‘SharePoint as a Help Desk’ On Tour–Manchester

I may have mentioned once or twice over the last couple of weeks I’d been invited to the Manchester SBSC group to deliver the presentation I gave at AMITPRO a few months ago.

So last Thursday I made the trip up to Manchester and as I’ve done every time I’ve presented to a user group I thought it’d critique myself again (in the interests of self improvement of course!)

But before that the rest of the event.

First I’d like to thank Simon Belt for organising the event and for very kindly hanging around for a couple of beers afterwards.

Next, thanks to the group members for their kind welcome and for not heckling.

Finally the other speaker of the night, Gary Duffield of QA. Garry attended WPC this year and gave a great presentation which summarised the key points that came out of the event and where Microsoft and their partners are heading in the near future. The session was very much discussion based and it was great to see that interactivity and gave everyone some good ideas to think about.

Garry also has a blog you can check out.

So onto my presentation.

On the whole I was pretty happy. I’ve had some nice follow up comments which I always appreciate.

What did I think though?

Preparation

I mentioned in my previous review that I’d used OneNote to put together an outline to work against and I was pleased with how it helped me last time. Because of the way i put it together it made the presentation much easier to pick up and and repeat (it’s the first time I’ve ever done a talk twice!). That said the first time around I created the presentation and then delivered it shortly after I’d finished it so it meant I knew everything inside out. While I had gone back through my notes when preparing I didn’t quite know it in the same way as first time around. Luckily the notes helped so while I did forget to do a couple of things it was very easy to pick that up.

As a result I actually didn’t build-up the application as much as last time. I did do enough to get my point across though even if I did race through a lot of it. I don’t think there is a lot I can do about this other make sure I’ve got enough time as possible and know the steps as well as I can. Building a fully working SharePoint application and explaining everything along the way in a hour is an ambitious thing to do but worth racing through if it gets people thinking about how they could do it.

Speed

When I gave this presentation for AMITPRO I didn’t use a slide deck (it wasn’t actually intentional) this time since very few people in the room knew me I started with the slides to introduce myself. There weren’t many slides but because of how much content there is in the demo to get through it stole a bit of my time. I’ll bear it in mind next time if it’s a packed agenda and maybe go back to the PowerPoint free presentation Guy praised me for last time.

Demo

I know a good workman shouldn’t blame his tools but I’m going to anyway. My laptop is a couple of years old now. It’s got an Intel mobile chip (so no virtualisation extensions!) with 3GB of RAM. While it just about ran the two virtual machines I used it very obviously struggled at times and it slowed the presentation quite a bit which wasn’t helpful when I had so much to get through. When I purchased the laptop I never really expected to be using it for running virtual machines for demoing SharePoint to a user group. Times have moved on though and user group presentations aside, the ability to run virtual machines on the go has lots of other benefits. I’m not planning on rushing out and getting a new laptop but when my next hardware refresh comes around I’ll be able to factor it in.

Not too much to complain about on the whole!

It was also good to see how another user group runs. Other than AMITPRO the only other time I’d been to another group was when I visited the Bristol group for the SBS 2008 launch. That was a slightly different format because of the SBS launch so I’m counting this as my first time!

Thanks again for to everyone who attended the meeting. Would be great to hear any comments you have!

SharePoint as a Help Desk–On Tour!

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!

SBS 2008 Migration Gotcha

I was recently migrating a client from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008.

I was using the Microsoft method (backed up by the techniques in Dave Overton’s book!) and having ran the source tool on the old server I kicked off the migration on the new server and got this error.

Weird….I’d ran the source tool without issue?  

So I rebooted and ran it again yet I still repeatedly got the same message.

I found an article on the official SBS blog outlining the error but it basically says the resolution is to run the source tool.

Confused I decided that there must be a log somewhere so called up a command prompt (did you know you can do this during setup? press SHIFT+F10) and changed to the log directory.

SBS 2008 keeps all the major logs in one place.

C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Logs

There is a post on the official SBS blog about this with full details.

So I opened the setup log and saw lots of passes until I got to this.

Read the rest of this entry »

SharePoint as a Help Desk @ AMITPRO

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!

Andy and SharePoint @ June AMITPRO Meeting

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!

David Houston – Community Legend

If you follow the SBS Community at all you’ll have no doubt heard the sad news of the passing of David Houston.

I met David “virtually” online in 2007. Both he and I participated in the long departed monthly SBS Chat and were the only people from this part of the world. (mainly because it started at 1am GMT!)

Once upon a time I also tried to help promote an event he was running by blogging about it.

I only met him once when he attended an AMITPRO meeting and while I knew he had health problems I was still shocked to hear the news over the weekend as he was very much a community person and you won’t hear a bad word said about him.

Hearing about the death of anyone you’ve been connected to in one way or the other certainly makes you take stock of things.

There are a lot of people in the SBS Community I don’t know as well as I’d like so I‘m going to try and change that over the coming months.

Susanne Dansey (Purple Cow Ideas Management) talks about David in her vLog here which prompted me to post as I wasn’t entirely sure what to talk about but since she went to the effort of getting in front of a camera I thought I could at least put a paragraph together.

My thoughts go out to David’s family and I’d like to thank David for all his efforts over the years

AMITPRO Invades Microsoft Briefing

Bank holiday always throws me so this is sneaking up on me quite quickly.

This Thursday, (6th May), Microsoft are holding a regional Partner Business Briefing in Birmingham to promote the upcoming changes to the Microsoft Partner Network, showcase the current wave of Microsoft products and facilitate inter-partner collaboration (we promoted the event on the AMITPRO site).

As part of this, a number of partners have been invited to speak briefly around a variety of topics with partner collaboration and growth as a central theme.

It’s no coincidence a big chunk of those are AMITPRO members since working together and sharing ideas is one of the main reasons we’re all a part of the group.

I’m fortunate enough to be one of those asked to speak so if you’re going to be there leave a comment as I’d love to hear from you and I’ll introduce you to the AMITPRO crowd!

Get them while their hot! ZDTM Workbook special offer

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

April AMITPRO meeting – Must Attend Event!

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!

Bye Bye EBS!

You’ve more than likely heard that Microsoft are ending development of EBS with immediate effect. If you browse to the website you’ll see this

(eventually…I got this and the regular product page randomly on each page load)

There is also an an announcement on the official SBS blog

“New IT Trends Bring Change to Mid-Market Product Line”

This didn’t exactly come as a massive surprise. If you work in the SME market hands up who sold lots of EBS?

When the product was initially announced it sounded like an interesting proposition but I had a few problems making it “fit”

Comparisons to SBS are bound to happen so that’s where I’ll start!

SBS works because it fits really well into a couple of scenarios that met a need for small businesses

New company, first network, first server

Obvious really. New company, buying infrastructure to get started. Decides to do it right from the offset and goes for SBS

Existing company, existing network, first server

A company that’s grown and needs to go from that peer to peer network to their first server

Existing Company, existing network, replacement server

You know the type. They’re using a “beefed up" PC as a central storage area for their files or they have been sold sold a more expensive "big daddy” Windows Server for sharing files and have no other functionality

As a side note Windows Foundation with some hosted services thrown in could easily swap out for SBS depending on the size of the company

So where in comparisons does EBS fit?

That was my problem.

Business that were generally large enough to look at EBS don’t really fit any of the above

New companies generally don’t start out needing to support 50+ users straight away

Existing companies that have grown to that size do so for a reason and they’ve usually made their IT mistakes and got something in that fits well. Usually “big daddy” Windows server but they pay enterprise prices because there isn’t a product specifically for them. Hence the introduction of EBS!

Since most existing companies like this generally have decent enough networks running it’s difficult to justify ripping the whole thing out and starting again.

So the other scenario I see is the businesses reaching the upper limits of SBS

I actually have this exact scenario going on at the moment with one of my clients and have agonised over EBS vs the regular server products

One of the issues I had was with the “Security Server”

The client in question had already made investments in protecting themselves at the gateway with a dedicated hardware firewall so had no need for Forefront Threat Management Gateway and were already covered by a message hygiene solution so no need for the Exchange Edge role so what exactly were they going to use this server for?

If you are doing it the traditional way then it’s a whole physical server you just don’t need. Obviously you could virtualise it but it’s still a running server that you need to provide support for, patch management, etc  (* this is based on my understanding being that you have to roll out ALL the servers to make EBS work. If I’m wrong please correct me)

There is also another point made by Andy Trish (UK SBSC PAL), that I saw on an email discussion tonight I hope Andy won’t mind me quoting him

They were trying to sell to a market that didn’t need the resellers knowledge to install and support
We wanted to sell using our knowledge to a market who we wanted to get rid of their support and use ours.

Andy is spot on here. Companies of this size have grown up enough to usually have some sort of IT function in-house. They may lean on a support company for advice or specific project work but they’ll make their own decisions about infrastructure. They’ll already have a happy system ticking over quite nicely. What benefit will they actually gain by ripping it all out and replacing it EBS. Slightly simplified licensing and Remote Web Workplace? Technically there really isn’t anything in EBS they aren’t already doing

Again I have a client where a similar situation occurs. They run about 30 internal staff and some external staff. They are quite a technology smart company and don’t run SBS as they have been running multiple Windows servers before SBS was actually relevant (I’ve known this company a LONG time!)

They improved the system a server at a time and now have pretty much all the servers in the EBS stack

File and Print, Domain Controller, Exchange, SQL, ISA (at one point, that has gone now though)

While EBS looked like a decent fit here it would be at the expense of ripping it all out and starting from scratch. This obviously makes no sense.

We actually had the same discussion around SBS a while back with them but what benefit would they get from ripping the whole thing out to start again with SBS?

The killer SBS/EBS feature they don’t have natively is Remote Web Workplace. There are other options for this though such an SSL VPN device or TS Gateway. Remote Web Workplace would be great here but they’ve done ok without it so far

Obviously this all my opinion and very specific point of view. In some ways though it’s a brave decision for Microsoft to just cut their losses and continue with the stuff that does make money so maybe we should applaud them for that

If you’ve already purchase EBS though Microsoft will be making an limited time offer (June 30th to December 31th) available to transition onto the regular products. Someone will have to actually perform the transition which will have a cost attached so it’s not entirely free

So as Guy Gregory said in tweet earlier

Farewell Essential Business Server, we hardly knew thee.

As always your own opinion more than welcome via comment below or email!