SBS / EBS Launch Event in the Midlands

After a ton of partner feedback the Microsoft UK team have decided to do away with the traditional all singing-all dancing launch event Emily Lambert and Gareth Hall have decided to take the event to the partners!

This means they will visiting the various user groups around the country to show off the brand new SBS 2008 and EBS 2008. The upside to this is that it will be a much tighter event and will also give a boost to the local user groups as partners who don’t usually attend wont have much choice if they want to be at the launch event!

The brief for existing AMITPRO members is also to “bring a friend” so if your based in the midlands area and you’ve never attended a user group meeting drop a comment here or email me at andy@ibitsolutions.co.uk and “you can be my dog” (terrible 80′s reference – I shouldn’t blog while under the influence)

So the date to mark in your diaries is Wednesday 12th November

AMITPRO normally meets on a Tuesday night but the shift to the Wednesday night it so that we can ensure the venue can accommodate us (we’d better make sure we all bring a friend!)

There will the usual network before and after the event so should be a good night!

As always check out the other AMITPRO blogger’s for their views

Vijay Riyait – UK SBSC PAL

Steve Wright – AMITPRO Leader

Richard Tubb – AMITPRO member

Also Emily Lambert from Microsoft blogs too

Make sure you attend!!!!

We’ve Got Wheels

I’m certainly not the first person to have done this but couldn’t help post about it

We’ve had an awful lot going on here recently

I posted a couple of months ago about our latest recruit. The main plan was to get him up to speed on how we work and develop his role to help to take a lot of the day to day problems we get (You know the sort “I can’t print”, “why can’t I send this 25mb attachment?”)

This also involved going out to client sites to install PC’s and printers, memory upgrades, etc

For him to do this he needed to be mobile so we’ve invested in a van. As well as the company logos we’ve had small business specialist logos added as well

How does it look?

The pictures were taken on an iPhone so if the quality is low…blame Apple

Credit Where Credit Is Due

I’m probably not the first person to say this but i’d like to publicly applaud Susan “SBS Diva” Bradley for sharing the full details of her recent security incident

It would have been very easy for her to have attributed the downtime to anything other that what actually happened, flattened the machine and start over - especially since she is so passionate about patching and security

Fortunately for the rest of us she’s shared her experience for the benefit of all – thank you!

Not much elase to say really so go read what happened and think about how your managing your patches!

http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2008/06/24/so-how-did-they-break-in.aspx

http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2008/06/20/point-and-counterpoint.aspx

http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2008/06/19/so-what-happened.aspx

http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2008/06/16/offline-for-a-couple-of-days.aspx

http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2008/06/16/houston-we-have-a-problem.aspx

SBS Community Survey

Plenty of other people have already blogged about this but I just wanted to shout about this

The SBS WW Community Survey 2008 is now available online.

It’s your chance to feedback on what’s important to you as part of the SBS community

Especially since at the very bottom is a free type field where you can say what you want!

If you don’t let the “powers that be” know what you want they can’t give it to you

I’ve just completed it and it’ll only take a couple of minutes

DO IT NOW!

May AMITPRO meeting & SBS Pricing

Two blog posts for the price of one!

I’m a bit rubbish at blogging at the moment but AMITPRO meetings always give me plenty of food for though

As per my last post Mike Bryett very kindly travelled up from down south to demonstrate Microsoft Office Accounting 2008

This was very useful as taking a look at this was on my list of things to do but it’s always much easier when someone who knows more than you shows you how it all works

Mike did a great job and I was impressed with the integration with Outlook & BCM and I downloaded it as soon as i got back to see if it will be of any benefit to us (luckily it’s our accounting year end so if we wanted to start using it it’s a good time!)

I also managed to find the Office Accounting Developer Portal which contains the SDK amongst other things so worth looking into as well

Paul Dadge then showed us how his business has benefited from partnering with Enta (which Richard Tubb also backed up as he is also a fan)

I’ve signed up for their partner program so more on this as it develops

There was then a third, previously unannounced speaker…me!

I’ve been part of the trial period for the UK Partner Portal Community (I blogged about this here) so Vijay asked me Tuesday morning if I’d like to fill the rest of the group in on how that has been going. It’s still in the Alpha stages at the moment but I’ve the group provided some decent feedback to send to Microsoft

Once again a worthwhile evening spent with fellow SBSers

So how am i linking this to the SBS pricing announcement?

When we got to the bar Vijay was checking his phone when he noticed the pricing announcement details which was a great place to start the after event chat (Vijay mentions it here)

So what do i think?

I’m really not sure. Once thing I’ve learnt in recent years is that dollar amount pricing announcements have little bearing on the price we’ll see in the UK

Also the announcements were only for retail pricing. No details on OEM or licensing prices yet so I don’t know what the real price is going to be here in the UK

Sean Daniel has a good post explaining the reasoning behind the change in price (excerpt below)

• Our current SBS 2003 pricing is backwards from our research.  Having a lower server price and higher CAL prices is counter intuitive to what people actually want
• We have seen a strong desire for SQL Standard edition, instead of SQL Workgroup edition
• There is a strong desire to separate Line of Business applications from the machine running your IT Infrastructure.
• There is frustration with “over-buying” CALs, and having to buy 5 CALs for 1 new employee
• Research has shown, if the server is too inexpensive there are negative perceptions
  • e.g. contains less than full versions of products
  • e.g. less capable then Windows Standard Server

All fair comments I guess and moving from SQL workgroup to SQL standard is obviously going to bump the price up some and I can understand his last statement though i guess it depends on who your speaking to!

Either way SBS is still a bargain in my opinion and Sean states SBS Standard will actually work out cheaper. It’s the improved SQL version pushing up the price

Also the change in the CAL buying policy is a welcome one. I’d be interested to hear if there will be any incentives to buy them in packs of five in the “traditional” manner?

There was also a firmer commitment to the public beta being available in the next couple of weeks or so. I sent an email to preview@microsoft.com after the Windows 2008 launch event so I’ll be keeping an eye out for details of that

May AMITPRO Meeting

Just realised I haven’t posted about this!

The last week or so has seen some great weather here in the UK which is part of the reason why my blogging has been so light.

I.e  -  I spent most of the weekend sat outside with a beer in my hand

Anyway the latest AMITPRO meeting is Tuesday 13 May (tomorrow!)

Everyone meets at 5.00pm for a 5.30pm start at the Arden Hotel

Vijay once again makes organising group speakers every month look easy!!

Michael Bryett of Bryett Enterprise, a Microsoft Small Business Specialist based in Windsor and Group Leader of the Thames Valley SBS Group, will be presenting/demoing Office Accounting 2008 with Business Contact Manager

This is followed up by Paul Dadge doing a short presentation on EntaNet and the benefits of signing up end users to this ISP

I’m looking forward to seeing Mike talk about Office Accounting. I know he was on the Beta program over here while the product was still only a myth! Also he’s an all round nice guy so it’s great he’s making the effort to come up and speak to our group

Paul is a regular at the meetings and anything he has to say is always interesting so if you’ve never been to a user group meeting and your in the Midlands area make this the month!!

Sharepoint Event – 29th April 2008

I had such a busy day yesterday I didn’t get around to posting about this.

I spent Tuesday afternoon travelling down to Microsoft’s offices in London (Victoria) with Vijay to attend an event he had organised with Combined Knowledge

The idea behind the event is to help educate more about WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) as opposed to full blown MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server). Especially in the SBS area as it’s already installed with your SBS server!

Something I certainly found out when first exploring SharePoint was finding WSS specific information wasn’t easy due to the fact that SharePoint – as a whole – generally means MOSS (or SharePoint Portal Server as it was!)

This is understandable as SharePoint experts will be dealing with MOSS more on a day-to-day basis (and from a Microsoft perspective it’s the product that makes licensing money!)

The event was kicked off by Craig Carpenter from Combined Knowledge who gave a demonstration of Search Server Express (eventually…as is always the way at these events someone’s demo usually does something unexpected and this time it happened to Craig but he managed to sort it out and do the full demo)

I’d read about Search Server Express (specifically over on Dave Overton’s blog) but not looked into any further than that.

The demo Craig gave showed how I do need to go back at look at it. The ability to ramp up WSS search capabilities is very compelling and features such as federated search (imagine including technet search results within your SharePoint results), custom search scopes and complete control over what is and isn’t crawled is all very cool

After this Steve Smith, also from Combined Knowledge talked about Content Types and document management. Since content types is something I only recently get my head around it was good to reinforce some of the things I’d been working with and also also show me some things I hadn’t given enough consideration to

The final speaker was Bill English. He’d flown in from the US to do a little bit of site seeing and speak at a couple of events about his product

I was really looking forward to hearing Bill speak. When I first started looking at SharePoint the first book I picked up was one of his books (Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit). I learnt awful lot from this book so this was like seeing a SharePoint celebrity speak to me

Bill was there to talk about his DeliverPoint product. The idea of the software is to give you a central location for managing SharePoint permissions. I can see on large installations how this could get out of hand so the product is certainly worth a look as it’s very easy to use and the feature list is very impressive. Take a look at the site for more information as I won’t do it just here!

As well as the usual networking opportunities we also got some great pizza! On the whole I really enjoyed the event and even though I didn’t get home until 1am it was thoroughly worth the trip

 Their is a SharePoint user group in the Midlands so I’ll be looking out for upcoming events in the Midlands!

April Meeting of AMITPRO – Tuesday 8th

Just spreading the word a little,

The next meeting of AMITPRO will be on Tue 8^th April at the Arden Hotel (http://www.ardenhotel.co.uk) meeting at 5.00pm for a 5.30pm start. We have Jeff Ravell of Kaseya (http://www.kaseya.com) presenting on the Kaseya Managed Services solution so should be interesting.

If you’ve never been to a user group meeting before but are interested give it a go this month!

What a busy week! (Part Three)

Part Two here 

Thursday 20th March

I gave the night out in Broad Street a miss because I had a 9am meeting the following day that I needed to be sharp for

A client has a Visual Foxpro system that basically runs the main function of their business (I wrote it in a previous life about six or seven years ago)

They are concerned about the lack of support for Foxpro going forward and also recognise the software doesn’t quite fit as it used to so are interested in a having a new system created. I spent most of the day there going through requirements and creating a “wish list” about what they would like to do. I’ll more than likely be calling on a local partner to help with this as development isn’t my strong point anymore (if it ever was!)

I left there just before four and raced down to Reading for Susanne’s goodbye bash as she’s leaving the country (today!) on her new adventure

I first met Susanne in person in August last year and in that short time since it’s been easy to see why she’s such a respected member of the community. She’s been nothing but helpful to me when I’ve needed it, her blog is still one of the first I look out for everyday and her enthusiasm should be an inspiration to us all. I’d like to put on record my thanks and to wish her all the best in whatever she does next. She’ll be very much missed by everyone I know who is involved with the community

So onto the evening itself

Firstly I need to apologise to Dave Overton, Matt McSpirit, James Senior for any waffle that came out of my mouth.

Second, thanks to Mike Bryett for sticking with me to the end and putting up with me!

My final thanks go out to the Live Search Mobile team. Your great piece of software got me out of a jam a couple of times!

The evening involved drinking and chatting in a bar called Dogma until we got kicked out of there and whoever was left moved onto the Pitcher and Piano

I had a really good time even though my busy day meant I didn’t eat until very late (Sweeny and Todd to the rescue though…what great food!) and drank far too much taking this into account. It’s probably for the best I didn’t go out on the previous two nights!

This week reminded me how much I’ve enjoyed the last twelve months being involved in the community.

Any community is only as good as the people in it and here in the UK the people that make up that community are top notch!

What a busy week! (Part Two)

Part One here 

Wednesday 19th March

 Today was the Microsoft launch event at the ICC in Birmingham so I was up bright and early to make sure I was there on time.

The event was huge and i was impressed with the amount of information there was to consume.

I got a seat right at the front for the keynote by Jonathan Perera, General Manager of Application Platform and Developer Marketing but before he came one were treated to the sound of “Noise Ensemble” (sample video below)

If someone had told me beforehand that the Microsoft launch would open to some flashing lights and a group of people banging drums I would have laughed but it worked really well and was different and memorable

The keynote talked about the “heroes happen here” campaign and we had some demos of the new products in action.

There were various sessions to attend but i decided to focus on content i hadn’t seen as i was worried that with all the events (technet/user group/ etc) i’ve been to i might be hearing the same thing again

The first thing i saw was a small session (as in the amount of people) with Steve Lamb talking about security. What i liked about this session was that Steve wasn’t following any prepared content as such but was creating a conversation about anything security related. We started with Bitlocker and moved onto Server 2008, Hyper-v and IIS

Other sessions i went to included a look at Terminal Services (including Citrix and Softgrid) following by a look at the new features of IIS

My only downside was that a lot of the sessions overran so time in between was short which then meant i couldn’t check everything else out. The main hall was full of vendors, people from Microsoft covering various topics and a community stage where some of the developer user groups (noticeably the NXTGen user group) had some entertaining pieces on including a reworked version of Family Fortunes and something called “Swagons Den”!

I did manage to get a look at the stands run by HP, Symantec, Quest software, Dell and the partner programme. I just wish i’d been able to get to some more. Especially the life size statue of the Master Chief as i didn’t get a chance to grab a photo!!

As always there were plenty of people from the SBS community and as always we had a good natter!

The day ended at a “geek dinner”. I was really pleased this was organised actually as it wasn’t the first time I’d heard that name but they mostly organised in the south which generally limits my attendance! As Richard said in his post it would be good to try and get something similar in the Midlands going so if I’d love to hear from you if your interested. I really enjoyed the fact that guys from many different areas of IT came together over our common love of pizza and beer! All joking aside i got to meet some of the guys from the developer groups that i might not have otherwise engaged with so thanks to Zi for organising and thanks to NXTGen, VBUG and Developer Developer Developer! for being so hospitable

While Richard may have braved the night out on Broad Street i drove home knowing what i had in store for tomorrow. I got back just before 12 and this time went straight to bed!

End of part two!