I’ve been waiting to post this as I wanted to make sure it was shared on the official site first!

As you may or may not know (if you read this blog or know me you should!) I can quite happily ramble on about SharePoint in a small business context for a long time. So much so that I get to stand up in front of the AMITPRO members and bore them from time to time

So after the last time Simon Belt from the North West SBS group asked if I’d go up to Manchester to bore them too and give a repeat performance and I was happy to say yes.

The meeting is on August 19th at 18:30 at QA’s training facilities on the 3^rd Floor, Westminster House, Minshull Street, off Portland Street, Manchester M1 3HU

Full details of the event are here

Let me know if you’re planning on attending?

I’ll be staying overnight so if anyone wants to chat about all things SBS-related I’ll be happy to do so.

Also if you’re in and around the North West region and have never visited an SBS user group meeting why not make this your first?

I’ve been told there will be pizza!

Urgh….I meant to do this a lot earlier but I’ve had a crazy week since the AMITPRO meeting last week. I’ve got a back log of posts I want to put together but between holidays, hospitals and a couple of major client projects I’ve been at full tilt since then.

Anyway, back to the point!

Last time I spoke at an AMITPRO meeting I posted a brief “critique” of myself so I could figure out where I went right and wrong so I thought it was worth doing again.

First of all though a big thank you to everyone that attended!

We had a really great turn out and as well as our regular crowd there were a lot of new faces as well as appearances from some familiar faces we haven’t seen for a while. Thanks everyone for making the effort.

So what did I think?

Demo – Something I’d mentioned in my last critique was that I’d wanted to have a lot more structure in the demo itself. This was even more important subject matter and I’d used OneNote to great effect to give myself an outline to work against which meant everything went far more smoothly.

Speed - I didn’t quite feel as rushed as last time. By that I mean myself. I really did go through the demos quite quickly because I had a lot to try and do in a short space of time but I felt a lot more relaxed when speaking which will be down to experience and the fact it’s not the first time I’ve presented to the group.

Slides – Even though Guy very kindly made it look like I’d dropped the dreaded slides I had put together a very small deck that I didn’t get to use. I was still running the Office 2010 beta on my laptop and when I tried to open the file I got an error. Because I was literally minutes from speaking I just made the decision to drop them. When I checked it again afterwards it turned out I could have clicked through the error and used the slides. Which brings me onto my next point.

Organisation (1)– There had been a mix up at the venue about the room we’d booked and we were in a room for 10-15 with almost 30 people. I’d already started to setup in the smaller room when we needed to move. Also since I’m involved with the organisation of the event I had to help sort the new room,  get everyone moved and setup again. I then ended up speaking first instead of second so I was in a massive rush to get started as we were now running late.

Organisation (2) – While the previous point was a little out of my control this wasn’t. I’d setup my demo on my home setup with the intention of copying it to my laptop I’d use on the day. On the morning of the meeting I took my virtual machines to the offices with intention of tweaking my machines and going over my notes. We had such a busy day at the office that it just didn’t work out that way.

At around half three I realised I needed to setup a scheduled task to make everything easier. However, my server machine was running like a dog and generally unresponsive. I’d run a couple of VM’s on my laptop before no problem but was now panicking. After a bit of investigation I found a couple of articles that indicated that laptop hardware can go into reign in the CPU when VMs are running as it thinks the system is actually idle (though I don’t know if this actually true!)

So in my panic I uninstalled Virtual PC 2007 and installed Windows Virtual PC so I could make a setting change that would overcome this. At the same time I totally forgot that the VM’s aren’t directly compatible so it was almost four thirty (i.e time to leave!) and I had no way to run the demo! I quickly got rid of Windows Virtual PC, loaded Virtual PC 2007 back up and left for the meeting.

On the way I realised in my rush I hadn’t copied my slide deck onto the laptop. Once at the meeting I had to fight a dodgy 3G signal to try and remote back to the office and grab the file. My intention was to get everything prepped while the other speaker was on but I ended up going on FIRST!

I was quite lucky in that other than the slides everything from a demo perspective went to plan.

The lesson to learn was that I should have included the actual laptop the demo would run from as part of demo build instead of just assuming it would all work as expected.

Thankfully I’d prepared my demo and notes in such a way that I was able to get back on track quickly even though I was quite flustered at the beginning

All in all I was pleased with how it went.

I still don’t think I’m a natural presenter but hopefully anyone who was there learning something. If they did then it was mission accomplished.

I got some very nice comments from people in attendance and via Twitter and e-mail the following day which were much appreciated.

There was a TON of stuff I’d actually prepared that I just didn’t even cover because of time and the fact I didn’t want to go on for too long and have everyone lose interest. I joked during the presentation that I can talk for HOURS about SharePoint but in all honesty I was being serious!

Yeah i know….me again.

We’ve had a speaker drop out at short notice so I’m going to speaking at AMITPRO this month. The topic is one you’ll probably know is something I quite like talking about – SharePoint!

My presentation will be titled – SharePoint as a Helpdesk

I’ve had the idea for the while so it’s something Guy and I have been sort of keeping in reserve just in case we had any issues with speakers so I finally get to roll it out this month.

So what exactly do I mean by SharePoint as a Helpdesk?

One thing I’ve found when talking to other partners is that because SharePoint is such a flexible (large?) product is that many of them find it difficult to get into quickly. I can understand this as it can be an awful lot to take in.

However, I really do think many partners are missing out on revenue opportunities because of this! Now that don’t necessarily mean you need to instantly became a master in SharePoint but if you have a basic understanding of what it can do then you can always partner with a company that does if you have a client who might benefit from such a solution.

Partnering with other companies is something SBSC partners are good at!

So….what I’m going to try to do in the time I’ll have is to create a basic helpdesk. All IT companies know what a helpdesk is and what sort of functionality it needs so we can create a quick and dirty SharePoint application that showcases what SharePoint can do.

I’ll be touching on,

Lists and Libraries.

Columns and Views.

Content Types and E-mail Integration.

Web Part Pages and Web Parts.

SharePoint designer and Workflows.

Office integration and Mobile access

And if there is time another topic I like to shout about…InfoPath

Time depending of course!

Our other speaker is Dell Quinn from Microsoft.

She’s going to talk about the changes to the Microsoft Partner Network and how it’ll impact Small Business Specialists.

All this as well as the usual pre and post event banter that goes on at any AMITPRO event!

As always guests are more than welcome. If you’ve never attended a user group event we’ve love for you to come along.

If you’d like to know more than leave a comment here, visit the AMITPRO site or get in touch with me directly (or on Twitter)

Look forward to seeing you there!

In my last post I gave details about the upcoming event at AMITPRO featuring Karl Palachuk and Richard Tubb

I just wanted to share a special offer Karl has kindly put together

Time-limited offer for attendees of the April 6th AMITPRO meeting!
Karl has offered a massive saving of $120 (£80) off the cost of buying his latest book ‘The Network Migration Workbook’. If you’re based in the UK and have contemplated buying this excellent resource, then you simply won’t get a better offer than this:

List price inc. UK shipping: $339.95
Early bird discount inc. UK shipping: $289.95
AMITPRO/TVP Special Offer: $220 inc. FREE Shipping*

 

 

*Offer only open to people wishing to buy the book IN ADVANCE of the AMITPRO or TVP User Group Meetings. To qualify for the special pricing, you must collect the book from one of the aforementioned events. (please note: you don’t have to purchase a book to attend the meetings).

You can take advantage of this by visiting the SMB Books site here and you can read about this on the AMITPRO site too

Also Karl is visiting the Thames Valley SBS group the week before (1st April). The same offer applies for there too. If you’d like to hear more about their event you can read about it on Chris Timm blog

Finally….you can now become a fan of AMITPRO on Facebook

Just wanted to do a bit of shouting about our next AMITPRO meeting. It’s one we’re really excited about!

First, we’ve changed the date. Our meetings are usually on the second Tuesday of every month but we’re rearranged to accommodate one of our speakers. This means the date of the meeting is 6th April

So, the speakers, in no particular order!

AMITPRO’s very own Richard Tubb (@TubbLog), from James Cash.co.uk

Business Processes for SMB IT companies

How JamesCash.co.uk use them in their business, and how they can help businesses of all sizes rapidly grow. From the one-man-band where the owner is looking to take on his first employee but can’t find the time to take that step, to the bigger business where processes can help individuals grow in responsibility and encourage rapid business growth -  Richard will speak about the tools his company uses and the benefits you can expect from systemising your SMB IT business.

Richard has made great strides as a business owner in the years he’s been an AMITPRO member so it’ll be great to hear how something at the very core of his growth has been put together.

He went on to become one of the first IT companies in the UK to gain Accredit certification which is a testament to the hard work Richard put into the processes used to run his business

We’re trying to encourage more content from within the group so it’s fantastic Richard has stepped up to do this.

Our next guest is Karl Palachuck (@karlpalachuk) from KPEnterprises and Great Little Book. If you’re involved in the SBS community at all you’ll know who Karl is! He’s been heavily involved in the community for years and contributes an awful lot through his blogs, newsletters, podcasts, conference calls, etc, etc!

He is also the author of some great books, his most recent one being, The Network Migration Workbook, Zero Downtime Strategies for Microsoft Networks 

I’ve got this one myself and it’s brilliant

590(!!) pages crammed with information, checklists, diagrams and spreadsheets. There is also an accompanying CD with customisable versions of the documents and a website to continue adding value after you’ve read the book

Karl will be bringing various books with him so you’ll be able to check them out and get your own copies. They’ll be more information about this on the AMITPRO site as the date gets closer

Karl is actually in the UK on a holiday so we appreciate the time he’s taking to come and speak to our group

Karl will be speaking about

Zero Downtime Migration Strategies

Join one of the authors of The Network Migration Workbook for an introduction to SBS Migration that will make your business more profitable and your clients a lot happier. Is ZDTM really possible and practical in your business? Attend and find out.

Obviously there will be the usual pre and post event networking so in all this is going to be a good one!

If you’ve never attended a user group meeting before this is going to be a great one to start with!

If you’d like to know more leave a comment here or visit the AMITPRO website

We look forward to seeing you!

It’s almost nine pm and I only got home about an hour ago after leaving the house at about six thirty this morning. The reason for such a long day was the TCA conference at the Walkers Stadium in Leicester

I was very kindly invited as a guest of the TCA Chief Executive, Adam Harris. As well as the conference itself this also meant I was invited to a reseller forum being run in conjunction with Comptia

This was a breakfast meeting before the main conference itself so registration was at 07:30…nice and early!

The reseller forum was a roundtable style event with lots of different business from around the UK. Some were managed service providers, some were businesses who concentrate on home users as well as some software developers

We had a set agenda and this lead to some great discussions around some of the business issues that we all face such as vendor relationships and becoming that “trusted advisor” to your clients. As it is when I go to AMITPRO it was great to hear how other people do things and see if I can use their experiences to improve my own business.

The final part of the session focussed around best practices. The idea here was that we all had a minute to suggest an idea that has either made or saved money for us. This could be in the form of using a new technology, a business process or even just a business process or policy. We would then all vote on who we thought had the best idea

It was great to hear what everyone had to say. They were all unique and I came away from the meeting with tons of notes full of ideas I can use myself.

After the forum was the actual TCA conference itself.

The conference was opened by the TCA Chairman, Robert French who then handed over to a series of presentations by the sponsors such as Samsung, Kasaya and Synaxon. Of those, one thing that was interesting was the approach Samsung are taking to try in making their external hard disks stand out from the crowd. One thing is to make the packaging unique. They have done this by making it look more like an entertainment package and including a move to watch

Terminator Salvation is one of the movies available. Others included Angels & Demons and the Michael Jackson film that was released shortly after his death with the drive itself having a custom design. They are also looking at similar opportunities for custom designs (Samsung are a Chelsea sponsor for example so they are launching a blue drive with the club badge on)

It’s great to see someone trying something different in a market that isn’t all that exciting

Next up was one of my favourite presentations of the day

It’s the first time I’ve come across Matthew Poyiadgi, who is Vice President at CompTIA. His enthusiasm really comes across and his presentation was fantastic. One of his opening lines was

“I’ve got 84 slides to get through…..

No, really!”

However, this was no death by PowerPoint and I’ll say hand on heart this was one of the most interesting and inspiring thirty minutes I’ve had the pleasure to sit through in some time.

Matthew talked about the current state, of technology, where we’re going and how as businesses we need to be thinking outside the box for marketing and brand awareness and using mediums such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogging (just to start!) to reach out to customers. I’m not really doing it justice here though so if you get the chance to hear Matthew speak make sure you take it up!

After a spot of lunch and chatting with exhibitors the next session was about the impending launch of the TCA Academy

This is all about bringing together training and certifications under a single umbrella to help set standards in the UK IT industry. This is to help make companies more professional, weed our the “cowboys” and give clients (consumer or business) confidence they are choosing a quality supplier (you know anyone who is Corgi registered shouldn’t endanger your family after fixing your boiler for example!)

After this was the “reseller theatre”

People from four different IT business (including AMITPRO’s very own Richard Tubb) had a “pitch and bitch” session where they talked about challenges and triumphs they have encountered over the last year or so including having a bit of moan (see, pitch vs bitch!) over some things that can be frustrating. The format lent itself well to some audience participation and again there were some great ideas and discussion points thrown around

Next there was a presentation from one of the sponsors, Kingston Technology who were there to talk about their solid state drives. I had a chance to speak to the people on the Kingston stand and they have an interesting product line. One of the options is an SSD upgrade kit. This kit comes with a caddie (internal for desktop, external for laptops) cables and a disc that comes pre-loaded with some disk imaging software (the specific technology is Acronis) to transfer your operating system onto the new drive. Once the transfer is done your left with a regular hard disk to use as you see fit (backups anyone!?). If I were planning on buying an external hard drive I’d seriously consider looking at this as an option. I’d still get an external drive but I’d also get the performance enhancements afforded by an SSD. Kingston had two near identical laptops on their stand with different drives so they could demonstrate the performance enhancements by having “boot races” to see which system came up quickest

There were then a couple of presentations by some of the guys at Hiscox and P & A Finance who are helping provide TCA member benefits (comprehensive insurances and financial advice respectively) followed by a roundup of some of the TCA member benefits and an overview of the direction TCA are going by new Chief Executive, Adam Harris

The final two presentations were very interesting

The first was a “PR masterclass” by Dennis Publishing (well known for PC Pro, Micro Mart, Channel Pro, etc)

I didn’t get the persons name who presented this but it was very entertaining and an insight into how you can use PR, specifically leveraging trade publications to promote your business.

To end the conference there was a chat show style interview with David Atherton

David is famous for starting dabs.com and four years ago selling it to BT for a large sum of cash!

He talked about how he went from selling computers via mail order to becoming one of the leading “e-tailers” in the UK

It was a fascinating insight into how David built the business and took advantage of technology to drive his company forward. As you can imagine there were some great stories to hear and David shared his experiences with us and was very open and honest

It was seven thirty by the time I got back to my car so I’d been there over twelve hours and still had the drive home to contend with. While it was a long day I’m glad I was able to stay for the whole event as it’s been a useful day. I’ve come away with tons and tons of notes and ideas which I’ll sleep on tonight and hopefully do something with tomorrow

I’d just like to thank William Linard of Comptia as I haven’t mentioned him above. He did a great job behind the scenes and even delivered a speech of his own as part of the TCA Academy launch even though he only had five minutes notice! Thanks to everyone at TCA and COMPTIA who organised today (and the sponsors of course!)

It was also really good to catch up with some of the guys I know through the small business specialist community. While conferences are great for meeting new people I also enjoy getting together with the people that I do know to kick ideas around and generally enjoy the experience together as friends and colleagues so thanks to Richard Tubb, Chris Timm, James Harbidge and Rob Franklin (who battled through a terrible cold!)

I’ve come across Paypal on three occasions in a short space of time which raised a question I wanted opinions on

If someone offers PayPal as a payment option, who should pick up the payment charges?

The first time I got thinking about this is because AMITPRO now offers PayPal as a payment option for our subscriptions

Guy and I figured it was a quick and easy way of providing the ability for members to make credit card payments and if it encouraged just one person to pay quicker i would be worth more than the potential time and effort trying to chase payment later down the line

I then had to pay for two sets of services, both of them gave me the option to pay by cheque or PayPal

One of them swallowed the costs, one of them added the charge on top of what I was paying for

I asked the question on Twitter and got the following responses

@AndyParkes – how we see it is that the PayPal charges covers the wages of the credit control / money chaser person we don’t have to employ!

@AndyParkes depends

 

@AndyParkes if its the only method given – then the seller should.

I’ve been meaning to post about the changes at AMITPRO for a little while but I’ve been a bit on the busy side recently. I’ve started the post about three times and never finished it!

So the changes…if you’re a regular attendee to AMITPRO you’ll already know that Steve Wright has decided to stand down as group leader

He’s done a great job over the last twelve months and will still have input into the group via his Partner Area Lead role

As of this month the new leader of the group is Guy Gregory of Peak Support and me!

Both Guy and I had shown an interest in taking on the group lead role and decided a joint effort would bring more to the group and sharing the responsibilities can only be a good thing

Since I’ve been involved with AMITPRO there has always been a great spirit of collaboration so it makes perfect sense from my perspective to take this on with someone else

If Guy and myself can keep up the great work from Steve and Vijay before him AMITPRO will continue to be a great resource for IT Professionals in the Midlands area

Tonight’s meeting was our first as joint leaders. Steve had already organised the speakers so we were able to hit the ground running!

Our first speaker was Zoe Russell of ZHR Marketing

She gave a great presentation about marketing specifically for the small business. It took a while for the group to warm up but once they did there were lots of questions and ideas about different marketing ideas. Hopefully it will have given everyone some new ideas!

Next up was Cécile Cathala and Richard Zinner from StorageCraft Europe

While StorageCraft isn’t a new name over in the States they are only just branching out into the UK.

StorageCraft is a backup imaging product for grabbing snapshots of servers and PC (competing products are Backup Exec System Recovery and Acronis TrueImage) that can also restored to dissimilar hardware or even a virtual environment

They have editions for Desktop PCs, Servers and Small Business Server

There is also a managed service provider licensing model if you would like to provide backup and recovery as a service

One of their unique features is their IT Edition. This is a technician license that allows you to create images of as many servers as you need. You can also run this directly from a CD or USB Drive while the system is running

There are trial versions of the products available so it’s definitely worth a look

Just a quick overview of both speakers. They both did a great job

Afterwards we retired to the bar and continued with our usual mix of chat about business, life the universe and everything!

Next month we’ll be organising speakers of our own…that’s when it gets really serious!

I’ve just got back from tonight’s AMITPRO meeting where I was speaking about InfoPath (if your still wondering what InfoPath is I’ll post about this soon!)

All in all I was pleased with how it went down and got some great comments from people there

Since I’m my own worse enemy when it comes to things I do I’m going to critique myself to make sure I learn!

If the ultimate goal was to give everyone an overall view of what InfoPath is, how it works, how much it costs, etc I think i achieved that. Driving back i thought of a couple of things I’d have liked to improve

1) Slides – some slides I skipped over far too quickly. I’d put the slide in there for a reason so why bother not using it?

2) Specific plan – I would have no hope of memorising some sort of script, etc so my plan was to use the slides as prompts and then talk from my own knowledge and experience which I think generally worked ok but i possibly over emphasised some things and glossed over other points altogether as I tried to make sure I covered everything. The other problem with this is that if I had to give the same presentation again it would probably be very different. It also meant I sort of dwindled away instead of having a clear specific ending

3) Speed – it felt to me like I raced through the entire thing though obviously that’s just my perspective as I was concentrating on recalling other things while talking at the same time

4) Demos – My demos weren’t as structured as I’d have liked (this sort of follows on from point 2) which I sometimes ended up wandering down dead ends

We rarely have group members speak at meetings so it was personally big deal for me to get it right. If you were there tonight thanks for your attention. Any feedback you have (good or bad!) is appreciated

I enjoyed the whole experience though I could probably do with a laptop upgrade  

Having a bad case of insomnia so thought I’d get up and do something productive…then i ended up here

The next AMITPRO meeting is this Tuesday (12th April), 17:00 at the Arden hotel (as always!)

There will be two sessions this month

First is Sally Ross, SMB Channel Development Manager for Citrix who will be talking about the recently rebranded Citrix Access Essentials (now XenApp Fundementals). She’ll be accompanied by Kathryn Whyte who is a Citrix and Microsoft Product Sales Specialist from Ingram Micro.

I met both ladies at a recent Citrix event so will be looking forward to seeing them present for the group

The second session is by someone called Andy Parkes

I’ll be doing a short piece on Microsoft Infopath covering what it is, how you can get it with a sprinkling of demos to show how it works

Look forward to seeing you on the 12th!