Preferences, Choice and the value of No

Posted: 3:19 pm
June 11, 2008
Misc
1 Comment

One of the personality faults I am still trying to work out of my engineering brain is that not all problems need a solution. Making a transition from a purely technical problem-solving personality to a CEO and someone that motivates the organization to get things done and remain agile is challenging, even more so as the number of cooks in the kitchen grows and number of problems to deal with grows exponentially.

Today I was calling in to place an order, a generic good that I can get anywhere. I struggled through the accent with someone that must have washed up on the coast of California yesterday and I wanted to pay with an Amex. They only took Visa and MasterCard.

Now, a few years ago I might have let that bother me, I might have asked if there was an alternate form of payment, if they had a discount if I gave them a less “consumer-friendly” card, etc. Today, I just politely thanked her and went to the next number on the list.

The beauty of choice, commodity and global markets is that you have a lot of choices. You have the right to have a preference, as much as they have a right to say “No, we will not do business with you under those circumstances” and you can either make things easy and capture every possible sale or draw a line in the sand and only do the kind do of business that you want to do.

In the end, I didn’t get upset, I got exactly what I wanted under the terms that I wanted and it didn’t distract me from the mission I set for myself today.

Hakuna Matata.

Monkey Knowledge

Posted: 2:00 am
June 11, 2008
Shockey Monkey
1 Comment

One of the most challenging tasks in running Own Web Now is the information sharing. While we’ve really worked hard to get together with our partners on a number of fronts in terms of activity and service notification, our ability to offer the documentation and knowhow is still lacking mostly because it sucks internally as much as it sucks externally. We have no fewer than four places in which we keep our KB data (between SharePoint, internal blog, www.ownwebnow.com/help support wiki and our development PF). Having this KB data out there in a way that people could count on would save a ton of support requests if we could just update our documents in the same location. So:

Enter Monkey Knowledge Base

I shot a 5 minute video to explain this to you.

What is hilarious about this is that it took less than two hours to develop the feature and tie it into all the other systems we currently use. Features:

  • Organization-wide knowledge base accessible through the portal
  • Company restrictions, allowing you to mark certain KB articles as private to a given company if you’ve written specific documentation for them
  • Rich HTML KB article editor, which allows cut and paste from Microsoft Word
  • RSS feed for external syndication with your public web site, SharePoint
  • Support ticket to Knowledge Base article conversion is a one checkbox click process.

And it’s fully integrated into the portal so its in a place where your clients are already logging in to review invoices, pay bills, request support, manage contacts.

What I didn’t say, and what you’ll have to read between the lines for, is what we can do if features like this are doable in less than two hours. If all the clients are used to this portal, which now includes free integrated email-to-ticket creation and updates, and it’s already used to order, bill and report for services, what more could it possibly do in the hands of Own Web Now? 🙂

Keeping it simple… So everyone can figure it out. By the way, there is another cool way to keep up with Shockey Monkey, check out our Twitter page at www.twitter.com/shockeymonkey

Nobody ever reads asterisks anyhow..

Posted: 7:28 pm
June 10, 2008
Apple
1 Comment

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What would help your virtualization efforts?

Posted: 1:06 pm
June 10, 2008
Microsoft, Mobility
Comments Off on What would help your virtualization efforts?

Dave Sobel, cohost of the SBS Show, wants to know.

Dave is putting together some content around virtualization with the SMB focus and is taking on all advice you wish to pass on.

I cannot stress this enough. It is ALL about the tshirt!

Posted: 9:06 pm
June 9, 2008
Microsoft
7 Comments

Man, it sucks when Vlad is right. The tribe is lighting the torch and this time going after Kevin Beares, possibly the nicest person working at Microsoft. What did Kevin do wrong? He didn’t offer a free tshirt or $10 for a survey and is stuck at 250 responses in two weeks.

So, ‘let’s see if we can beat that: FILL OUT THIS SURVEY AND WIN A FREE TSHIRT.

Is this the beginning of the end?

Posted: 1:41 pm
June 9, 2008
Apple, Microsoft
7 Comments

Apple is coming on strong. Read the live coverage of the WWDC Keynote. Most paralyzing thing for me as a Microsoft Partner?

“You’re witnessing the birth of a third major computer platform: Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone”

According to the new business at Own Web Now that’s very true. Microsoft is definitely losing their grip on the dominance and the app space is opening up. Microsoft PDC can’t come soon enough.

F me running, now we’re going to have to support Entourage instead of treating it like Outlook’s retarded half-cousin.

Things that piss Vlad off

Posted: 2:08 am
June 9, 2008
SMB
11 Comments

Monday, time for the weekly pep talk.

There are really only two things that piss me off about this blog and I’m pretty sure that you won’t be able to guess them. If you scroll through the comments you’ll find plenty of examples.

“Dude, you work too hard..”

Oh really Jimmy Joe Bob, have you discovered the f’n missing link between the hard work and success? What do you think, someone just gave me all this one day for the good dental hygiene? If I was born with all this knowledge then I sure wasted a lot of damn time in college, in webcasts, in seminars and on the road taking in conferences, training folks, giving speeches.

If you are waiting for someone to just “give it to you” then go stand in the unemployment line.

“It would be great if I could get all of that without having to work for it..”

I get a lot of this on the phone too.

Oh, I would love to have you just teach me step by step what needs to be done in each situation.

Oh, I don’t like to read, can you make a podcast about it?

Oh, I wish I could do that but I just don’t have the time, could you sum it up for me?

Oh, I know you write about that stuff all the time with over 2,500 posts on vladville.com but could you post it again because I have an attention span of a shit fly.

In my years on the road and working with the partners I’ve had the joy of meeting a few idiots. Maybe a handful. I’d say less than 50 in total. Considering how many people I know, thats nothing. Most people I work with are very smart. All these people have plans, have process, have ideas, are executing. What are they executing? Not a whole heck of a lot, judging by the fact that they have the same problems year-over-year and don’t seem to have made an inch worth of progress since the day I met them.

Why? Cause it’s hard. I have to keep on learning. Things keep changing. I’m too stressed, I can work only 3 days a week and if someone is rude to me I need a mini vacation.. Are you kidding me? Does that even work for four year olds? Why in the world would it work when you’re fourty? Hint: See point #1.

Everyone keeps on looking for a shortcut. There must be some process that you’re not in on. All the people that are growing and prospering must have some trick that they haven’t let you in in. Maybe I should just peer up with others who have as little clue as I do or maybe I should keep on revising my plan every two months?

There is no secret. There is no shortcut. There is no peer solution for lazy. There is no magic blog post to cure cluelessness. There is no lifestyle buffer between business ownership and unemployment.

You just aren’t working hard enough. Really, that’s all there is to it. Read all about it in my upcoming book “SMB ENTERPRISE WHITEPAPER”, available as a preorder for $49.95. Condensed for the busy professional on the go, just one page, just one paragraph.

Stop making excuses. Stop at looking at the grass on the other side of the fence. Stop thinking you’re special. Stop looking for motivation. Just take a huge break from all the things you are doing on the side to distract yourself from working on what you’re actually supposed to be working on.

spfnationpress

And if the prospect of that brings you down, if you can’t find energy in what you do, if you aren’t up at 2am trying to get better at what you do and aren’t willing to work hard and be happy with the blessing that is the ability to build your own company and serve people in your own way then why the f… even bother pretending? For a set of steak knives?

It’s Monday. Are you here to work or not?

Shockey Monkey Mail Connector

Posted: 12:49 am
June 9, 2008
Shockey Monkey
1 Comment

Note: This is not the same thing as the Shockey Outlook which is a Microsoft Outlook addin that allows you to click on the email and promote it to a support request with one click, or one click upload of contacts, tasks and calendar appointments. It is an email gateway that allows everyone to create new tickets in the portal just by sending an email to your support@ email address. It also supports conversations through the support@ alias, allowing you to respond to the portal and use the SLA framework to properly categorize/escalate the ticket and send proper notifications as you go along. I do not recommend the use of this feature to anyone.

Hope everyone had a great weekend. I have a new experimental feature to share with you. It is called Mail Connector, it allows you to create and update tickets through email.

In your portal you will find a new tab under Settings called “Experimental Features”; Click on it and look for your Mail Connector email address. Note the text in red. Your Mail Connector address is of xyz@tree.shockeymonkey.com

Implementation

Pick an available alias on your domain and forward it to the xyz@tree.shockeymonkey.com address.

WARNING: DO NOT MAKE THE ALIAS ADDRESS THE SAME AS YOUR BUSINESS CONTACT INFORMATION EMAIL AS LISTED UNDER SETTINGS > BRANDING. DOING SO WILL CURRENTLY CREATE AN UNBREAKABLE INFINITE LOOP.

Features

Mail Connector does the following:

  • Email to the Mail Connector address from an unknown email address is rejected.
  • Email to the Mail Connector address from a known email address creates a new ticket.
  • Response to the email generated by the Mail Connector address updates the ticket.
  • Response to the email generated by the Mail Connector are only applied if they come from the administrative account (companyid 1 or 2) or from the company that originated the ticket (any user within the company)
  • Administrative response (companyid 1 or 2) to the Mail Connector address will update the ticket.
  • ALL Mail Connector updates follow the defined SLA which can be granular with respect to the senders email address, so you can create specific filters for specific email addresses and sort them into adequate queues.

In short, Shockey Monkey Mail Connector is an email interface to your portal allowing you to create and update support requests through email on any device and still keep the SLA framework in place.

By the time 2.0 ships I plan to fully implement this feature and make it configurable (on/off), as well as split the mail confirmation sending address and archival copy sending address. Currently those addresses are identical, so if the message is sent to the archive and the same address is used to loop back to the Mail Connector feature which then generates the autoresponse saying that the ticket has been updated and then sends a copy back to itself which loops it back over and over and over again. So please, please be careful.

Promote Andy Lees

Posted: 2:16 pm
June 6, 2008
Apple
5 Comments

Over the past year or so I have been trying to offer an amplified voice to the challenges the ITPRO community is feeling around the Microsoft brand. One of my major gripes with Redmond is the near absence of marketing or competitive response to the constant beatdown by the competitors. At this point it is probably too late for Microsoft to respond as millions of dollars have already gone far enough to encourage people to look at something other than Microsoft when it comes to technology spending for their business.

However, I would like to personally congratulate Andy Lees, Sr. VP of Microsoft Mobile Communications Business for figuratively whipping out his big fat black dick using it to bitchslap the Apple iPhone crachwhore up and down the 36 cracktown blocks.

That’s how I’d put it, but for a more PC version check out Fortune Apple 2.0: Microsoft packs 36 iPhone digs into one 7-paragraph letter. So far this is the best blog post of the year, and definitely the best news release of the year. It’s not every day that Microsoft brags about having an open platform and 150 different phone choices (none suitable for even basic web browsing but let’s not nitpick).

Is this letter too little too late? Time will tell, I for one will get the iPhone the moment they deliver full EAS support. Let’s hope Microsoft figures out how to take a few of those billions of dollars in the bank and spend it on customer-facing marketing instead of waiting for its partners to do it.

How great software gets made

Posted: 1:25 am
June 6, 2008
Shockey Monkey
7 Comments

There is a comment bot (or someone with entirely too much time) that pings me whenever a day goes by without a blog post or a comment. Daily Dose of Vlad. Seriously, if you can’t dig up another source of technical filth on the Internet we’re going to have to shut it down. Here you go, hope you laugh. If you’re British I hope you’re offended.

How great software gets made

I’m sure that if you’ve read between the lines over the past two weeks or so you’ve noticed a fair bit of frustration in my writing. It has been an unusually frustrating time in my professional life but not because you may think – When you’re an ISP for over 10 years you get used to dealing with idiots allergic to documentation that want you to provide it to them that its not your fault. So work doesn’t bother me, positive stuff doesn’t do so much for me because frankly people kiss my ass and love what we do all day and night. However, when things turn ugly I find motivation because its an opportunity to improve and get better. Just how I work I suppose.

So yesterday I decided to squash my month-long angst towards billing side of Shockey Monkey and I decided to sit down and finally just bang it out. But you can’t just sit down and write software. Not good software at least.

First, we went to Buffalo Wild Wings and I ordered a Hurricane and asked it be “as strong as you can legally make it” and to my surprise they came just short of it being straight rum. That will get you started at 11am!

The rest of the day I spent hanging out with my son. At about 6 PM I decided to get on the Wii and work on getting a 1000 rank in boxing.

So let’s recap. Get drunk. Check. Get half naked and pound air in front of your TV in the living room until you are coated with sweat. Check. Start coding.

What I came up with after that is slightly hazy but incomplete to say the least. Here are my major design shortcomings:

  1. For a true syncronization to work I need to mirror the data between the accounting software and Shockey Monkey. Things like account identifiers, invoices, amounts, etc. When one gets adjusted so should the other. Nobody in their right mind would do that.
  2. Getting the experience to be the same across multiple accounting platforms is a huge problem. For example, some systems limit invoice item notes/description to a 256 varchar field. Others will take an entire book. There isn’t a consistent way to do this.
  3. The way most consulting shops bill is on the time rendered during the week/month/quarter. The way Shockey Monkey logically filters items for billing is by waiting for the ticket to be closed. So I got about 24 hours to redraw the schema and my billing code to reflect the incomplete issue billing.

Now, why destroy your mind and body before trying to mess with the above? Because anyone with the ounce of sanity the above would have been a two second solution: It is what it is, adjust to my software and just suck it. K? Not quite what I’m going for.

So after the conference call today when I realized all I did to this point is pretty much broken I just sat there and spaced out and thought of the Shockey Monkey tagline. No, not the “Making IT Management Fun” but the more polite version Chris Rue designed specifically for the UK market: “Better than snorting coke of the hookers ass” after someone from UK actually bothered to call me and complain about the title and how it offended their sensibilities, and how a picture of my comment on ETAs offended the even more (can’t find the picture anymore, but its our official ETA guidance picture with me and the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland).  

Core frustration 

My biggest frustration is that I am (yet) unable to make this ridiculously simple. Most of the IT space has a fantastically simple job. We sell products and then we sell services, either in bundles or metered. Doesn’t get simpler than that. The software should eliminate all complexity from the “getting paid” part of the equation and it should be immediately obvious what needs to be done. Work on the ticket, update ticket, add time, close ticket, click on accounting, click on a link print the invoice and either email and ask for money or mail and ask for money. So simple, so beautiful. The only thing complicating it would be the 3,000 different accounting packages 🙁

But, it’s 1:30, I’m working on it and should have something simple by the weekend.

If you’re not on Shockey Monkey I am sad to say that the beta is closed until the product goes commercial which should have been this Monday but obviously didn’t happen. I appreciate your interest and hope you understand that due to the size of the beta it would be difficult for me to effectively support more than the 3,000 people on it so far. I appreciate the interest, and if you can’t wait for it I do recommend Connectwise. Call Arnie and tell him Vlad sent you and scream Go Gators after you mention that part. Hopefully gets you a discount.