November

As you may have heard or read here, we recently launched the ExchangeDefender Migration & Support services for our hosted Exchange, Lync and SharePoint 2013 cloud platform. These services line us up with our most successful and fastest growing partners by giving them the power of scale – through executing their clients email migration to the cloud on their behalf for free. What it’s basically doing is saying “Sell the cloud, mark it up, charge for migration – get paid and we’ll do all the technical, coordination and management legwork behind the scenes so you don’t have to work on the weekends or dedicate a ton of time on it”. To say it’s going well would be a huge understatement. I’ve actually personally dedicated all of my Q4 time to it.

This project is something we really cannot afford to fuck up. The demand for it is off the charts and it’s something I frankly misjudged – I always figured that the pride of doing the technical work would be something that MSPs and VARs would never delegate. But as I keep on hearing, money over technical pride all day and night. So live and learn – I’ve been working from home for the past week or so and will continue till mid December. That said, my time for pretty much everything else is shot.

My appearance at the ConnectWise conference and associated events will be minimal.

There is no conspiracy theory here – I still have my vendor pass and my entire team will be there throughout the show. Virtually all the VPs will be there at one point or another and I’ll do my best to hop in for a few hours of meetings but beyond that I hope you can understand how important the task we have ahead of us is and how important it is that we get this right. Nobody is mad at me, I am not mad at anyone, there are no issues with Shockey Monkey, I do not feel that ConnectWise is irrelevant, I do not lack respect for their partners, I do not <insert any negative impression you have for me not being out there the next 2 months>

I typically go all out for large IT events in Orlando when Microsoft, VMWare and so on bring in tens of thousands of people and lots of our international partners get a single chance to see me and visit us. In the past I’ve pulled the crazy hours and done every party and every meeting but this year the schedule is just shot.

Anyhow, wanted to explain myself because I don’t want this conversation to take place a 100 times and people typically assume the worst or try to find some hidden meaning out of pure business. The trust and faith our partners are putting in ExchangeDefender to work with your clients directly is something I don’t take lightly and we are learning more and more each day. These projects are being designed and managed from the top of the organization as we probably have only one shot at making this a flawless experience for our partners. This is our chance to repay our partners for making us so successful over the years and frankly, we can’t bugfix this later, it has to be done now. Hence a blog post at 5AM because this is the only time nobody will pick up the phone  

Thanks for understanding. I’d rather be partying, but those of you that have met with me about this project so far know just how significant it is. If we haven’t talked about it, we need to, email me. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing you and feeling bad about missing out on stuff.