Vlad “on the road again” and other rants

Mega-rant ahead, thread lightly 🙂 Personal Schedule I'm boarding a plane to Washington DC in a few hours so I'm looking forward to meeting some SBSers up there. Sincerest apologies to my Florida SBS kinfolk, they all scheduled their meetings today and tomorrow so making it to any/all of them was impossible. Pimpin' aint EZ I was very honored to be invited as a guest on Eric Ligman's Small Business Specialist Talk Session webcast. Amy Luby and I had a great time and the recorded webcast is available here so check it out. This was a business-style webcast giving partners an idea the kind of success they can realize from the Small Business Specialist designation. Sorry about the voice quality. Thanks for the lovely sentiments, but no, the mic was not in my mouth. And its not LiveMeeting's fault, when you have all sorts of inputs, different headsets, etc.. it is impossible to level things out. We try to at the SBS Show but it takes so much time and effort that I frankly hope Eric Ligman can spend elsewhere. Besides, this is why we have added Susanne Dansey to our lineup, so we can have some sophistication to our show. We are in final stages of integrating some classical music behind her voice in an effort to sound more like NPR 🙂 Regarding the other comments – yes, I am shameless. I plugged no less than 10 sites during Eric's webcast not only because I'm the SBS pimp but because I believe you NEED to be informed and take advantage of every opportunity. You should know what Microsoft is offering in the way of incentives, what the customer is thinking from Susan Bradley, what the partner in USA is doing, what a partner in UK is doing, who can train you to do it, who can help you with day-to-day, etc. It is NOT easy, this is a profession people. But as to my pimp skills:

Subject: Holler at a player Heard the webcast. Two notes: 1) Step back from the mic. Just because you're in Orlando and he is in Redmond doesn't require you to yell loud enough so he can hear you over the air. Thats why you have a phone! 2) With skills like that you should blow off Google's offer. Move to Las Vegas instead and work the strip for the strippers. Those Mexicans don't have anything on you.

I have wonderful friends, don't I? SBS Show & Depth This kind of started on the feedback forums of the SBS Show #8 announcement regarding how deep we went into the patch management stuff. Philip is a good friend and I don't take his comments as criticism but I'm sure many others are wondering the very same thing so I'll come out and say it yet again. We're an SBS Show. It is about entertainment and about information for those of you that are not 100% technical. If you're in SBS and you are 100% technical you are not going to be very successful because SBS by its nature is more about business than it is about technology. With the exception of perhaps BizTalk, there is no other Microsoft product where you need to be more in tune with the customers business needs than anything else to create an effective deployment that works for your customer. If you're just a wizard jockey thats not good either but you have to have a mix of two. I've spent years supporting Microsoft platforms and meeting partners through many Microsoft roadshows and I can feel the 2×4 coming right behind me – We are NOWHERE NEAR the technical competency we ought to be in the SBS land. How many of you backup? How many of you have a patch strategy? How many of you can honestly sit down and say that you've done everything that you possibly can to secure and assure smooth business operation of SBS? If you're saying "thats me" then tell me how many of your partners and coleagues are not. This is what I looked at for years. Chris and I talked about this at great length and our conversations in private are nothing like those you hear on the SBS Show. We are both MCSE's and CCNA's and we can make you tune out of the SBS Show in a split second if we actually talk about what we do. What you can't hear during the SBS Show is the first 30 minutes of the recording we did with Susan where we kept on back-tracking trying to get her to dumb it down (a lot) because that is not the objective of the SBS Show. So what is? The purpose of the SBS Show is to educate and inform the largest portion of SBS admin users, IT professionals and owners. Most of us are not Small Business Specialists. Most of us don't have IMF or Exchange configured correctly. Most of us have heard of WSUS but do not have it implemented. Most of us consider off-site backups, disaster recovery and business continuity very important things…. but most of us do not practice it. The goal of the SBS Show therefore is to give you an hour or so and get you going immediately. Whatever excuse you have for not doing what we're talking about should be something you can do right after you listen to our show. You're busy, I get it, but you're not going to get less busy with more and more software and customers to support. If you're really technical there is the Inside SBS show by Mark Stanfill. Their show is awesome, it is like a 200-300 level Technet webcast except geared at SBS. Done not by marketing and Death-by-Powerpoint crew but by the people that live and support SBS. One day when we've covered all the essentials we will get more technical, but I know my SBSers. What is the point of explaining group policy, propagation and insides of WSUS if you haven't even installed it? If you're that advanced you're in great hands with Mark, trust me. But I know that most of you are not and Chris, Susanne and I will keep the light on for you. Thats my promise. There are several things I am really good at. Really really good at. At everything else I'm a hack at best. Every now and then I need a solid kick in the ass and I want someone to explain the very basics and once I understand the theory and execution I can figure out the syntax and all the details. Thats what SBS Show is – a giant kick in your ass to get started managing SBS and Small Business IT the right way. I will leave the rest of the commentary to Mr. Chris Rue and my right and honorable friend Susanne Dansey. Orlando IT Pro Still coming off the high from last weeks SQL 2005 Launch. Wow, what an event. Culminis really hooked us up big time, I am writing a little report explain just how/what we did. But going forward, we do have a meeting next week, Thursday, Dec 22, 2005. We will have a massive braindump event going over all the things you can use to manage the Windows Server network better. We'll review the new Windows Server R2, Exchange SP2, MOM, WSUS, baselining, BCM on the server, etc. Basically we'll take turns talking about what we use and how we use it so leave the laptop at home for this one and be ready to share.