Nick's SMB Blog

Moved House

2009-08-17T12:49:00.001-07:00

I’ve moved my blog from here to my own site, please update your links :)

www.nicklloyd.it/blog

SBS 2008 and Anonymous Mail

2009-07-31T01:42:00.001-07:00

As previously mentioned we’re running CommitCRM as our CRM and PSA tool and the program needs to interact with Exchange to both receive and send emails. Although we had this working to a degree, I finally got around to troubleshooting why we weren’t getting certain emails through. I had previously read on UKSBSG that Exchange 2007 by default wouldn’t allow anon email to be routed internally – something a scan to email device might need to do. CommitCRM has a tool to test the email settings and this was giving the following error:

AUTH CRAM-MD5
504 5.7.4 Unrecognized authentication type
AUTH LOGIN
RequestDone Rq=11 Error=504 5.7.4 Unrecognized authentication type

A quick Google didn’t turn up anything useful so I turned to the ever resourceful MS Partner Online Technical Community (PTOC). As always I got a extensive reply and because it was in the SBS forum this was within four hours. Shawn from MS explained that the application was trying to use “UTH CRAM-MD5”, but that this was supported by Exchange 2003 and not Exchange 2007. To work around this problem Shawn laid out the steps to create a new Receive Connector for Commit to use:

1. In EMC, expand Server Configuration, highlight the Hub Transport.
2. Start new Receive Connector wizard
3. On the Introduction page, follow these steps:
a. In the Name: field, type a meaningful name for this connector. This name is used to identify the connector.
b. In the Select the intended use for this connector: field, select Custom.
c. Click Next.
4. On the Local network settings page, click Next
5. On the Remote Network settings page, remove the existing 0.0.0.0 - 255.255.255.255 entry. Then add only the IP of the application server to the list
6. After completing the Wizard, open properties of the new created receive Connector
7. Enable the option "Exchange Servers" under Permission group
8. On the authentication page, enable "Externally secured" option
9. Restart Microsoft Exchange Transport service

This helped partially, but I also needed to allow Commit to send emails anonymously:

1. Open the properties of the Receive Connector we created.
2. Under the Permission Group tab, enable Anonymous users.
3. Under Authentication tab, only enable "Basic Authentication"
4. Restart the Exchange Transport Service.

I was now closer and could send emails internally, but not externally. Via further communication with Shawn I discovered that Exchange 2007 doesn’t allow anonymous users to relay, but this can be changed with the following command in the Exchange Management Shell:

Get-ReceiveConnector "Connector_Name" | Add-ADPermission -User "NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON" -ExtendedRights "Ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Recipient"

After using this command email started flowing correctly for Commit and I’m pretty sure the same setup could be used for other devices/apps that need to route email.

Many thanks once again to the guys at MS PTOC, life is a lot easier when you know someone will have the answer.

Technorati Tags: SBS 2008,Exchange 2007,SBS

Getting Organised – A CRM Solution

2009-07-19T10:00:00.001-07:00

We’ve dipped our toe in various CRM packages over the last couple of years here at Sirona, but we never quite realised how important it was until we finally had one place for everything.

We started our CRM journey using vTiger CRM, a free branch of the open source program SugarCRM. Our primary requirement was a ticketing solution, but we also populated it with customer data and played around with it’s invoicing capability. We used vTiger for a good twelve months until we decided to switch to using the ticketing system built in to Kaseya. The main reason for the switch was all our customer’s PCs and servers were listed in Kaseya and tickets could be logged against them. This meant we could run reports against individual machines to spot any issues.

We used Kaseya for probably six months until I started to want something more. My main aim was for customers to be able to email our support email address and have a ticket automatically logged. Having previously looked at both Connectwise and Autotask, I knew these products could do this. We’ve had demos of both and they are fantastic looking products; I’m personally sold on Connectwise. However, the cost of both is just prohibitive for us at the moment. I think in a couple of years when we’ve grown some more we will head down the Connectwise route, but until then I needed something else.

What initially got me thinking about moving away from Kaseya was stumbling across Cerberus Helpdesk. Cerberus is an email based helpdesk with decent pricing and was a definite contender. Seeing as we were thinking of a move, I decided I needed to look at more than just one option. Searching brought up a couple of other options, Blue Folder and Zoho CRM being the two other likely candidates. I spent a fair amount of time looking at these three and had finally decided that Blue Folder was the option when a friend suggested CommitCRM.

Now CommitCRM offered a lot more than any of the others we’d either used or trialled, in fact it bills itself as a PSA tool for IT service companies. Like any good service it offered a free trial so I downloaded it and started using it in earnest. That was about two months ago, we’ve now paid for it and use it on a daily basis.

Commit allows tickets to be logged by email and will continue to track email conversations regarding tickets. It’s not the slickest of tracking, but it works and the Commit team are actively working on improving it (we’re on the new beta and it’s already improved). We have all our customer’s assets in there so tickets are tracked against the right asset. We’re able to expand assets from just hardware to anything, so we track all software purchases and licenses. We can also track contracts as to what they cover and how much they cost. Commit will link to Quickbooks, so we’re working on getting that working to simplify the monthly invoicing tasks. We track every piece of work we do against the relevant contract, so we can see how much time we spend on a contract in a month. This will help us both to see whether a contract is profitable and also demonstrate to customers the value of their contract.

It’s still early days, but it’s already making a great difference in the way our business runs. It’s great having one place for everything, but it’s also vital that we use it for everything. Sometimes it’s easy to do it the old way, but we have to change our ways and ensure that if it happens, it happens in Commit. Going forward it’s great to know we’ll have one place for all the history for all our customers.

Hamachi Geekness

2009-06-12T08:20:00.001-07:00

I was bathed in geekness the other day when I successfully shared my CD-ROM drive across the Internet to solve a little problem…

I was connected to an SBS server doing some application maintenance when the always annoying message ‘CD Required’ popped up. If I was a bit more organised I’d have a copy of the CDs backed up on the local hard drive, but alas I am not. I didn’t want to drive out to site to insert a CD and my usual contact there was also on holiday. I had the CDs I needed in our office, so I thought there must be a way to share my local CD-ROM drive with the server. A quick Google brought up nothing, so I was about to admit defeat and plan a trip to site when I remembered Hamachi.

For those of you who aren’t aware of the product, it’s a small piece of software that will map a VPN between two places without opening any ports. It does this by using a third party to establish the VPN, but after this all data is only sent between the two parties at either end. The software has the blessing of security guru Steve Gibson, so I’m more than happy to use it on a client site.

In this instance I fired up Hamachi on my laptop and on the server and established a tunnel. After sharing out my CD-ROM drive on my Vista laptop I mapped to it over the tunnel. In the application I was modifying I pointed it to the newly mapped drive and lo and behold it grabbed the files it needed off the CD! Application updated, job done.

Behold, I am a geek!

Sirona now Microsoft Licensing Specialists (Lite)

2009-06-12T02:10:00.001-07:00

My business partner and I attended a MS bootcamp on Licensing yesterday, hosted by Ingram Micro with a trainer from Microsoft. It was an impressive set up at the Manchester Airport Radisson hotel and a great spread thrown in for lunch. Great to see a distributor putting on events in the north and makes me more inclined to move my business away from C2K to Ingram.

The MLSS Lite accreditation is made up of two sections – products and licensing. The ‘Lite’ name certainly rang true and as a techy who is very familiar with Microsoft’s product line there wasn’t anything mind blowing on that side, but my business partner got more out of it. The licensing side re-enforced a lot of what I’ve learnt but also threw up a few surprises, one being another OEM drawback. I always knew that if you upgraded a CPU or mobo under an OEM OS license that license was then invalid. However, what I learnt yesterday was that if a CPU or mobo fails outside warranty, then that also invalidates the OEM license… All the more reason to get at least 3 years warranty when dealing with OEM and it re-enforces the 3 year lifespan of a PC.

After lunch we were all able to sit the two exams and then get them marked while we waited. I’m very pleased to say Sirona now has two licensing specialists and we’ll now look to get it mentioned in our marketing literature.

The next step is to think about doing the higher level courses and exams, but I’m not sure of the relevance to our sector. We’re generally dealing with 5 to 35 users and therefore only a very small area of licensing is applicable. I’m hesitant to invest more time into the higher level accreditations as understandably they don’t just concentrate on our market. Maybe the powers that be will revisit this in the future and create an accreditation linked directly to SBSC, but until then I’ll just make do with my ‘Lite’.

SBS 2008 – Outlook Anywhere Hanging Outlook

2009-04-03T00:55:00.001-07:00

Outlook over HTTPS, now renamed to Outlook Anywhere, is a great feature that we use in-house and at a number of clients. It basically gives you Exchange connectivity outside of the network without using a VPN. I use it on my laptop as my primary profile and it means Outlook works whether I’m in the office or not.

After recently deploying SBS 2008 in the office we noticed Outlook would struggle to connect over HTTPS. Once connected it would generally work without a problem for a number of hours, but it would then become un-responsive and we had to move to OWA while it recovered. If you left Outlook it would generally recover, although it could take up to an hour.

I raised this with my ever resourceful friends over at microsoft.private.sbsc.windowsserver.sbs and yet again they came back with the right answer. In our case that was the TCP Chimney Offload problem, as described in this MS article.

Following the above article I found that TCP Chimney Offload was already disabled in the OS, but not on the network card. First of all I replaced the network card drivers that the SBS setup had installed with the correct drivers from HP. Then in the Advanced tap of the network card properties I set ‘Receive Side Scaling’ to disabled.

These two actions together have cured all the problems we were having with Outlook and another hats off to Robert in the newsgroups.

SBS 2008 – Stop Mail Being Marked as Spam in the IMF

2009-04-03T00:35:00.001-07:00

The new anti-spam engine in SBS 2008 seems to be doing a good job on one of our customer’s sites. However, the interface isn’t the greatest and I struggled to find a way to stop a particular email being marked as spam. My struggle was explained when I raised a post in microsoft.private.sbsc.windowsserver.sbs – you can’t do it through the GUI, you need to use the Exchange shell (EMS). One note about said shell, always right-click and choose ‘Run as Administrator’, certain commands, including the ones below, don’t work if you run it as a normal user.

Use the following shell command to add sender SMTP addresses to the BypassedSenders list:

Set-ContentFilterConfig -BypassedSenders foo@somedomain.com,foo2@somedomain.com

Use the following command to whitelist the sending domain:

Set-ContentFilterConfig -BypassedSenderDomains somedomain.com,someotherdomain.com

You don’t get any confirmation that the action has been taken, but you also don’t get any error message. Use the following commands to list which users or domains have been added to the BypassedSenders lists:

Get-contentFilterConfig |fl BypassedSenders
Get-contentFilterConfig |fl BypassedSenderDomains

Thanks to Robert Li in the newsgroups for this info.

Related info:

How to Specify Recipient and Sender Exceptions for Content Filtering
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa995952.aspx

Get-ContentFilterConfig
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998807.aspx

Technorati Tags: sbs 2008,exchange 2007,anti-spam

Windows 7 and SBS 2008

2009-02-11T05:50:00.001-08:00

The team at the Official SBS Blog have posted details on how to get your Windows 7 machine running on your SBS 2008 network:

Using Windows 7 BETA With SBS 2008

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,SBS 2008

Windows 7

2009-02-11T05:44:00.001-08:00

I’ve been using Windows 7 since the public beta and I’ve been very impressed. I’ve got it dual-booting with Vista on my laptop and running as my primary OS on my home machine. It runs very nicely, although these are both pretty new machines (Core 2 Duos). From what I’ve heard it will run on lesser hardware, but it still needs to be current gen hardware. One example is it runs quite happily on Atom based Netbooks, where Vista would struggle.

Unfortunately the public beta has now finished, however I’m sure readers of this blog will either have already got it, or know certain means to lay their hands on it. Also, if you’ve got TechNet, it’s still there for the taking.

I did run into a problem with it on my desktop yesterday where a RAR set made in the old 00x style wouldn’t open. However, trying the same RAR set on Vista produced the same problem. Luckily 7zip came to the rescue and happily opened the set for me.

One other problem which I’m hoping will be addressed by a driver update is some sort of conflict with my video card on the desktop. It’s a ATi 2400 Pro and I had the same problem for a while on Vista. The driver crashes and Vista would usually recover, however Win7 seems get stuck in a loop which eventually crashes the system. I’m still running the MS driver installed for the card when I installed the OS, so I’m hoping getting the ATi driver will resolve the issue.

All in all Win7 is a polished version of Vista and I’m a Vista fan. However, I think Win7 will also win over some Vista haters – it’s certainly a lot more OS X like which will to be some people’s taste.

How to Stop WSUS Downloading Updates in SBS 2008

2009-02-04T00:52:00.001-08:00

In SBS 2008 WSUS is enabled by default and will start downloading updates once setup is complete. We use a centralised update service which manages updates for all our clients and means we only have to approve updates once and not for each server.

WSUS in SBS 2008 gives you the option to not install updates and download only. However, this means the server is still downloading all the updates and wasting bandwidth and disk space.

I raised this issue with the guys in microsoft.private.sbsc.windowsserver.sbs and after some internal discussion they came back and said the only way to stop the downloads was to remove WSUS. Unfortunately this has the side effect of stopping SBS reporting on patch level, but our centralised software covers this anyway.

So I’ve followed MS’s advise and so far so good. No unnecessary downloads and the server is ticking along nicely.

Technorati Tags: sbs 2008,microsoft,wsus

SBSC Survey

2009-02-03T15:15:00.001-08:00

Emily Lambert has posted about the Small Business Specialist Community online survey and the deadline for this is Feb 6th – this Friday. If you’ve got five minutes today, please head on over there and fill out the survey to help MS understand us SBS’ers a bit better.

Technorati Tags: SBSC,Microsoft

Change the Anti-Spam Setting in SBS 2008

2009-02-03T15:11:00.001-08:00

SBS 2008 has the Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) enabled by default, so out of the box mail will be filtered and the default behaviour is block rather than quarantine. One of our customers had some missing mails so I needed to adjust this and Microsoft’s very own SBS expert Dave Overton had done a neat little blog entry that sorted it out in a few clicks:

http://uksbsguy.com/blogs/doverton/archive/2008/05/30/how-to-change-spam-settings-on-exchange-2007-sbs-2008-to-enable-some-all-more-spam-to-be-delivered-to-an-account-for-analysis.aspx

Thanks Dave.

Technorati Tags: SBS 2008,Exchange 2007,Microsoft

SBS 2008 – SendAs and Full Mailbox Permissions

2009-01-14T02:55:00.001-08:00

This turns out to be a lot simpler than I thought, but a Google didn’t give me the answer, so I thought I’d share what I found. Thanks to the guys in microsoft.private.sbsc.windowsserver.sbs for the information:

SendAs Permissions

To use the Exchange Management Console to grant a user the Send As permission for another user's mailbox
1. Start the Exchange Management Console.
2. In the console tree, click Recipient Configuration.
3. In the result pane, select the mailbox for which you want to grant the Send As permission.
4. In the action pane, under the mailbox name, click Manage Send As Permission. The Manage Send As Permission wizard opens.
5. On the Manage Send As Permission page, click Add.
6. In Select User or Group, select the user to which you want to grant the Send As permission, and then click OK.
7. Click Manage.
8. On the Completion page, the Summary states whether the Send As permission was successfully granted. The summary also displays the Exchange Management Shell command that was used to grant the Send As permission.
9. Click Finish.

To use the Exchange Management Shell to grant a user the Send As permission for another user's mailbox run the following command (Run the shell as admin)
Add-ADPermission "Mailbox" -User "Domain\User" -Extendedrights "Send As"

Source: microsoft.private.sbsc.windowsserver.sbs

More info: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998291.aspx

=================================================

Full Mailbox Access

To use the Exchange Management Console to grant the Full Access permission for a mailbox
1. Start the Exchange Management Console.
2. In the console tree, click Recipient Configuration.
3. In the result pane, select the mailbox for which you want to grant the Full Access permission.
4. In the action pane, under the mailbox name, click Manage Full Access Permission. The Manage Full Access Permission wizard opens.
5. On the Manage Full Access Permission page, click Add.
6. In Select User or Group, select the user to which you want to grant the Full Access permission, and then click OK.
7. Click Manage.
8. On the Completion page, the Summary states whether the Full Access permission was successfully granted. The summary also displays the Exchange Management Shell command that was used to grant the Full Access permission.
9. Click Finish.

To use the Exchange Management Shell to grant the Full Access permission for a mailbox
" Run the following command to add the Full Access permission directly to the mailbox (Run shell as admin)
Add-MailboxPermission "Mailbox" -User "Trusted User" -AccessRights FullAccess

Source: microsoft.private.sbsc.windowsserver.sbs

More info: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996343.aspx

Technorati Tags: sbs 2008,exchange 2007

HP Bloatware on Business Machines…

2008-12-17T14:16:00.001-08:00

We switched to reselling HP rather than Dell earlier this year and generally we’ve been very happy with the move. I’ve blogged about my dissatisfaction with Dell before so I wont go over it all again. Suffice to say they’re not channel friendly despite what they may claim.

We’ve supplied a few bits of HP kit here and there and been pleased with what we’ve seen. Last week we upgraded a five user network to HP kit and I was very disappointed to discover the large amount of bloatware shipping on the business machines we had supplied.

Something like a PDF reader I can accept, as well as HP’s various pieces of software – you’ll get that whatever the vendor. But when I discovered they’d installed the AOL IE Toolbar I felt they’d crossed the line. Not only was this ugly toolbar taking up desktop space, they’d also changed the default search provider in the top right-hand corner to AOL and the homepage was some amalgamation between AOL and HP.

With consumer PCs I can accept a certain level of bloatware, this often helps the vendor keep the costs down and it’s just become the norm. But when you’re paying a premium for high-end HP laptops and desktops I expect them to be clean of such crap.

Unfortunately there’s nothing they’re going to do about it, I just expect better from HP. I’ll just know in the future to include some extra time for each PC, to allow clean up before installing at customers.

Technorati Tags: HP,Bloatware

SBS 2008 Training Comes to Stockport

2008-11-19T05:34:00.001-08:00

After seeing heavily subsidised SBS 2008 training being offered in such places as the US, Canada and Australia I raised the question with Emily Lambert at the SBS 2008 launch event in Manchester. Emily asked me to drop her a mail with examples of this training, which I duly did and copied in our friendly MS PAL, Vijay.

It turned out a number of people had raised this with Emily and in early November they came up trumps with a 3 day workshop in London for only £200. After consulting my heavily pregnant wife we agreed it was worth the time away from home and I booked my spot. Unfortunately the demand had been so high all the places had gone and I’d been put on the waiting list.

Meanwhile Ric from NetLink IT had been musing over the fact that the only offering was in London and wondered out loud to Emily if we could have some further North. I obviously backed this whole heartedly, not only because I didn’t have a place on the course, but it’s always nicer to be closer to home for these events.

Last night I was catching up on my blog roll and discovered Microsoft had come up trumps again with new courses announced across the country.

Course Title: 44CO101 - Implementing and Administering Windows® Small Business Server 2008

Location	Date	Duration
London	01/12/08	3 days
London	12/01/09	2 days
Edinburgh	15/01/09	2 days
Stockport	16/02/09	2 days
Birmingham	19/02/09	2 days

My booking is confirmed and paid for, I hope to see some of you there.

Single CAL Open License Confirmed

2008-11-17T00:18:00.001-08:00

Typical, that on the same day I blog about a missing part number, my question is answered. I’m not complaining though, I always thought it was just an oversight. I’ve updated my spreadsheet with the missing part number (6UA-02673) and many thanks to Emily Lambert for confirming the information. And just to confirm how complicated MS licensing can be, here are all the part numbers for what is basically the same product:

6UA-02656 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP C Device CAL

6UA-02670 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP NL Device CAL

6UA-02671 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP C User CAL

6UA-02673 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP NL User CAL

6UA-02750 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Lic/SA Pack OLP NL GOVT Device CAL

6UA-02751 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Lic/SA Pack OLP NL GOVT User CAL

6UA-02752 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste SA OLP NL GOVT Device CAL

6UA-02753 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste SA OLP NL GOVT User CAL

6UA-02754 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 OLP NL GOVT Device CAL

6UA-02755 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 OLP NL GOVT User CAL

6UA-02542 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP B AE Device CAL

6UA-02543 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP NL AE Device CAL

6UA-02544 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP B AE User CAL

6UA-02658 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP NL Device CAL

6UA-02659 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP C User CAL

6UA-02661 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP NL User CAL

6UA-02662 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP C Device CAL

6UA-02664 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP NL Device CAL

6UA-02665 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP C User CAL

6UA-02667 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP NL User CAL

6UA-02668 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP C Device CAL

6UA-02545 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP NL AE User CAL

6UA-02546 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP B AE Device CAL

6UA-02547 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP NL AE Device CAL

6UA-02548 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP B AE User CAL

6UA-02549 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP NL AE User CAL

6UA-02550 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP B AE Device CAL

6UA-02551 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP NL AE Device CAL

6UA-02552 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP B AE User CAL

6UA-02553 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP NL AE User CAL

Technorati Tags: licensing,sbs 2008,microsoft

Single CALs? Great. But Where’s the Open License Option?

2008-11-14T01:43:00.001-08:00

From a costs point of view one of the biggest changes with the new version of SBS is the availability of single CALs. With SBS 2003 the minimum purchase was five, so if you had a customer with six users they would have to buy ten CALs. For budget conscious customers this wasn’t the greatest piece of news when discussing implementing SBS.

The initial minimum purchase is still the five CALs that ship with SBS Standard or Premium, but after that you can switch to purchasing single CALs. When drawing up a reference spreadsheet of the various part numbers for SBS 2008 and CAL options, I stumbled across a missing piece. I found the part numbers for single CALs in Open Value License (OVL), FPP and OEM, but not Open License (OL).

Previously we’ve almost always sold OEM, but we’re now shifting towards Open Licenses to enable transfer rights, which in turn also allows our new DR plan to work. OVL is one option but has the added cost of Software Assurance (SA) which I don’t see the value in as SBS 2008 isn’t going to be replaced in the next 3 years. Saying that there is one good reason to sell OVL and that’s the split payment option – a customer can pay for the licenses over 3 years, instead of up front and there’s no added cost, in effect 0% APR.

So unless a customer wants to split their payments, we’re going to be offering OL, but now we run into the problem that there doesn’t seem to be a single CAL license option… Surely this is just an oversight on MS’s part, but so far my questions to them about it via Eric Ligman and Emily Lambert remain unanswered…

I’ll keep looking and add an update here if I find anything, but if anyone else already knows the answer I’d love to hear it.

Technorati Tags: licensing,sbs 2008,microsoft

Time to Migrate to SBS 2008

2008-11-12T12:36:00.001-08:00

Today is the official launch of Windows Essential Server Solutions, which to you and me really means Small Business Server 2008. Here at Sirona Solutions we’ve been running the beta for some time, but not as our production server. We’re now recommending SBS 2008 to potential new customers, so it’s definitely time to start using it on a daily basis. So what’s holding us back? Lack of disk space and memory…

We run our production servers on a Dell PE2950 running VMWare ESX 3.5 and it’s been an excellent solution. Unfortunately what was a very decent spec just over a year ago, is now not enough to add a fourth virtual server. All eight memory slots are full (8 x 1Gb) and to upgrade it you have to remove the lot. Eight lots of 2Gb is expensive enough, but looking forward perhaps the even more expensive option of 4 x 4Gb would be better, leaving four slots free for further expansion. As for the disk space, I’m hoping VMWare support are going to be able to help me clear up some files to enough room.

Once we get past the problem of upgrading the server, the business of actually migrating comes up. Microsoft have released the official migration document and Jamie Burgess has a few useful pointers on his blog too. VMWare has the great feature of Snapshots which allow you to take a point-in-time image which you can revert back to in seconds. I’ve used this in previous major software changes and it’s like having the undo feature in Word and the value is even greater in a migration scenario.

Vijay has posted some good notes on his experience of upgrading and I’ll be sure to do the same when we move over. Has anyone else already done the deed?

Technorati Tags: sbs 2008,migration,vmware

Symantec Backup Exec Road Show

2008-11-07T05:37:00.001-08:00

I’m sat in Birmingham New Street station waiting for my train back to Stockport to leave. I travelled down this morning for Symantec’s Backup Exec Road Show and it was certainly worth the trip. I haven’t used Backup Exec since my corporate days, but recent research has shown it’s still considered the backup software to use and we’re preparing a new backup strategy to offer to our customers. Alongside this strategy is a disaster recovery option and that was my main reason for attending the road show today.

Backup Exec System Recovery (BESR) is a very impressive piece of software for, surprisingly enough, recovering your system. It’s basically an imaging solution with support for incremental backups. So you do one big image of your system to an internal drive, USB device, NAS box or even an FTP server (really needs to be local). Once that big image is done you can then schedule incrementals, which means your image is kept up to date while the backup times are kept to a minimum. In the event of a disaster rendering your server inoperable you boot your standby server from a PE boot CD, point at the image and within an hour your standby server is running just like your original.

Recovery to dissimilar hardware as above is one option, but what if you don’t even want to wait an hour? BESR also gives you the option to create virtual images of your production server, giving you a VMDK file for VMWare or the Hyper-V equivalent (note to self, must read up on Hyper-V). Incrementals are supported again, so you do that one big backup and then just run an incremental each night/hour/minute, whatever your preference. Then in the event of a disaster you turn up to site with your loan server already running VMWare/Hyper-V, copy over the virtual image file and have the server up and running in ten or fifteen minutes!

Finally another great use for BESR is one that Mr Richard Tubb of Netlink-IT highlighted. He recently migrated a customer to a new server and instead of following MS’s published and painful documentation (I have first hand experience of the pain) or even a swing migration, Ric just used BESR. Using the first scenario I outlined, he booted from the PE disk and loaded up the image, less than an hour later the customer was migrated! Compare that to the two days I spent migrating a customer using MS’s method, I know which I’ll do in the future.

Now, lets see if I can publish this while sat at Wolverhampton station!

Technorati Tags: backup,disaster recovery,small business

Peer Groups

2008-08-24T11:43:00.001-07:00

Something that surprised me when we started Sirona was the open nature of other businesses. This first started with my good friend Jason Stephanides of Onsite Solutions. Jason was a massive help in getting Sirona going, giving us loads of great support and advice.

Soon after starting Sirona I discovered this open nature extended well beyond personal friends. I've discovered various small business communities focused on the delivery of IT services, specifically in the Microsoft arena. The first of these was the Yahoo Group UKSBSG, there's a great bunch of people there who are always very quick to respond to technical or business related questions. There are a number of other groups offering similar communities, but not focused on the UK market:

Another slightly different group is SMBManagedServices, this has been a fantastic resource for developing our business in the Managed Services sector.

Offline, another great group has been the Manchester SBS Group. SBS Groups are found worldwide and are generally focused around Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS). The Manchester group had gone quiet for a while and in March 2008 a couple of Microsoft employees started to rally the troops to get it going again. Chris Parkes, Partner Technology Specialist and Danny Ovens, Northwest Regional Development Manager were both fundamental in getting the group going again. Chris and Danny were originally running the group, but felt it would be better to have one of the community running it. Last week Simon Belt of Simply Better IT took the reins and quickly put up a website dedicated to the group. I'm sure Simon will do a great job going forward.

Our SBS group meets once a month, generally on the third Thursday. Last week our usual host wasn't available and I'm happy to say Sirona was able to stand in and provide a room at Sirona House. We also had guests, Gareth Hall, Microsoft Windows Server Product Manager, Emily Lambert, Microsoft SBSC Programme Lead and Vijay Singh Riyait from iQubed.

I look forward to our SBS meeting every month and always find it a very rewarding evening. I should be bringing two guests to next months meeting - details in a future post - and in October we're having a launch event for SBS 2008.

SharePoint Seminar

2008-07-16T12:52:00.001-07:00

Today Alex and I attended a SharePoint seminar hosted by Combined Knowledge down in Leicester. It was a great day and I want to say a big thank you to Steve Smith, the owner of Combined Knowledge, for putting on a great day giving us a perfect taster of what SharePoint can do for our business.

SharePoint is a web based application used by thousands of companies worldwide for a variety of uses; the core purpose of being to share and collaborate on a wide variety of documents. Small businesses generally rely on a simple file share to store and share documents, SharePoint tries to break away from this old practice. Some of the main advantages are:

Cut down on documents being emailed and filling up mailboxes
Give control of document access back to end users
Automate repetitive processes
Tailor the style and functionality of the application for your business

At Sirona we're already using the latest version of SharePoint for our own document collaboration and our plan is to start offering it to customers over the next few months. Hopefully we'll be heading back to Leicester to make more use of the courses available at Combined Knowledge, until then we'll keep testing and developing at Sirona House.

SBSC Qualified

2008-06-30T14:20:00.001-07:00

Today Sirona Solutions became part of the Microsoft Small Business Specialist Community, this was because I passed my SBSC exam. It’s fair to say I’m far from a fan of exams and I thought I’d put them well behind me when I left formal education many years ago. However, I’ve taken a long list of exams in my IT career and today’s was the latest and also the one I’m most proud of. I’m most proud of it because it’s not just for me, it’s for our company and it shows current and future customers that we excel at what we do.

The certification also shows Microsoft that we are serious at what we’re doing and allows them to better help as they know what we specialise in.

Some developments at Sirona have been put on hold while I’ve been concentrating on this qualification. Now it’s done things can start moving again, all of which will help Sirona grow. Stay tuned for more information ;-)

VoIP for Business

2008-06-27T03:51:00.001-07:00

When you mention VoIP, the first thing that usually springs to mind is Skype. Now Skype is a fantastic piece of software and millions of people use it every day. I’ve used it on occasion myself, on a trip to the US I used Skype on the free hotel Wifi to speak to Mrs Nick back in the UK. The call quality was fantastic, especially compared to a mobile. I’ve also used it to talk to a good friend in Hong Kong, again brilliant call quality and who could argue at an hour long phone call half-way round the world costing zero pence?

VoIP for Business, on the other hand, is a whole different ball park. The idea is to bring corporate phone system features and functionality to small businesses at an affordable cost. There are also savings to be made in call costs, in my experience these are particularly evident when calling abroad. One sixty minute call to the States recently, came in at just over £1!

We use VoIP here at Sirona House and we make use of a lot of the advanced features. When you call Sirona you are presented with a voice-menu, don’t hate me just yet though we have kept it nice and short – only two button presses get you through to the right person. Our voice-menu was professionally recorded, but you can also record your own. The advantage for us is when the call gets put through to the office we know what buttons you have pressed. So we know if you’re calling for tech support, to log a call, whether you’re a business or home user, etc. As we grow we’ll be able to route calls more effectively and ensure our customer’s calls are always answered by the correct person.

Voice-mail is now a feature we’re all very used to with mobile phones and this comes bundled with VoIP. You can either have individual voice-mail and/or a group voice-mail depending on how your calls are routed. That’s another feature, call routing. You can ensure that at 9am your calls are all forwarded to the office, then at 5pm they’re routed to the person on-call and at 8pm they switch to voice-mail. Call routing can also be tied into a voice-menu to be routed to a particular department. You can also arrange how phones ring, you can have a group of phones ring at the same time, have one ring and then another or even have a call automatically routed to a mobile if no-one picks up in the office.

So you may be asking what the catch is, why are BT still making money? Well the reason all these features are affordable is they are delivered over a standard broadband connection. A lot of users of business VoIP will share one broadband connection for both web browsing and VoIP. This isn’t the recommended solution and at Sirona House we have a dedicated broadband connection just for VoIP.

So with business VoIP you are putting your entire phone network over a single broadband connection and most people will have experienced a failure of their broadband connection. However, broadband has become a lot more reliable in the last couple of years and I actually struggle to remember the last time either our business or home connections failed. On top of this business VoIP providers are now providing their own broadband connections to their customers that come with guarantees of service. This gives you call quality guarantees and dedicated support behind the connections so if there are problems they are rectified quickly.

Overall we’re very happy with our VoIP service and there’s no way we could afford to have all the features we have by going straight to BT. We’re also not tied into a long agreement, so if weren’t happy with it we could easily go somewhere else.

Open Letter to Dell Premier

2008-06-22T08:10:00.001-07:00

Dell Premier is Dell’s latest offering to the Channel community to help us prepare quotes for customers. While I liked having an account manager I could actually speak to, the web site is easy to use and I can get prices very quickly.

The Channel relationship is supposed to give us, as resellers, as a discount to persuade customers to do business through us, rather than going direct to Dell. However, on my latest quote Premier has made us look like rip-off merchants… Hence my letter to Olivia Hughes, UKI PAD eBusiness Manager:

Hi Olivia,

We have been a Dell partner for a little under a year and generally we have had a very positive experience working with Dell. On Friday I prepared a quote for a potential customer and included in that quote was a Dell PowerConnect 2716. The price to us as a partner, on Dell Premier, was and still is £159 and this is what we duly quoted to the customer. Today the customer has come back to me and has asked me to explain why he can buy the same PowerConnect switch for £60 less than our quote. Looking on the consumer website I can indeed see the PowerConnect 2716 for £97!

During our initial meeting with this customer we had championed our relationship with Dell and the discounts we were able to make available for him. I hope you can understand the difficult position this price conflict now puts our company in and the possible damage it has done to our relationship with this customer in such a strategic point in our relationship.

Could you offer any explanation as to why this huge price difference is evident? Could you also offer any reassurance as to why I don’t have to start comparing all products between Dell Premier and Dell Consumer, before putting quotes forward to customers?

Please note I have copied in a number of SMB community groups and I will also be publishing this email on my personal blog.

I look forward to your response.

Regards,

Nick

I look forward to what response, if any, that I get from Dell.

Manchester SBS Meeting

2008-06-20T09:29:00.001-07:00

Last night I went to my second Manchester SBS Meeting hosted by Ceri Thomas of 168Tech with Chris Parkes and Danny Ovens from Microsoft. After getting a lot out of the last meeting back in April, I dragged my business partner Alex along to this one. I assured him that it was a good mixture of technical content and marketing (his speciality) so he was happy to come.

Chris gave a quick demo of SBS 2008, which he’d only just installed himself earlier that day. It was really good to see it running, rather than just the screen shots I’ve seen so far. It did get a bit bogged down running in Hyper-V on a 64bit laptop, I’ll have to see how well it runs on our VMware ESX box.

By the end of that Alex was wondering what the hell I’d brought him to! However, a combination of pizza and Ceri’s SharePoint presentation saved the day. I’ve been wondering about SharePoint over the last few weeks and posted over at UKSBSG asking how people were using it. It ships with every SBS server, so it’s been bugging me that I haven’t been making use of it.

Ceri showed off some great looking and very functional SharePoint v3.0 sites and really opened my eyes as to what can be done. Chris then took the floor and extended on the technical side, I had no idea about most of what was presented. Both Alex and I came away suitable impressed and determined to start testing it in our own environment with the view to presenting to customers ASAP.

Thanks to everyone involved in last night’s meeting, already looking forward to the next one. If you haven’t been along, I’d highly recommend it, just drop me a line if you’re interested.

Managed Services

2008-06-18T08:28:00.001-07:00

Managed Services is now the core business at Sirona Solutions and we’re pleased to offer this service to a number of small businesses in and around Manchester.

When we started Sirona we knew the key to a successful business was to find customers who saw value in having an IT partner. At first we saw that role as responding to faults and maintaining servers on a daily basis. As we discovered the term ‘Managed Services’ we found there was lot more we can offer that will help us stand out from other IT suppliers.

On a day to day basis we may still just be responding to faults, but under the surface we’ve been adding more and more value to our contracts. A key tool that has helped us expand what we do, without drastically affecting the bottom line, is Kaseya. Kaseya is an automation tool which allows us to manage our client’s infrastructure, servers and desktops. I like the way our supplier put it; ‘Kaseya can basically do anything to a PC that doesn’t require a screwdriver’.

There are various ways to use Kaseya and for a company of our size a hosted solution was the best option. We considered a few suppliers and quickly settled on Bull Terrier Systems. Ian from Bull Terrier made the journey to come and see us and demonstrate what the service can do. This shows a level of commitment from the start that you don’t find from many suppliers. Of course it’s something that Sirona does when we’re engaging potential new customers, but our journeys are generally less than 20 miles round trip, not 200.

We’ve now been using Kaseya for just over a month and it’s really allowed us to become a 24/7 operation. System patching is built in and ready to go, so all the machines we manage always have the latest MS patches installed. Beyond that we’ve been able to roll out new software packages outside core business hours, reboot servers without having to get up in the middle of the night to do it and be alerted as soon as a key service fails.

We see Managed Services as redefining our role as a business partner, rather than just a supplier. Kaseya is one step on the road to becoming this, by taking complete control of the infrastructure and offering great value for money.

Podcasts

2008-06-17T11:10:00.001-07:00

Podcasts have obviously been around for quite a while now, but even as a self confessed geek, at first I never quite saw their purpose. This changed a couple of years ago when I found myself in a job that left me with a lot of spare time.

Considering how vast the Internet is, it’s amazing how quickly you run out of things to entertain you when you have too much spare time (within the confines of an office mind you). So on one of those long afternoons I stumbled across TWiT.TV, not sure how I got there, but these days I couldn’t imagine a long car journey without them. In fact it doesn’t even need to be a long car journey, these days I don’t spend much time in the car so I listen on my five or ten minute commute to and from work.

So TWiT is a network of over 10 podcasts, or netcasts as host Leo likes to call them. TWiT stands for This Week in Tech and is their lead show. As the name suggests it’s a weekly show with a varying panel of guests discussing tech news from the preceding week. Most of the guests are American, with the likes of John C Dvorak, Patrick Norton and Jason Calacanis being a few of the regulars. There are a few exceptions to all the Americans and one of those is Brit Wil Harris. Previously Editor in Chief of the enthusiast site bit-tech, Wil has now started his own on-line video channel ChannelFlip.

Anyway, back to the post at hand – podcasts. TWiT is a very entertaining show and generally very informative to boot. You tend to get some pretty decent debates about various news items and I haven’t missed a show in ages. I guess there’s no particular reason to miss a podcast though…

The host of TWiT and all the other shows at TWiT.TV is Leo Laporte. Leo is pretty well known in tech circles, in particular due to his role on The Screen Savers. Leo hosted this TV show from 1998 to 2004 and a number of the panelists on This Week in Tech were there with him.

Another show of note at TWiT is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott, news editor for Windows IT Pro Magazine. Also Security Now with Steve Gibson, of ShieldsUp fame, remember when we first found out the Internet was dangerous?!?

Well this was supposed to be a post about podcasts in general, but it seems to be all about TWiT. Those are my podcasts of choice, I guess, but there are others. I’ll do another post to include those and also throw in some online video that keeps me entertained when Mrs Nick is watching Eastenders!

New Gadget

2008-06-12T09:40:00.001-07:00

Being a small business owner who’s yet to make his first million, new gadgets don’t come around that often ;) So I was very pleased when my phone contract was up for renewal and I could start browsing the available devices.

My last phone was the T-Mobile MDA Vario II, otherwise known as the HTC Tytn. The Tytn II was released not long after I got my phone last year and I was pretty gutted that I missed the boat on it. The Tytn was very functional, but was pretty hefty. The Tytn II was a bit sleeker, had a much nicer keyboard, built in GPS and ran Windows Mobile 6, rather than 5. At the time I did ring T-Mobile to see whether I could upgrade, but almost fell off my chair when they gave me a price…

So upgrade time finally came round and I still had my sites set on the Tytn II. There were smaller devices available, but I really liked have the full keyboard and had got up to a pretty decent WPM on it. The only thing that was initially standing in its way was the beautiful Apple iPhone. The next revision of the iPhone software was round the corner with supposed support for Exchange ActiveSync.

I wasn’t totally convinced about the iPhone and decided to check out T-Mobile’s site to see if anything else took my fancy. That’s when I stumbled across the T-Mobile Touch Plus. The device certainly looks the part, but initially I thought it was purely a touch device with no keyboard. I then started to look around and found this great review over at Trusted Reviews. They gave it a glowing report and an impressive 8 out of 10 rating. I’ve always liked the reviews by the guys at Trusted Reviews and on an aside, what a great job they have! A quick Google turned up a number of other positive reviews and soon the Tytn II was a distant memory.

So it was now the Touch Plus vs the iPhone. As much bashing as it gets, I actually don’t mind the Windows Mobile OS and the reviews seemed to suggest this was currently the best phone running WM6. While the iPhone is beautiful, I still don’t think it’s really business class, maybe the new software revision will change that, but only time will tell.

There’s also a key feature of WM6 that myself and my business partner use on a regular basis and that’s the Internet Connection Sharing software. Being a HSDPA phone the connection speeds are pretty impressive, hook it up via USB or Bluetooth to a laptop and you’ve got broadband on the go. In fact when we first moved into our offices before BT installed their lines, we used our phones as our primary broadband connection and we got speeds in excess of 1Mb!

So I was pretty sure the iPhone wasn’t going to offer this key feature and then T-Mobile helped make up my mind once and for all. We spend a fair amount with them each month so a few minutes on the phone with them and they confirmed we could have two phones free of charge. Comparing this to the hassle of moving to O2, a charge of £100 per phone and no Internet Connection Sharing and I was sold! T-Mobile even threw in a copy of CoPilot Live 7 each and two Bluetooth GPS units.

The phones arrived the next day and I’m pleased as punch! It’s actually the size of a phone, rather than a small brick. So it’s a lot smaller than the Tytn and while there’s no QWERTY keyboard, I’m getting used to T9 again pretty quickly. There are some nice additions to WM6 which is HTC trying to imitate the iPhone. When you slide your finger up the screen an application launches with shortcuts to programs. Then sliding your finger left or right shows a nice animation of a cube and switches to contact shortcuts. Slide again and there’s another page of shortcuts. I’m not sure how much I’ll use this feature, but it’s pretty cool and nice to show off with now and again ;)

So if you’re happy with WM6 and in line for a new phone, I’d certainly recommend the Touch Plus. There’s also a version available with a full QWERTY keyboard, but I’m not sure how this affects the size. For me though, the normal keypad is enough.

SMB and SBS Blogs

2008-06-11T06:03:00.000-07:00

I thought I should post all the blogs that gave me inspiration to start my own. They're obviously all different, most lean towards the SBS side of things, but a few could be used for any small business owner.

Ask the SBS Team - Microsoft Enterprise Support SBS EMEA Team technet blog.
Davesbs Blog - "...focussed on the SMB IT ‘Community’ through the rambling thoughts of a Microsoft Small Business Specialist IT Consultant."
UK SBS Guy - Dave is a UK based Microsoft employee and shares information about MS solutions, ISVs and small business issues.
Girish's Graffiti - Another Technet blog, with thoughts on SBS and other MS technologies.
Paulie’s Technical Memoirs - More SBS tech info.
Small Biz Thoughts by Karl Palachuk - A fantastic place for anyone wanting to develop their IT business, especially down the Managed Services route.
SMB Dude - More SMB info.
SBS Diva - Plenty of technical info about SBS.
The WSSG Community Lead Blog - The official blog for the SBS, Windows Essential Business Server, Windows Home Server.
TubbBlog - Only found this one yesterday, another UK small IT business owner like myself.
UK SMB Girl - A very active blog until Susanne moved down under. However, she recently blipped back onto the scene, so there may be more to come!
Vladville Blog - The owner of OwnWebNow, a US based hosting company. Very SMB friendly, with some great products, vlad always has something interesting to say.
You Had Me At EHLO - The official MS blog for the MS Exchange team.

For those of you interested I use Google's RSS client 'Reader' to keep track of all of these. It keeps track of what I have and haven't read and I can access it from any web client including my T-Mobile Touch Plus.

Now Is The Time

2008-06-10T14:34:00.000-07:00

After a few months finding more and more great blogs in the SMB and SBS community, I've decided it's time to start my own. I'm not sure exactly what the content is going to be, but I guess it'll be based around my roles as both a techy and a small business owner.

I am co-owner of Sirona Solutions, an IT company based in Stockport, south Manchester. We incorporated a year ago and we've gone from strength to strength since then. My business partner has owned his own business for five years now and his experience has been a driving force in getting Sirona off the ground.

I've been blown away with the community I've found behind small IT companies from all over the world. I've learnt so much from this community and learn more and more on a daily basis. I now hope to be able to give something back to it and at the same time maybe help some non-IT companies too.