|
|
|
|
|
| Welcome to my blog site. Here you will find a fair brain dump of the various bits and pieces that I come across in my travels, consulting, training, and writing. I hope there's a few gems in there for you all. - SBSGuru |
|
3/07/2008 Well - in a move designed to rival Microsoft's own world domination plans, it was revealed today that Vlad Mazek, CEO of Own Web Now Corp, announced that yes he too was indeed coming to Australia. Vlad has bowed to pressure... uh support... from the local community and setup datacenters here in Australia to cater for demand. Personally I think it's all about Vlad needing another place to store his porn that is outside the controls of the US government..
Seriously though, Vlad is offering Exchange mailboxes for $10 USD / mailbox per month - not even WebCentral can do that! Free Sharepoint too. One day we might even see a free set of steak knives with every mailbox sold :-) 2/07/2008Following on from the training last week, we've posted the presentations for the sessions that we did. I'll have the videos done and up on the web early next week (busy this week with a few things). In the meantime, check out Robbies post and links to the slide decks here Looking forward to seeing everyone at the Aussie SMB Preday at TechEd - we're gunna show the rest of the world what a real community looks like with a 350 member group meeting :-) This afternoon I had one of those "blonde" moments... I read all my email and then mark as unread if I want to do something about it later, or if it's something I want to come back to later. I also have mail filed in a number of subfolders for various community groups I belong to. So it's not uncommon for me to have more than 1000 messages in my "Unread" filter view. What I normally do every day is to go to the Unread filter view to see all the mail across my mailbox that I need to review. This is cool because it shows me mail even in subfolders. I can then jump to those mails, and read them or mark the folder as read... well today I did something stupid. I right clicked the Unread Mail filter and selected "Mark All as Read". Dang - what a stupid mistake. Now I have a nice tidy inbox with ALL my mail having been read... be warned... I didn't know this would work, but it does. 1/07/2008... then you need your head examined. With SBS 2008 on the horizon for release later this year, Microsoft have been promoting Software Assurance as they key way to get our customers some form of technology protection as they purchase SBS 2003 right now. In addition to the various rebates Microsoft are offering the SBS resellers (www.sbsrebate.com) they have just announced the formal entitlements for Software Assurance on the official SBS Blog. As for the technical details, yes - you will need to ensure that the customer has a 64bit server to run SBS 2008, and ISA WILL need to be installed on a separate server in order to use it, but look at it this way, you can get the best of breed software for SBS both now and into the future with selling SA on SBS right now. At least quote SA on your SBS 2003 sales right now, so that if the customer does not want it, you can say "I tried to offer it to you, but you refused...". You can lead them to water, but you can't make them drink :-) Yes - that's right 500 partners around Australia that have seen a fairly intensive insight into SBS 2008 and EBS 2008 from Robbie Upcroft and myself. Over the last 3 weeks, we've been to the 5 major capital cities around Australia to ensure that the partners who are invested in the community, i.e. those that attend via the SBS Groups / SMB IT Professional groups around Australia and those in the SBSC channel. Robbie Upcroft has been a breath of fresh air in Microsoft Australia and I believe will be a key reason why SBS and EBS will be successful here. Robbie "GETS" community and knows that even though there is no metric in Microsoft terms to measure the success of these recent events, he is willing to invest in it to make it happen and give back to those that continue to sell and support SBS at a grass roots level. Look out for more efforts in this area such as the SMB PreDay @ Tech Ed Australia on September 2nd. I've had a few people mention to me that after they've installed the latest Trend Worry Free Business Security 5.0 on their SBS servers that they have had some new errors in their event logs. I've not seen this in the upgrades that I've done so I've been a little perplexed as to what it is that they are all talking about. Thanks to Norm Hughes from Quadrant Computers and the Melbourne SBS Group, who has given me the errors he's seeing and some explanation he got from Trend Micro on the issue. Here are the error messages from the System Log: Source: SideBySide Category: None Event ID: 34 Description: Component identity found in manifest does not match the identity of the component requested Source: SideBySide Category: None Event ID: 58 Description: Syntax error in manifest or policy file "C:\smex80temp\Microsoft.VC80.MFCLOC.MANIFEST" on line 5. Source: SideBySide Category: None Event ID: 59 Description: Generate Activation Context failed for C:\smex80temp\MFC80U.DLL. Reference error message: The manifest file contains one or more syntax errors. Norm says that he got the following response from Trend Micro when questioned. "The SidebySide issues are not Trend Micro issues but MIcrosoft ones. This is actually an issue with Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x86). For reference, you can also check this via the Web/Google which is http://forums.primopdf.com/showthread.php?t=1146 To fix the issue, kindly download and apply the Microsoft Fix posted at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=32BC1BEE-A3F9-4C13-9C99-220B62A191EE&displaylang=en " Norm also goes on to say that so far he has only seen these errors on SBS 2003 SP1 systems and NOT on systems that have Windows 2003 SP2 applied - that may be why I've not seen them because all my servers have SP2 already. Thanks Norm for the contribution. 25/06/2008 One of the cool tools I've mentioned in my talks around Australia this week and last week is a free tool that works with Visio to diagram your network. This tool is only available for free until June 30, so you need to act fast to grab it.
Check it out here 19/06/2008This week at the Perth SMB IT Professionals Group, Sandi Hardmeirer, used my laptop to demonstrate ways that potential spyware attacks could take place on unsuspecting users without them even clicking on links in a web page. She showed us a video which displayed how a well respected website was infected with malvertisements (bad advertisements) that redirected the user to other websites without any interaction at all. Following the redirection the bad website would proceed to install malicious code on the users PC for their own nefarious purposes. During the demonstration, Sandi attempted to visit a URL that was known to be bad, and I was impressed to see that my Trend WFBS 5.0 client software blocked her from getting there. From the screenshot below, you can see that the Web Reputation Services built into the Trend software has blocked the web browser from accessing this malicious site. It gave me the option to approve the website I was attempting to go to, but naturally we declined :-) Well done Trend - one more step forward for the good guys. 
18/06/2008Last week I was working with a client and I needed to be able to configure the timezone on machines automatically by some form of automated process. The workstations we needed to configure were spread across 5 separate time zones in Australia and New Zealand. Digging into this some more, I found that I could easily set the time zone based on a command line script as below. "control.exe timedate.cpl,,/Z (GMT+10:00) Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney" You can easily change the section after the /Z to be the exact same text as what you see when you go to change the time zone manually. I elected to create 5 individual batch files and then call those batch files from the existing site specific logon scripts. This way when we move a PC to a site, and the local user logs on, it will set the time zone correctly. I also explored the option of setting this as a computer startup script via Group Policy. Doing it this way would have meant that I could apply a GPO to the specific site via Active Directory Sites and Services that would automatically affect all computers in that sites IP subnet. In the end though the reason I chose not to do this was that it would also affect travelling users who visit a remote office. When the travelling user connects their PC to the LAN, they are immediately in that local site, and therefore if they rebooted their computer while on that site, their time zone settings would have been modified. This would have had the side effect of ALSO changing their outlook calendar appointments which would have caused much confusion. Last night @ the Perth SMB IT Professionals Group meeting, I met the orange shirt brigade, also known locally as PCGuru :-) These guys are a small SMB focused group that stand out from the crowd if for nothing more than their bright orange shirts. Their Managing Director - Jason Jordan told me about their funky cars they use to drive around in - check out the pictures below. Jason also gave me some thoughts on the local market too. PCGURU focuses on the 5 to 50 seat market and has recently made the transition to decide NOT to service the domestic/residential market after reviewing their business from top to bottom. They use best of breed products including SBS 2003 and Trends Antivirus product to protect their clients (welcome to the family guys). The team at PCGURU is now 20 strong and growing well, with the only limitation being finding SBSC's with personality - I can relate to that problem well! Well done Jason on creating an image that is hard to miss and hopefully puts some fun into dealing with difficult IT Issues. Have you got an interesting advertising approach for your SMB focused business? If so let me know - I'm keen to get this information out to the rest of the world :-) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|