June 2008 - Posts
A while back I was talking about what brings me along to the SMB IT Professional Sydney Group, meaning for me a 6.5 hour round trip to hang out with SBSers. Wanting to get to know some of the other group members, and build my network I mentioned that I would be doing a NEW Team New Blood.
So to get started here is mine.
Name: David Mackie
Company: Synergistic Network Solutions Pty Limited
Location: Canberra ACT Australia
Describe your business: Synergistic Consults to Federal Government Departments, Small – Medium and some retail businesses, providing diverse solutions based on Microsoft Technologies.
What makes your business different: 1 + 1 = 3.
OK we are are really good at developing “mission modules” if you like, addition of feature sets for business eventualities that rely on the Core Infrastructure but drive specific business outcomes.
I knew if I tried really hard I could get you guys to ask me about my Infrastructure Projects based on the FSF-1 Sea Fighter
What are you really good at?: Working things out, new and shiny technologies, Logical Fault Finding
Each Technical Team Member:
David: Pretty much the shiny new stuff.
What is the best possible referral: For us right now anything SMB Commercial, we are looking to breakout of our selling hours for money to the Government and start selling up time and projects to the commercial sector.
What are your main business goals this year: 30% of Total revenue from SMB, additional 15% from SMB Focused Partners
What are your main professional goals this year: Windows 2008 Certifications (from scratch, to walk where we will expect our SE’s to focus), Start my Masters
How do you Deploy Workstations: WDS, why can you do it another way???
What Network Management Platform are you using?: No single one, but looks like hosted Kaseya.
What AV Platform are you using?: Trend Micro Worry Free Business Security, and Worry Free Remote Manager
What Backup Platform are you using?: Shadow Protect, SBS Backup, DPM 2007 and NetBackup
Are you coming to the TechEd Pre-Day?: You bet ya!
Will you be staying for the rest of TechEd?: Yes, wanna keep the SMB spirit going with some dinners and a huge night on Thursday?? Some of the best parts of TechED aside from the sessions, is the folk we get to spend time with.
So Guys and Gals think about sending me your answers and we will get the community Dossiers posted.
I have recently done an implementation of Network Access Protection (NAP) for a Mid-Market Client, and we have delivered some benefits which were not part of our original planning.
I won’t go into too much about their specifics but will cover the scenario and some of the side benefits we achieved.
Even Better I’m going to build all this on SBS 2008 so it should be kind of generic and really quite fun for me to extend with the low end kit I may have lying around my Lab.
Oh but to make it into a deployment guide for both SBS 2008 AND EBS 2008, I have spoken with my friends in the Dell Sydney Office to borrow a Switch so I can really hang together a guide for a switch that is affordable but has all the features the big boys expect to see.Not Quite Fully agree’d so when I get it I will replicate the whole thing including the ACLs and Scripts.
Now today I got a notification of an update to the NAP Solution Accelerator, and giving it a quick look this morning without saying too much as it is a Beta Release I see that NAP is seen in the Rationalized to Dynamic area of the Core IO Model.
Mapping NAP technology into the Core IO Model
So given the high end nature of the benefits of NAP to provide Infrastructure Optimisation, I’m going to try to see how far down the cost and complexity stack I can drive.
Now my Lab is a little light on for hardware and most of the Server Infrastructure is Virtualized in WMware Server Version One, so the first steps will be baby ones and you can follow on further as we go.
In the coming days (more likely weeks) we will see what we can do with:
- SBS 2008 RC0
- LINKSYS SLM2008
- Wiretek Unmanaged 24 Port 10/100 Switch
- D-Link DWL-2000AP+ Wireless Access Point
and that is about all the kit hanging around gash in the lab right now so here we go first installation in a day or two … NAP DHCP on SBS 2008 with Windows XP SP3 Client.
What does that have to do with my Mid-Market Customers config or Project? Nothing but I don’t have a 802.1x Switch that supports Dynamic VLANs so you will have to wait until the Dell deal is done and I can get it in releasable documented form.
BTW my Mid-Market Client was using Nortel 5520 switches, and I don’t have one of them either so unless I can find one for a loan we need to wait for the Dell one.
Cross Posted from http://SMEManaged.com
I think I have lost count how many times the topic of licensing comes up in lists I subscribe to but it is so often it amazes me that we can’t just get this sorted once and for all with something that makes sense for everyone and doesn’t make me look like I’m stealing from my clients.
Recently we had a question about making XP Home work in a domain, that is pretty much where it always starts my customer bought a computer from Blah Blah Blah and they sold them XP Home Edition, Vista Home Basic / Premium and now I can’t join it to the domain what can I do and how do I handle the cost conversation?
Often the list has a number of people say:
- Sell them OEM XP Professional / OEM Vista Business with a Hard Drive or Mouse
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Windows Vista OEM licenses — like all other OEM licenses — can only be sold with a complete system. What constitutes a complete system? A complete system consists of at least an enclosure, a power supply, a main board, a processor, memory, and a hard disk.
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The complying peripheral rule is long gone but long remembered too
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Once the idea of getting legal with a peripheral sale is debunked sometimes people suggest a purchase from the customer for $1, add OEM XP Pro, sell back to customer. Now that is interesting
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I have suggested in the past that making the machine non genuine by removing the Home Edition COA would then comply for Get Genuine but even that is not a great option
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The idea of an upgrade to Vista Business and exercise down grade rights is probably the right course but not a popular one I suspect.
Lets Assume the machine was bought from a local system builder and sold with XP Home Edition and I come to do an SBS Implementation, and I need XP Professional on the machines for either SOE or compatibility reasons.
Lets look at the licensing costs the client is hit with:
- XP Professional OEM sold by a Knowledgeable consultative System Builder $165 + Markup + Shipping. Total ~ $195.00
- XP Home sold buy call centre on machine $102 in cost of machine
- Vista Business Upgrade $323.57 + Markup + Shipping ~ $369.00
- End User Pays $471.00 for something they should have paid $195 for.
- XP Home sold buy call centre on machine $102 in cost of machine
- User tears off COA
- Buys MSOEM GET GENUINE KIT XP $212.30 + Markup + Shipping ~ $246.50
- End User Pays $348.50 for something they should have paid $195 for.
- XP Home sold buy call centre on machine $102 in cost of machine
- Reseller Buys Machine for $1.00
- Reseller reloads XP Professional OEM (maybe replaces fans, replaces Mouse and Keyboard but these are not Software Costs). XP Professional OEM $165 + Markup + Shipping. Total ~ $195.00
- End User Pays $296.00 for something they should have paid $195 for.
In all of the upgrade scenarios the clients are being robbed AND MS is making a whole second licence in the deal and the client thinks I’m robbing them, little wonder it is such a tough sell in this part of the market.
If I were king of the licensing machine in Microsoft I would offer an easy way for clients who relied on your partner channel (I’m including the OEMs as Partners) and got poor advice to get the right licence without being penalised for not being an IT Licensing guru.
How about two SKUs that do this:
- XP Home OEM to XP Professional OEM - $63.00 in fact charge me $10 for the COA (double what referbishers get theirs for), End User Pays ~ $219.00ish for something they should have paid $195 for, not too bad IMNSHO.
- Vista Home Basic OEM to Vista Business OEM - $64.90 plus $10 for the COA
I would have no problem selling a make good plus $10 COA to customers who want to be legal but treated like a customer should be. Why not make a condition that both COA's need to appear on the machine.
I really want to help my clients be legal and have some platform loyalty but it is tough when we are forced to sell in some cases more than double the correct licensing cost and 4 times their initial outlay for what appears to be very little benefit.
No wonder some people say just sync local credentials because all the fancy domain membership is for the Administrator anyway.
So many people are talking about the death of SBS past SBS 2008, some I even talk to are concerned about the viability of being an SME focused Infrastructure Company.
I know there are many places where hosted cloud services make sense but much of it seems to be a bit too … not really there and for the bandwidth challenged, with security concerns, I think we are quite some way off not having a viable business deploying and supporting the Mid Market. That is why we are saying to as many SMB IT Professionals in our local area that EBS 2008 and some time spent learning more than a 15 click install of anything will still provide a reasonable base, yes you will need to do other things too but not abandon a market you are in right now.
Remember not everything shiny that appeals to 12 year old girls will appeal to your more serious business clients.
This video does sum up some of the over excitement out there.
I often get asked about training my competition or letting out the secret sauce formula. I really think this is a BIG fear especially for guys who are coming from Integrators and Consulting firms who service the enterprise. Some of it also comes from the misconception that they have some secret sauce in the first place.
I thought big companies had great methodologies, standardisation, project management, risk mitigation you name it they had it, I thought they made money by reducing variation and providing consistent solutions, supported by highly scripted service desks, with SLAs and defined escalation points, handing up problems to increasingly smarter highly technical people who could replace anybody with a small VB script.
I have done some sub contracts for some big Integrators and Software Vendors and I don’t think that their propaganda matches my experience, while some very good individuals produce great outcomes the experience of these guys does NOT automatically mean that the whole organisation have a secret sauce recipe and more so, most of the Systems Engineers deploy their own version of best practice and with a good deal of variation even between builds in the same project.
So I have no doubt that the small business focused communities have a great many differences in the people who come along and their desire to share, this is stark contrast to my experience with more Enterprise focused communities.
I have had some Senior Engineers from some consulting companies openly say “why would I come along to a User Group? What could you possibly teach me” (how about humility you knob jockey?). Others don't come because they are not goal’d on going to things like that.
This not to say that Enterprise Focused IT Pro Groups members are evil, just that SMB IT Pro Groups are different, and I would like to explain the good and not so good of the communities I participate in, and the motivations for, and methods of, contribution I see.
SME Community Participation.
In SMB communities are see far greater standardisation of builds due to shared step by step guides, books and blogs pointing to the way an individual has done a certain thing on SBS.
Visual Guides and how to Videos
Now the phenomenon of people just following a guide as a substitute to thinking is not new, if I had a dollar for each of the builds I have seen that are exactly the lab example from Microsoft Official Curriculum…. That is not to say that Step by Step Guides are not a good thing I think they have huge value and have done some myself and they help people to choose similar options as others who have been down the same road.
I am starting to think that a Video that does the same thing as a Step by Step guide is more effective as it allows a conversation, one way granted but the producer can explain options and why things are being configured the way they are. In a written step by step guide the writer is lucky if the text gets read at all, (man is it tempting to put misleading info in the screen shots ;-D)
Here are two examples of installing CSM for SMB 3.x, I am not making a judgement call on a demo vs a full guide but might later:
Small Business Server Books
I sometimes wonder just how many books we need on Small Business Server 2003? I even found one today I had not heard of before, but I think the count is around six or seven, they all vary in depth and technical usefulness but I must say the thing that made people pay attention to the early ones from Harry Brelsford, was the story of Springer Spaniels, an imaginary company that the books walks through a deployment for. These made the reader think about the deployment and I still see many folk deploy against Harry’s Best Practice. (Guys please remember Best practice in 2003 may have been a 10GB C drive partition BUT in 2008 how about making it 60GB or more it is not like you are buying 40GB drives anymore)
Presenting at User Groups
I think Consultants sell consulting and I think this fact is missed universally by consultants who work for other people and are focused on their utilisation.
I have noticed a shift toward selling guides to help people do highly technical things and with varying success. I also notice the trend toward charging a subscription for content on private web sites, this has been happening for quite a while but I’m not sure you will ever see me going that route.
It is my opinion that showing people what you can do, free and openly will not cost consulting sales. I think that when I see someone who can do something that I can’t do or can’t do yet more specifically, I think about how I would engage this person to do the service delivery on my behalf. Why provide a sloppy first cut of an offering that a professional who has already read the manuals so to speak can do, better in less time.
Is this to say I believe everyone should publish the detail of all their offerings to the web and then compete against the people who are “borrowing” your IP without the development costs. Well that would be up to you, personally I would consider a new approach:
- Creating a step by step guide does not give people enough knowledge to customise or maintain most solutions
- Clicking next 15 Times does not make an offering
- Scripting the steps and doing an automated deployment is worth keeping in the consulting toolkit (a one hour session would not cover how to automate usually)
- Deploying a series of features using the press next method makes for expensive manual deployments, making an offering that automates the build based of Group Policy deployed software components, is time efficient.
- Defining the build in step by step form that provides the same outcomes as the scripted one, helps standardisation which I think is a great idea.
So what am I saying thinking about presenting to your peers about what you do well will not cost sales and may even increase partnering opportunities with other SMB IT Pros. Contribute to the community what your are comfortable with but remember well configured standardised deployments help everyone in my opinion.
I am looking forward to what the Sydney SMB IT Professionals will come up with this year.
Here we go I was at the SMBIT Professionals Sydney Group last night and had a real holy crap moment. Lets go on that Journey for a little bit.
Wayne Small had just finished a demo of SBS 2008 including the reporting and showed what was in a basic report and an advanced report, I thought it was received well. That was until the session after the break when Spiceworks 3.0 Beta was demo’d (not by Wayne and on a Documentation topic).
OK that is a pretty interface and pretty comprehensive too, well there were many OOOhs and Ahhhhs, now if I were a betting man. I’d expect to see LOTS of Spice Works instances loaded on SBS 2008 and that will mean Internet Explorer running on the Server opened up so the Advertising networks can run on the console.
Who do I thank in the product team for that configuration, when I see it all over the place??
See before I was just saying that you broke your promises. Now I’m saying and I don’t think I’m wrong, you made the product bundle weaker. Not very cool.
***Update***
To be clear I am NOT saying SBS 2008 is a bad product, I am not saying it is insecure.
I AM saying that if SCE 2007 were still in then there would be nobody thinking about Spiceworks on the SBS Server, and nobody adding Ad Networks to the Trusted Zone to make everything all good.
I understand that Spiceworks could be on a different box, or even run from a browser on a different box, but in SBS Land folk manage the network from the SBS Server they have been taught to do that for more than 10 Years now
I am NOT saying we will abandon SBS or EBS in fact we are committed to both products I'm just not too thrilled by the "solutions" that will fill the void that SCE 2007 left on SBS 2008
***/Update***
Sorry enough said, I think
Last Time I promise.
Wow last night I explained separately no less than 5 times why I made the trip to the SMBIT Professionals Sydney group well the Sydney SBS User Group which I find easier to remember, but such is life.
So for me it is about 6.5 hours in the Truck for a 3 hour meeting and it seems to surprise folk that I’m happy to do that. So let me explain my motivations for turning up and see if these are motivations for others or if I’m just nerdboi with too much time on my hands.
I have been involved with running In-Person Technical Communities in Canberra since 2004, when Wayne Small and David Allinson conned me into starting the Canberra SBS Users Group. It just happed that TechEd was in Canberra that year and I was all community’ d up. While the group was not a huge success and really only had around 10 punters on a really good month I think we had some fun and in the process learned a thing or two, for me some presenting and the realization that a Zero Hair cut is not a really good look for me.
Wanting to succeed at all costs and numbers seemed to be the measure, I broadened the scope of the group to include anything IT Pro to the ultimate unintentional exclusion of SBS. Well numbers improved and I personally learned a LOT about many technologies but as my family will attest if you want to teach and on really interesting technologies you chase the latest beta and talk about the things you think are cool, and it makes your month look a bit like this:
- Find something shiny
- Read every whitepaper or blog post (from softies) and learn all you can
- Start building VMs for the demos because it really is monthly show and tell
- Throw out all the VMs Friday night and rebuild the whole thing because you now know how crap the first demo’s were
- On Monday night realize you have no slide deck so stay up until 3am making one
- Notice you are shagged from last night and the weekend, take the day off to recover and rehearse
- Ha all fun
So in August last year I quit running the Canberra IT Pro User Group and it was taken over by a friend. They gave it away early this year for their own reasons.
So now I find myself without a group to go along to and have looked hard at what to do? Online….? Other communities
- SMBIT Professionals Sydney – Webcasted?
- Sydney Windows Mobile – Webcasted?
- Soon BIG – Webcasted?
- Canberra Security Interchange Group?? a
- Australian Computer Society Branch Forum?? a
- SMBIT Professionals Sydney in person? a
OK two local (Canberra) ticks but neither of these is really a peer group like the SMBIT Pro groups and I am willing to travel to get the networking component which I would not get from the Webcast. So what is better in person?
In the last year I have met / maintained a relationship with the following people all of whom have taught me something, given me a good idea or made me think I should deepen our focus on an area of practice or will teach me something of value moving forward (no pressure);
All of these people have been at live events, and the things that resonate the most of all is who they are or what they say. NOT because of a single presentation I have seen them give or anything other than spending short amounts of time with these folk.
There are exceptions to the in person rule and lets just say I’m not sure I want to be an SPF.
Now the International flavour of the SMB communities we participate in have different reach and different touch and where I started with this might not be where I end but…
I wanted to let people know why I have arranged my Tuesdays to accommodate the monthly trip and so I can have a Don’t F#ck With David Tuesday arvo at least twice a month (I’m not really deep and a regular whole Friday would not be productive).
It is about peer interaction and nothing else, I do not come to these events for the education, because it is my responsibility to myself to know all I can about our areas of focus. If we could make it so that we all sat around having a beer I’m sure I would get as much if not more out the group but not sure we would get the numbers for a monthly Beer O’clock (hard for me to sell to Libby too). In my view if you are expecting to be taught in a 1 Hour session at 100 – 200 Level then there will be gaps that you need to fill before selling anything people tell you on Tuesday night.
My other reason to link in with the Sydney group for me is:
- The partnerships - we used to do quite a bit of local support for members of the Sydney group, and over time we don’t really do too much, I think this is to do with touch. While I want the revenue back because it is pre-sold work done for customers we didn’t need to find, and we get to solve problems and leave. It is kind of a pace change and a way to train our guys to do what we do well and that is be a partner to our clients and a true partner to our partners.
- We have some clients in Sydney and don’t want to open a full office, we do want to sub some of the service delivery to partners but only to ones I know are good at the thing we want to sub. I already have some idea of who I would get to do what in some areas and the more I participate the better for me from a service delivery perspective.
So what have I stumbled around saying? I see no other single success measure to doing what we do in SMB than to network with folk who do what you do. They will extend your reach if you can be a true partner AND just talking will give you clues to be just like the thought leaders and they may not be who you think.
So actions for tomorrow:
- Sign up to the SMB Pre-day at TechEd AU;
- Sign up for the rest of TechEd while you are there. If you listened carefully to Robbie on Tuesday Night most of us are Generalists and TechEd will give you 300 Level sessions on lots of stuff you work with everyday, not to mention if you spend $
1749 $1969 (TechEd Ticket Plus Discounted SMB Pre-Day Ticket) you will save $330 so you can say I bought it on sale. Ask your Partner it works for shoes AND golf clubs;
- Commit to coming to every meeting for the rest of the year, if I can drive to Sydney you can come from the burbs;
- Participate in my NEW Team New Blood, it is a cross between what I did last year, what Robbie is doing with the AU SBS MVPs and what Chris Rue did last year so here is my plan I’m going to sidle up to as many SBSers as I can in the Australian market and do something like these. The difference is that it will be ordinary SMB IT Pros.
Now why do a NEW Team New blood?? I was more than a little amazed by a brief conversation I had in the car park, about that girl I was chatting with earlier. I didn’t really think that the Community of the Yahoo Groups, SBS Shows and such were so far removed from the local punters experience of the community.
I was really surprised and given a list of the people I consider to be my extended family in differing extents, I think folk would be surprised about how anonymous so many of the SBS rock stars really are.
I want to shine a spot light on my local community and see how that builds a local network, so when I send you a questionnaire for your Dossier and capture a quick happy snap in my Blackjack be ready for some fun questions.