Mixing Business With Pleasure

So it’s the morning (afternoon now!) after the night before of my first experience meeting people from the SBS Community

My head is still a little fuzzy so it’s taking quite a while to write this

All in all i had a fantastic time and learnt more in one night about the value of the community and the people that are a part of it than i have done online in the past two or three months

So what did i learn

• FeastIndia is a fantastic restaurant
• I really need to get Windows Mobile 6
• Drinking Port is a socially acceptable way to end an evening
• TravelLodge really need to get some air-con
• Nobody cares about your stupid stickers
• You can’t book into a hotel you don’t have a reservation for…no matter how loud you shout :-p
• I say really random things when i’ve had a drink

Not really…but first things first….

Thanks to Vijay for organising the whole thing (and Ratinder for putting up with us geeks!). The food was great and apart from one or two people getting stuck in traffic (you can’t control everything!) everything went very smoothly

I’d also like to say hello and thank you to Michael, David, Steve, Will, Susanne, Gareth, Jane, Alan and Paul for making the effort (some people came a long way!) and helping me have such an entertaining evening

Basically we all met up at the restaurant, ate, drank and talked loads, went to a bar in Leicester until they kicked us out where the remaining few went to the bar at the hotel where David was staying until we all realised that we really should end the night. Michael and i ended up in Subway watching some drunk guy arguing about why he should have a free sandwich, even though his voucher was about three years old!

So what did i really learn?

The insight into how other people do business, their opinions and ideas left my head full of tons of thoughts about stuff i can do to have a positive impact on the business

Also I got to put faces to some of those names that pop up everywhere, such as

Gareth Brown, who other than Vijay is PAL for the UK. After spending a couple of hours with him it’s easy to see how and why he got that status. He can also draw his business card faster than a western gun slinger :-p

Susanne Dansey, whose enthusiasm is there for everyone to see, has only been in her new job a month but from what we heard she is doing great things for Westcoast which will also benefit the community in general. Oh and has a great MVP badge!

David Overton, who is about to move away from the day-to-day of SBS to work with in the ISV team, but i very easily can see why he is so well respected in the community and why the community will miss his presence. His choice of shirt was fantastic!

I’m not going to mention every single person who was there but finally our other PAL Vijay did a great job of organising the night and i look forward to catching up with him again when the Midland group starts up in September which he is hard at work sorting out

I was really pleased with how welcoming everyone was and hopefully i didn’t say or do anything (too) embarrassing

This was my first in person visit to a community event but it certainly wont be the last. If you have never been and are a little unsure find your local group and make an appearance as i can certainly recommend it

Vijay posted some pictures he took on Facebook and Flickr. The flickr set is here

Missing Pictures

*-* Updated *-*

When i view the Pictures folder in Explorer the files aren’t there! If i view them in the attach files dialog they are there but it still wont let me attach them. 

When i right click while trying to attach files files it wont open in Photo Gallery either. However good old paint came to my rescue. It opened them fine and i resaved them and all is well. I’m still puzzled about what happened and why!!

Here is the pic that all the fuss was about…. 

I don’t think it looks anything like me!

*-*-*-**-*-*

I just got an email from Vijay finalising some details for tomorrow nights meetup.

I tried to send a picture i got from Simpsonizeme.com. I previewed the pictures ok and attached them via google mail

In my sent items the picture wouldn’t open and claimed it was an empty file.

I browsed to the pictures folder and they aren’t even there! If i go back and try to reattach them the files are there but it wont let me copy them out as Vista claims the file doesn’t exist!!

Anyone seen anything like this before? I’m trying to track them down but it’s a little worrying

five different files can’t just disappear!

Media Player keeps playing

Susanne posted a while back about a problem with Windows Media Player on Vista where the music continues to play even after you have closed the program

I’d noticed the same thing on my computer at home so just got into the habit of stopping whatever i was listening to before i closed

I was reading through the latest technet flash when i found this KB article.

Here is the solution they offer

WORKAROUND

To work around this problem when it occurs, follow these steps to shut down Windows Media Player:

Well duh!

Not really all that helpful but at least they have acknowledged there is a problem. Hopefully we’ll see a fix sometime soon

So this google reader..

After an endorsment by Vlad i figured it would rude not to check out google reader!

So far i’m pretty impressed. I like the speed of it. One thing about a lot of web services is clicking then waiting which you obviously don’t get with a desktop reader.

The shortcuts are a god send! I like how the tagging “just works” as i’d tried to use a combination of categories, flags and search folders in outlook to help find stuff but found it too much hassle. The ease of which you can add subscriptions whilst still in reader is great and the fact the interface is pretty similar to google mail is helpful.

 I also like that when i select a folder it shows all the items of the feeds inside. It’s something i had wished for in Outlook

What dont i like?

Not much to be honest. I wish there was a “mark all as unread”  (or mark selection as unread) option as i’d subscribed to a couple of feeds and they were already marked as unread. I didn’t fancy going through each item

I also had some strange things going on..I tried added the subscribe feature to my links bar and it worked at the office but not at home. Also on some feeds (not all) when i press the ‘M’ button to toggle the read status i just get a script error. Of the ten feeds i’m current subscribed to it only happens to two, Vlad’s feed (spooky!) and the google reader team blog (even spookier!). This happens at the office and on the home pc as well

Those problems aside my initial impression is good so i’ll run with it for a week and make the move after that

Look what came in the post!

Moo SBS Sticker Books

Originally uploaded by Andy Parkes

A little while back i came across a website called Moo.com

Basically they are a London based company that take your pictures and turn them into mini-cards and notecards for handing out to friends and the like. I thought about getting some pictures of my little girl that i could give to grand-parents, aunties, uncles etc

I spotted recently that they have expanded their product range into stickers. I thought this might be cool for something so decided to try it out as they had free delivery in July, they were only £4.99 and the process was pretty simple so thought i’d try out some logos so i uploaded the Small Business Specialist logo and the company logo

When i got to the office today they had arrived!

They are pretty cool but not really meant for logos of this type, more like little pictures but it’s not bad. It probably didn’t help that i did it quite quickly and since the pictures HAVE to be a square it was difficult getting rectangular logos to look in proportion

The SBS logos aren’t too bad but its chopped the last letter from the company logo.

I’ll be taking them with me to Vijay’s curry night on Friday and while i wont be brandishing them about like some sticker wielding nutter i’ll be happy to share!

Closure on closure

A while back i posted and had a moan where i worried we may be losing customer for sticking to our principles (original post here) and was worried the client may end up getting a nasty sting if they went with what on the surface appeared to be a vastly cheaper quote

I then posted to say that the customer decided to come with us so all was good!

Well for the last week i’ve been doing the new SBS installation for that client

Now i’m not normally one to say “i told you so” but we got it spot on here.

We used just about the amount of man days we had quoted for and as we anticipated there were one or two issues that slowed us down but were covered in the days we quoted

What amazes me is the state the system was in when we arrived.

It’s a twenty five user system and the server was a Windows 2000 server (not SBS!)

The hardware was the scary bit. It was a self build, basically a souped up PC. The CD-ROM drive didn’t work, the USB didn’t work, the floppy drive didn’t work, the internal tape drive didn’t work.

The tape drive was replaced with an external DAT drive. When someone with a bit of common sense asked if they could test the tapes were backing up ok on a different server they were told “we don’t have anything that will take those anymore”

Storage was on a single P-ATA/IDE disk. It was on the point of failure once before so the drive had been replaced and the data copied to the new one. I say replaced but the old drive had just been left inside!

We took the drive out as we planned to take an image of it before we didn’t anything with it. I plugged it into my IDE-USB cable and fired it up. It started to spin up and i moved the disk as it was a bit close to the edge of the desk, i heard the drive stop, then start, then stop again. Real heart in mouth stuff

I put it back into the server in the end and it was ok, as long as you didn’t touch anything!

The PC’s were all on static IP addresses as the cabling was shared with a company downstairs! There was no central switch and it was all linked together with workgroup hubs. It also meant that they couldn’t use DHCP at all (we knew about this beforehand though and new cabling was being completed while we were onsite)

The only network printer in the building was the photocopier as all the printers were shared directly from the PC’s

I wont even mention the PCs as this post is long enough!

The single scary thing about this is that the client was generally unaware of all this other than the fact than the server locked up a several times a week. The server could have died at any point and the backups were “untrustworthy” and that would have been it everything gone. The client is a charity so mainly deals in information. There is no “product” to sell

Without the data on the server they don’t exist

Fortunately the install went well and other than a bit of downtime the users are using the system in pretty much the same way it was before

We’re giving them a bit of bedding in time to catch up after the disruption and then they will be introducted to RWW, OWA, SharePoint, Exchange, etc

As i said they deal with information so SharePoint is going to be huge here

As much as i love setting up SBS the satisfaction is when you see someones face the first time they see RWW, or when you actually see ideas forming when you show them SharePoint

Bye Bye Outlook RSS

I’ve never found an RSS reader i’ve been 100% happy with

I started with NewsGator (online version) and tried various desktop offerings such as RSS Bandit but thought Outlook 2007 would be the answer to my prayers. I know that it doesn’t have the features that other readers have but it does mean i keep my main sources of info (email,calendar,tasks,contacts,etc) all in one happy application and i can flag and categorize items of interest and also easily shift things into OneNote

I also cheated a little to enable me to use my PDA for keeping up

Before i leave the office i make sure i keep Outlook open. That way when it updates the feeds they automatically get saved to the Exchange server so that when i do ActiveSync over the Internet i get them delivered to me automatically. The same applies to OWA so i can access while i’m away or at home

The down side is that if Outlook loses it’s connection to the exchange (for whatever reason!)  i then lose that ability. As i’ve been out of the office most of this week it’s meant i’ve missed lots of stuff i normally would have read and i’ve now got loads to catch up on

So for now i’ve going to give Google Reader ago as i know it’s quite popular and ticks all the boxes i’ve mentioned above

For now i’ve going to just add my frequently read feeds and leave the rest in Outlook. If i’m happy i’ll move the rest across

Anyone else using anything different am i just really late in coming to Google Reader?