Looking at the world - from Down Under : SBS User Group

Small Business Server 2008 World Wide Community Survey

calvert — Tue, 27 May 2008 23:57:00 GMT

Passing on an email from Kevin Beares ... Microsoft community leader extraordinaire

The Windows Small Business Server 2008 WW Community Survey is live

This is the third year we have published an SBS WW Community Survey to the SBS Community.

We have learned an amazing amount of information from the people who have taken the time to tell us what they thought. Some things we kind of knew already, but other things were not as clear before we had received the feedback.

Because of the previous surveys, we have made some adjustments in our community engagement. To name a few; we really worked on putting more focus on the Official SBS Blog. Our Sustaining Engineering team runs mini betas with our MVPs before KB's and Bug Fixes are released via Windows Update. We try to get more involvement in our techbetas from our User Groups. The list does go on.

To the survey, the SBS Product Team would like to hear from the Windows SBS Community again. This survey is completely anonymous. In fact, some of you may have to sign out from Live in order to take the survey. So, if you get a PAGE NOT FOUND error message, please log out of Live and click on the link to the survey again.

We want to know how valuable your experience is with the community resources and information that is available to you today as a member of the Windows SBS Community. We also want to know what you think could be done to improve your Windows SBS Community Experience. Please take a couple of minutes to provide us your candid feedback via this survey and let us know what you think.

SBS WW Community Survey 2008

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Kevin Beares

Community Lead – WSSG

Going to meet with Trend Micro next week

calvert — Thu, 08 May 2008 01:17:00 GMT

This is a copy of an email I sent to the Adelaide SBS User Group a few minutes ago and consider this worthwhile posting to the wider world.

"I’ve got a meeting with Trend Micro next week with one of the top people in the company who’s travelling out from the USA to meet with me and a few others to discuss Trend and the IT community moving forward. This will not be a technical discussion – it’s going to be more strategic.

So, I’d like some feedback to take with me to the meeting. Those of you currently using Trend products, can you please provide me with some feedback (offlist if you think it’s sensitive) about your working relationship with Trend. Some things to consider are:

· Are Trend an important partner for your business and your customers?

· How easy do you find it to get answers to questions you have for them?

· Comments on the Trend web site – the good, bad and ugly

· Do you use the partner portal and do you have comments on its usability, information etc

· Anything else of relevance – remember this is not a technical discussion so it can’t be along the lines of “I’ve got this issue with CSM at a site where.....”

For those of you not using Trend products I guess it would be interesting to know why not and who you do work with – why you use other products and what are the great points about these products/companies that have got you using them.

I’m not a Trend evangelist by any means – I’m simply looking for feedback. We use Trend products (I make no secret of that) and we have our reasons for this as a company. Personally I’ve no issue with anyone not using Trend product but am seeking great feedback to take to Trend which will make working with them, and protecting the networks we maintain, better for the future.

My meeting is next Friday (May 16) so if you can please get me any feedback by midday Thursday next week that’d be great. I’m happy to keep your comments confidential too if you want that."

So please let me know what you'd like Trend to hear. I can be reached at dean[cut this bit out] at calvert DOT net DOT au

SBS Technical Training now in Canberra

calvert — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:27:00 GMT

Nick's just blogged this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/nickmayhew/archive/2007/09/14/sbs-partner-training-now-with-a-date-in-canberra.aspx

This follows on from my last post about the training for SBSers. If you're in Canberra please take advantage of this offer.

It's a simple matter of economics that if Microsoft can see the numbers in Canberra for these events then they'll continue to offer them there. If attendance is routinely low (and this is really for any place an event is run) then they won't be offered there in the future.

So - support yourself and your local community by attending these events and reap the rewards.

Calling all network manager type people

calvert — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 08:36:00 GMT

Put this onto your radar:

http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/essentials/default.mspx

Had a meeting with some bodies here at the MS Australian partner conference just a while ago, in particular the lovely Frederique Dennison (Product Marketing Manager, Secfurity and Management) where we were discussing network management tools and processes.

Microsoft is certainly ramping things up for the SME end of town and if you work in this space then you need to start getting familiar with System Center Essentials (SCE) before the guy up the road does. It's going to change the way networks are maintained moving forward - making things easier, more visible, more pro-active rather than reactive (aka waiting for the phone to ring).

You can download a VHD of SCE to play with so you're not installing it into your production environment to begin with, and being a virtual machine you could even play with it whilst flying home from the conference

Hint: SCE is part of the wave hitting a network near you next year (http://msmvps.com/blogs/calvert/archive/2007/08/31/aussies-add-this-to-your-rss-feed.aspx), so get your board waxed and ready ahead of time.

Adelaide SBS User Group Meeting - October

calvert — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 14:17:00 GMT

Don't forget next Monday night, October 23, is the next meeting for the Adelaide SBS group.

We'll be at Ingram Micro again (our new home for now) which is level 2, 208 Greenhill Rd, Eastwood.

Park across the road on the north side of Greenhill Rd as the undercover carpark is known to 'eat' cars.

We kick off at 6:30 but come from just after 6pm for pizza & drinks. Not 100% what the topic will be yet but it will be worth your time.

As always entry is free unless you really feel like paying . If you are planning on attending please RSVP to info {at} sbsusers {dot} net.

Make sure you're there for the November meeting announcement - something special has been arranged.....

Don't be #801

calvert — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 22:27:00 GMT

SMB Nation 2006 is open for registration. This is THE premier event for SME consultants/VARs/VAPs/resellers and you need to do all you can to be there. The conference will once again be held at Microsoft's Conference Centre in Redmond, Washington.

There are only 800 places available so don't delay getting your registration in - you don't want to miss out by being number 801 to register. There's an early-bird special until the end of March where the registration cost is only US$695, following which it'll go up to US$795. That US$100 saving can be applied to your drinking money in the bar at the Marriot in Redmond [:D]

There's an impressive list of speakers for this year's conference (http://www.smbnation.com/Default.aspx?TabId=5) so you're sure to learn plenty regardless of which track you follow (technical, business, product/sales). I'll be speaking in the business track again and plan to get into more advanced business growth information - taking your business to the next level. If you're coming along and would like some specific information included then please let me know and I'll see if I can work it into the time available for the presentation.

Of course I think the best part of attending an event like SMB Nation is the ability to network with fellow SBSers from around the world. People with whom I communicate with by email or IM and it's great to put a face to a name or catch up with a face I've met before.

So what are you waiting for? Get your registration in and join in the learning, fun & friendship. Hope to see you there :)

Feb user group slides are up

calvert — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 22:07:00 GMT

We had a great meeting last Monday night (Feb 20), being our first SBS user group meeting for 2006. The topic was ISA2004, particularly with regard to its place in SBS.

Now I'm not going to profess to be an expert in ISA - there are plenty of others around that leave me for dead, but I certainly did learn a lot more in preparation for this meeting. I should point out that prior to any UG meeting presentation I make sure I research the topic that will be presented as well as I can in the time available to me. In this way I can provide a quality presentation with relevant and accurate information plus hopefully answer any questions that come up.

Congratulations go to Paul Cumberworth who was the only attendee able to list the 7 layers of the OSI model for networking. He won a Microsoft 64Mb USB stick for that effort - well done Paul :) (Refer to http://www.learntcpip.com/TCPIP/default.htm for an overview).

The slide deck has been posted to the UG web site (www.sbsusers.net/meetings.htm) so you can download it from there although the slides really only have the bullet points of what we covered. There were plenty of demonstrations using a real live virtual SBS server I carry around with me - better make sure you come to the next meeting then!! The slide deck also has some ISA references near the end so make sure you refer to those too for more in depth information.

For the record I relied not only on my own experience with ISA for the presentaiton but also refered to Eriq Neale's "SBS2003 Unleashed" together with Dr Tom Shinder's ISA2004 book. Great additions to your library.

Next meeting is March 20 at HP (148 Frome Street, Adelaide). Looking for ideas for the meeting presentation - what do you want to see?

Web site maintenance

calvert — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 21:04:00 GMT

Just in case you get to wondering where the web site for www.sbsusers.net gets to - over the next few nights I plan to perform a major overhaul of the site. In fact the entire server is going to be rebuilt.

So, if you go looking for it, don't panic, it's just having some surgery.

Why? Well, I want to make the site more manageable, easier to update and able to provide more dynamic content.

The content currently there will be copied over to the new server

September SBS User Group meeting

calvert — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 00:07:00 GMT

We're meeting again on Monday night (Sept 19th), 6:30pm at HP's Adelaide office - 148 Frome Street, Adelaide. Free parking is available in the street. HP will once again be feeding us so bring your appetite.

Not sure yet what the topic will be so if you've any suggestions please let me know. I'll more than likely cover SMB Nation though which was a great event and well worth attending. Make sure you book it into your diary for 2006, Sept 8-10 in Redmond, Washington.

If you're planning on attending the meeting on Monday please RSVP to admin@sbsusers.net so we know how many to feed.

June SBS user group announcement

calvert — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 07:04:00 GMT

June meeting is next Monday (June 20) at 6:30pm. HP are hosting us again - 148 Frome Street, Adelaide (cnr Frome & Flinders Sts).

Parking is available in Frome Street & Flinders Street and is free by this time of day.

My plan is to present on rootkits. Keen to hear back any "war stories" on SBS SP1 deployments too.

HP will be providing pizza again - I'll stick with the toppings from last month unless you've got other requests.

Please RSVP your intention to attend so I can arrange enough for all - & feel free to pass this invitation on to any other contacts you may have that might be interested in attending.

The deck is available...

calvert — Mon, 30 May 2005 03:34:00 GMT

Forgot to let you know - the slide deck from last weeks SBS group meeting is available from www.sbsuser.net/meetings.htm. The presentation was about SBS SP1. Feel free to use the deck as you wish for your own meetings - Vlad Mazek is using a varient of it for his group meeting in Florida shortly. Way to go Vlad!

Next month - rootkits, plus of course some updates on SBS SP1. We're meeting on June 20th at HP again. Thanks for the pizza and fizzy (great pizza too - I think from the Australian Pizza House on West Terrace - brilliant). Stay tuned for the “official announcement”.

May Adelaide SBS users group get together

calvert — Thu, 12 May 2005 06:47:00 GMT

We're meeting again on Monday May 23rd. HP are hosting us again (148 Frome Street, Adelaide). Thanks Stacey for arranging this, and to George for agreeing to look after us for the evening.

The meeting will kick off at 6:30pm but get there early so you're not locked out. If you are stuck outside please call 0413 180 088 and ask to be let in (this mobile will only be turned on on the night).

At the moment I'm considering presenting either SBS SP1 in more detail (if it's released by then) or else rootkits - which I learned about in Singapore and more since getting home. They are freaky, scary things that we really need to know about, plus security best practices in general.

If SBS SP1 is the topic then rootkits will most likely be the June focus. In fact, why not help make this the best presentation ever by providing your own feedback, experiences and best practices. Please use the feedback option below to let me know your favourite hints & tips, URL links etc. The presentation deck will be made available on the user group website (www.sbsusers.net) for all to access.

If you're planning on attending the May meeting please RSVP to info@sbsusers.net.

April SBS Users Group Wrapup

calvert — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 17:57:00 GMT

Last night (Monday April 18) we held the April Adelaide SBS users group meeting.

Firstly, thanks to HP for hosting us, and special thanks to Stacey Nakos for staying back to keep the doors open.

Michael Jenkin presented us with our groups membership certificate to Culminis, which is a global organisation dedicated to helping user groups develop and grow. It's early days at the moment with our membership and as I learn more about what this offers the group I'll be updating this BLOG and the user group website.

Peter Teichert from SDM presented Microsoft CRM to us. Peter's dynamism and energy kept us all awake and tuned in to what he was presenting. Microsoft CRM is currently at version 1.2 and is already a amture and well featured product. I'm certainly no expert on the product (which is why Peter was presenting!) but more information can be found on the Microsoft site or by contacting SDM.

Our next meeting is tentatively booked for May 23 at HP again (148 Frome Street, Adelaide) starting 6:30pm. More details will be posted here, on the group web site and posted to the Yahoo mailing list when available. The topic will most likely be SBS 2003 service pack 1 which is expected to be released to market over the next few weeks.

Thanks to all who attended - see you next month.

March SBS users group wrap up

calvert — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 02:59:00 GMT

Wow - what a great meeting tonight. We had around 24 bodies in the boardroom at Sun Microsystems' office - was a little tight but that's all part of the fun.

I started with a brief introduction and welcome. Since there were some new faces amongst us, we then ran around the room giving our names. Perhaps I need to look at preparing some name badges for future meetings as the numbers increase and our memories are stretched!

Matthew Nolan (SA Branch Manager for Alstom IT) helped us thank Sun for hosting us and introduced Michael Jenkin (another SBS MVP) who gave us a brief overview of the Sun Fire V20z server he'd been playing with. This is a dual processor Opteron 1U rack mount server with room for 2 disks and up to 16Gb RAM. The report is it flies and runs SBS2003 flawlessly. No additional driver disks were required - it just installed (that's always great news). Michael was very impressed with the performance.

We then had a presentation from Ben Guthrie (Product Marketing Manger) from Trend Micro. Ben gave us an insight into some of the technologies Trend are looking to incorporate into future products. This presentation required the attendees to sign an NDA so I can't write anything more here except to say watch out for some amazing things from Trend later this year.

I also made mention of Harry Brelsford's visit to Australia next week when he will present in Sydney & Brisbane to other Microsoft partners.Some of the Adelaide group members are travelling over to Sydney for the day - it's great to see the willingness to go the extra mile (or the extra 1,000 miles) to learn more. Well done guys. This might be a precursor to SMB Nation in September (in Seattle, Washington) - we might get more than just 3 Aussies at the next one (look out for the Thunder from Down Under!!)

We finished the night with pizza and drinks courtesy of Alstom IT, who also arranged parking vouchers for us such that our parking was free. It's great to see the vendors and distributors getting behind the group and supporting us like this. - thanks guys.

Our next meeting will most likely be either April 18 or May 2nd (venue to be determined) so stay posted for an update, or you can join the group's Yahoo list to receive notifications in your Inbox (low traffic). We're going to be amazed by Peter Teichert (from SDM) with a presentation on Microsoft CRM.

Look forward to seeing you there.

Following the Feb SBS users group meeting...

calvert — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 22:47:00 GMT

We had a great meeting the other week and covered a lot of ground. The PowerPoint deck will shortly be available for download on the www.sbsusers.net site (go to the meetings page).

We had a discussion about some issues being experienced with Backup Exec on SBS. Andrew (one of my team) has covered this ground several times and came up with the goods - in particular how to get jobs that get to 99% to complete successfully rather than just sit in a pending state.

Turns out David from the Sydney SBS group has the same frustrations, so for all of you with Backup Exec woes, get ready to smile...

How to configure VERITAS Backup Exec (tm) to automatically respond to media alerts, including when a backup hangs at 99%, until the user responds to a tape eject prompt

Identified by looking in Event Viewer – Applications: Event ID 58061 is shown

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/192055.htm

That should do it! And for some more little gems Andrew has found...

OFO: Initialization failure on: "Shadow?Copy?Components" Advanced Open File Option used: Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). VSS Snapshot error. Unexpected provider error.

Identified by looking in Event Viewer – Applications: Event ID 34113 is shown. Often also associated as being a METADATA error

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/265927.htm

And be aware of ports in use when installing Backup Exec 10

After a reboot or restarting the Backup Exec services, the Backup Exec Server Service fails to start with the following error: "An internal error (-14) occurred in object 10."

Identified by looking in Event Viewer – Applications: Event ID 57802 is shown.

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/275017.htm

You will need to use netstat –a to find what ports are open

Refer to “netstat /?“ for full usage details

Another topic discussed was clearing out badmail folder entries where there are HEAPS of them present. Opening the folder in Windows Explorer, or even a command prompt, can be unsuccessful when there are thousands of entries. So, Microsoft have a VBscript to deal with this (again thanks to Andrew for finding this one). Smply visit http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=867642

Finally, if you find an Exchange server that's being used as an open relay and want to get it cleaned up, visit http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=324958

Of course you're better of not being an open relay in the first place.

Right - time to get back to work. Oh, that reminds me, details for the March SBS users group meeting need to be posted here...stay tuned...

February Adelaide SBS Users Group Meeting

calvert — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 15:59:00 GMT

The next meeting for the Adelaide SBS Users Group will be held Monday Feb 21 at 6:30pm.

We'll be meeting at Enterprise House (Business SA), 136 Greenhill Road, Unley. We'll be in room 6 on the first floor.

Parking is available on-site.

I'm looking for suggestions for topics to present, however at the moment I'll probably discuss new tips around ISA 2000 configuration and group policy. However, read my next blog entry on SBS SP1 which might come in as the winning topic to discuss.

Please RSVP your intention to attend to info@sbsusers.net. Attendance is free.

January Adelaide SBS users group update

calvert — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 04:45:00 GMT

The Adelaide SBS users group met tonight - it was a great night, even though the "demo gods" were against us (more on this later).
We had around 12 attendees, including me, plus our special presenter - George Alexandritis (from Trend Micro).
We started with introductions for new attendees and some notices including the impending release of Harry's latest SBS book. Get your copy here from Feb 7th (this date possibly subject to change). Not only will it be a great addition to your library, it will give you incredible information from some of the best SBS brains on the planet (FYI I'm NOT a contributing author - not enough brain cells!!) including Jeff Middleton, Susan Bradley, Wayne Small, Andy Goodman, Steven Banks and many more. Harry refers to them as the 'international "dream team" of the world's leading SBSers'.
George presented the fantastic offerings from Trend Micro - designed to protect your network from virii, spam and spyware, from the servers and gateways all the way down to your PDA.
The installation of the CSM suite onto our Virtual PC SBS server (Lexi) went fine but the "demo gods" were against us when it came time to access the management console - something to do with the SSL certificates.
I think next time we'll follow Kevin's BLOG about installing CSM onto SBS - why try to reinvent the wheel? By the way, George did a great job - thanks George. You're welcome back ANYTIME.
The meeting was well received and we had some great side discussions including a chat about swing migrations and backups (tape (9) vs disk (6) vs optical (3) and software used - SBS (5) vs Backup Exec (9) vs ArcServe (0) vs anything else).
Our next meeting is Monday Feb 21, starting 6:30pm at Enterprise House - 136 Greenhill Road, Unley (parking onsite). Please RSVP to info@sbsusers.net.

Oh - there were several articles we were looking for from the meeting.

Firstly there's the article on the IPXFER tool - http://kb.trendmicro.com/solutions/search/main/search/solutionDetail.asp?solutionID=5987

Secondly the ability to eliminate the pre-scan in the OfficeScan 3.5 client installation - Locate AUTOPCC.INI in the \AUTOPCC.CFG folder in the OfficeScan server. Search for the [INSTALL] section change the line

NoPrescan=0
to
NoPrescan=1
The prescan will be disabled next time the OfficeScan client program is deployed to clients.

Oh, thanks again to Kel for bringing the data projector.

Next Adelaide SBS users group meeting

calvert — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 17:13:00 GMT

Our next get together is Monday night, January 24th. Venue is yet to be 100% confirmed but should be at Enterprise House - 136 Greenhill Road, Unley. Parking is available on site.

Meeting starts at 6:30pm and I've asked for Trend Micro to present to us.

I'll post back final confirmation re the meeting details. If you're planning to attend please rsvp to info@sbsusers.net.

Adelaide SBS User Group met last Monday...

calvert — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 16:24:00 GMT

We had Michael Kleef (Microsoft IT Pro Evangelist) pay us a visit and present ISA 2004. We had a great turnout of around 15 - not sure if it was Michael or the pizza that brought them in though!

Our numbers have grown again since the MS/HP/Trend Micro SMB Partner Summit presentations touring the country hit Adelaide. In fact we've seen great response from MS partners in each of the cities which is fantastic. I think this calls for another blog entry - stay tuned.

Back to the user group meeting - Michael showed us the new face of ISA Server, highlighting it's “secure by default“ design which prevents any traffic from flowing through the firewall until it's setup to allow it. The presentation deck will be available for download from the meeting page of www.sbsusers.net as soon as I get it posted up (just have to find that USB key...).

We also saw the template based configuration available with ISA where we even get little pictures showing us what the configuration will look like. I'm sure Dr Tom's site has plenty of documentation on this available - check it out.

We finished off with loads of pizza (thanks to Dave Allinson from Microsoft for providing this) and a play of Halo2 on the X-Box where Michael well and truly kicked my butt! Fortunately I have no misconceptions about how terrible I am at the game so losing wasn't a real problem though I must admit I let out a few cheers when I knocked him off a couple of times.

We won't be holding a meeting in December, there just aren't enough days left, so January is the next get together. Looks like Monday the 24th will be the date - mark it in your diary and RSVP your intention to attend to info@sbsusers.net. Keep an eye on www.sbsusers.net for location details too.

I'll see if I can get Peter from SDM to stop in Adelaide long enough to show us CRM in action. Just in case though please let me know if you've got any requests for what to look at.