How do you work this thing?

Yesterday’s article is really bringing a lot of attention, glad you liked it. To be honest, I am still very involved in the technical side of Own Web Now, especially the new generation of products, but I have stopped blogging about them because they brought in far too much tech support via email form that said “don’t email me your tech support issues, take them to Microsoft newsgroups”; But since Exchange 2007 won’t be touched by SBSers for quite some time I can talk about it without fear.

A while back someone said they would pay to have me teach about how I work this stuff, particularly the troubleshooting, deployment and management. I played it off politely and modestly, very much unlike vladville.com, but the reason why you don’t see these kinds of presentations in SMB and the reason you will not see these kinds of technical presentations in the SMB space is that at their very core they are both too simplistic and too complex for the audience. Contradiction? Not really. Most of this stuff is very simple once you know the basics and know where to look for.

Let me take you through the thinking process step by step, yesterdays post for example:

First, I checked the site through the web browser. This told me that the web server works, that the domain did not expire, that the DNS is properly pointed at the server. This effort took all of five seconds, but it did not send me down a path of troubleshooting a problem that does not exist. For example, there is no need to restart IIS – if it gave you an error code that means its working so you need to check its logs or App/System log for errors.

Second, usual suspects. Check that stores are mounted, check that the app pools are started, general service checks.

Third, event log – what is causing the actual problem. This is time consuming exactly once. That first time you realize what the problem is, what the solution is and how it gets solved.

That is so simplistic that it would take two minutes to explain, but if you were an SBSer and didn’t know the basics and just pushed wizards over and over this would be a 6 day overview covering everything from how the Internet works all the way to registering ASP.NET correctly.

Anyhow, I just wanted to offer an explanation for why you’re not seeing in-depth technical training in SMB — the basics are far too complex for beginners and the solutions are, dare I say it, obvious to anyone that understands the basics.

Funny how that is all that separates people making teens per hour as opposed to six figures a year, eh?