenOffice 2.0
Now from the other side of software theology comes the Open Office 2.0, the long awaited update that promises huge performance increases. I’ve written about this before and I will do so again – you do not need more than what OpenOffice has to offer. I know the new Excel spreadsheets look great, I know the next Word will be so much easier to use but I’m in interoffice business documents all day long and they rarely, if ever, use more advanced features. One of the things Greg Boyd always stressed in his presentations has been the fact that people do not use features that are more than two clicks away. And yes, the new Office bars look pretty and dynamic, but its hard teaching and old (and overworked) non-technical office dog new tricks and there is little that separates Microsoft Office from OpenOffice for those people. Not everyone is a techie, not everyone is going to experience the “remarkable productivity gains for information workers” if they do not dig for those advanced features to begin with.

The Official SBS Support Blog #5
The new episode is on the web and this is yet another shining example of Microsoft employees that understand their customers. Now, these guys work in the support channel and they help customers that call and pay for help. They also have a public blog that rapidly responds to the most frequent new issues that come up. Peter Gallagher even has a blog on which he posts the support call of the day. These guys do awesome work, share it with everyone willing to read, take calls, take questions on the blog, participate in the public mailing lists to answer questions. And all is good, right?

Nope. Why are these people so hard to find? Why is the SBS Support Podcast only being marketed by Susan Bradley and Vlad Mazek? Why is it that the almighty Microsoft.com search does not show a trace of the Official SBS Support blog? Its been up there for five weeks, you’d figure it would be indexed somewhere by now but no.

Is it really a problem?
Depends on how you read it. Look at stories #1 and #3, then look at story number two. If Microsoft’s priority is on releasing undocumented software while pushing aside the very people that support and explain their platform, then what is my incentive to ignore their competitors? The only way this makes sense is if the next generation of Microsoft’s products sets up on its own and never experiences problems, in which case documentation and support will be irrelevant. I will start taking bets on this now 🙂

Update: I just got an email from Carlos asking whats bothering me today and what Microsoft has done today to piss me off. Nothing is bothering me and the real motive behind Exchange and SBS Support Podcast comments is really a bright, shining spotlight on how Microsoft priorities seem to be in the wrong place:
– SBS Support podcast nowhere to be found at Microsoft.com
– Exchange SP2 documentation limited to release notes and three blog posts.
– 52,000 (as of Sunday, 4AM) people have looked at my Exchange SP2 guides. Nearly double the regular volume.

Windows Mobile Security and Feature Pack also known as MSFP and after working some communities I broke down and I decided to call my contact at Microsoft (Sr. Product Manager at Microsoft Mobile & Embedded devices) and here is the skinny:

– MSFP will be complete and released to manufacturing within a month
– After testing this software will be distributed by the manufacturer
– It will not require a flash, just installation (might depend on manufacturer)
– Expect to see something within 2 months of next months release to manufacturing.

So thats the status of it right now. MSFP will only be available on Windows Mobile 5, likely within 3 months. If you are considering a new phone try to stick to a provider that has a good reputation of providing timely software updates for its branded devices.