The other steveb - Steve Banks' Blog on SBS, EBS, and other Small Business Technology Topics : PSSBS

Karl Palachuk is Seattle Bound!

steveb — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:31:00 GMT

Here's a quick advertisement for Karl's next Seattle visit. I've already bought my ticket, so I'll see you there. - Steve

Meet Karl in Seattle on Tuesday, November 3rd

6:30 PM – 9:00 PM
Introduction to Project Management and Zero Downtime Migration Strategies

$10 discount available instantly. Just use discount code SEA200911 at checkout.

For more info, see http://www.smbbooks.com/categories/seminars.htm

Response Point SP2 Demo this month at PSSBS' meeting in Bellevue

steveb — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:51:00 GMT

Rex Backman, Senior Business and Channel Development Manager at Microsoft Research, and long time friend and member of the Puget Sound Small Business Server group, Mike Iem, will be doing a presentation and demo this month on Response Point SP2, Microsoft's phone system for small business, at our March 19th PSSBS meeting. Be sure to attend and get a first hand look at Response Point SP2 . Meeting will be from 6 PM - 8:30 PM, with the Response Point presentation running from 6 PM - 7 PM.

Does Doyenz have their head in the clouds you ask?

steveb — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:05:00 GMT

"Suspended high among the pastel clouds of Bespin, held aloft by huge repulsorlifts built into its curved frame, is a floating metropolis of sophisticated beauty and political freedom. Cloud City exists not only as a mining colony, extracting valuable Tibanna gas from the depths of the giant planet, but also as a sanctuary for those trying to escape the turmoil gripping the galaxy." Oh, sorry, wrong cloud. ;-)

Ran across a post regarding Doyenz today by Joe Panettieri over at MSPmentor, Will Small Business Server Move Into the Clouds? I do not work for Doyenz, have not signed a partner agreement with them as of yet, and do not know where Doyenz may ultimately go as a company, but I do know what I've heard from them over the past twelve months and I don not think that their initial concept/business model has changed in the past five of those months.

Doyenz first showed up, in the form of their CTO, Przemek Pardyak, as an attendee at a PSSBS user group meeting back in November of 2007. At that time, I had no idea who Przemek, or the company was. Przemek emailed me in December to introduce himself again and but I didn't pursue a conversation at the time.

Jump ahead to March, 2008, when a customer of mine emails an introduction to Doyenz CEO, Ashutosh Tiwary, over to me:

-----Original Message-----
From: C...
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 11:24 AM
To: 'Ashutosh Tiwary'; Steven Banks
Subject: Intro btw CEO Doyenz & Steven Banks

Steven,

This morning I had the opportunity to spend an hour with Ashutosh, an
opportunity you should mirror. He created a startup that uses the notion of
a virtual machine to automate the provisioning of SBS-like services to small
and medium sized companies. He is super passionate about the segment and
knows that he wants to build a product that you and your community will
adopt and promote. As such he needs a community of like-minded souls for
feedback and guidance. Please take the chance to meet with him; I know
you're both very busy but each of you has a lot to offer the other.

Regards & thanks,

C...

Based off of my client's introduction and a subsequent meeting in person with Ashutosh at a Starbucks in Bellevue, I set up an event for our Puget Sound Small Business Server user group that coincided with the last night of Microsoft's 2008 MVP Summit, and Ashutosh had what I believe to be his first public presentation of his company, what they had envisioned for their service offering, and a rough time-line of when they would have something tangible to show us, and how he saw it as a progression in how those in the room had been doing business up to this point in the SMB / SBS space.

While there were many heated, sparked discussions that night, especially a very enjoyable devil's advocate "what-if" game played by Jeff Middleton and Henry Craven across a few rows of seats from each other, complete with choosing others in the room to represent their employees and businesses effected by their scenarios, one thing came out of that discussion that really hit home. This was reiterated by Ashutosh in October, when he met with us again prior to his launch at SMB Nation in Seattle. This is my translation of what I heard: Doyenz is not looking to be a cloud hosting company. They are creating a service offering that leverages economy of scale and deals with different providers, like Kaseya, to offer the SMB space a low cost solution that funnels services through Doyenz. They are positioning themselves as a servicing corporation to the SMB partner community. By going to Kaseya, the example mentioned by Panettieri in his article, and to others they are striking agreements with, they are signing deals based on an estimated number of potential end users, then bundling the services and providing the SMB partner/reseller an opportunity to use those services as part of the Doyenz virtualized delivery system as a whole package. Doyenz adds to the services by giving the partner/reseller a scripted vending machine type of approach where you go to the vending machine, I mean Doyenz Website, you place your order for an SBS 2003 Server, and you then pick up your end product out of the slot at the bottom of the machine in a few hours. What you do with that end image is completely up to you. You can run it on a customer premise server(s), you can host it at a collocation facility of your choice, or you can host it at your own facility. They really don't care, and are not in the "cloud" business. They are in the business of collecting a monthly revenue stream resulting from the collection of services they are packaging for your usage and the ability for you to take the server they created for you and to update it in a virtual sandbox that Doyenz does host, where you can make changes and test things out before dropping them on a live production box, and then at night or an off-time you choose, you can shut down the production virtualized box, and update the image with the changes you have instructed it to do by your actions performed on the sandbox machine. Doyenz does not want you to run your boxes in their sandbox as a cloud based service. The only individuals making the choice of whether Doyenz is part of a cloud solution are you and your end customer. If you really wanted to, you could take a Doyenz virtualized deployment and do a virtual to physical move and be done with them. But the beauty of their solution lies in their package of services for a very low monthly cost, with the incredible opportunity to use scripts and test updates on a "live copy" if you will, of your customer's production server, and then with the click of a mouse, instruct the Doyenz system to apply those scripts and updates after hours to the customer's box.

So while the MSPmentor article is correct in that Doyenz does have, and I'm sure are still creating, quiet relationships in the background with Kaseya and others, their motive is not to put SBS in the cloud. Their motive is to put SBS into a Doyenz virtualized environment on whatever hardware or hosted solution you choose, and then for Doyenz to be the value-add you will be excited to pay a monthly service fee to for the life of that server because you are getting a great amount of value from the bundle of those quiet relationships they have created and from their own technology that drew you to Doyenz in the first place, the ability to test and apply changes in an automated fashion without having to risk damage to the actual server.

I welcome your comments and ideas around this.

Steve

December 18th, 2008 PSSBS Meeting Cancelled due to the winter wonderland weather we are having in the Puget Sound this week.

steveb — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:51:00 GMT

Puget Sound Small Business Server User Group (PSSBS)

TONIGHT’S MEETING (December 18, 2008) IS CANCELLED DUE TO THE EXTREME WEATHER CONDITIONS IN THE PUGET SOUND REGION.

Saw this this morning on the KOMO News Website. Ryan Goeden is the person who submitted it to their site. Click on the photo to be taken to the KOMO page.

We have snow out here in Port Orchard too, so I'm staying off the roads personally today and figure you may all want to too. Have a merry Christmas and I'll see you all in January! - Steve

Meetings are the third Thursday of the month and are held at Microsoft’s Lincoln Square offices in downtown Bellevue.

Park in the Lincoln Square garage and meet at the elevators on the first floor by 6 PM to head up to the meeting. Meeting times are 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM.

For information about the group, email Steve Banks. Address is steve @ banksnw.com.

Next meeting will now be Thursday, January 15, 2008, at 6:00 PM.

For December’s meeting, Dave Shackelford (Microsoft Exchange MVP) was going to be leading an Exchange/SBS focused discussion on troubleshooting ActiveSync and Exchange migrations. Depending on the direction the group wants to go with the presentation and discussion, Dave may expand the talk into Exchange recovery and SBS 2008 recovery. We'll see what we can do to reschedule Dave for a future meeting.

The Windows Small Business Server 2008 World Wide Community Survey is Live!

steveb — Thu, 29 May 2008 06:13:00 GMT

Kevin Beares, the Community Lead for Microsoft's Windows Server Solutions Group (WSSG) asked a few of us to pass this along. If you haven't taken the 2008 SBS community survey yet, click on over to Kevin's Blog and get crackin! Below is the link and a note from Kevin:

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

Puget Sound Small Business Server User Group (PSSBS) Meeting tonight (Thursday, May 15th, 2008)

steveb — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:06:00 GMT

There have been a couple changes over at the PSSBS User Group. After four years or so of meeting in Building 43 on Microsoft's Redmond Campus, starting this evening we are now meeting at Microsoft's Lincoln Square offices in Bellevue. We'll be in 27004. We are asking that everyone meet near the elevators on the first floor of Lincoln Square (just north of Tully's in the main lobby) and we'll take people up to the room in groups. Meeting will be 6 PM - 8:30 PM. Lincoln Square is located on Bellevue Way NE between NE 6th and NE 8th Street in downtown Bellevue.

On the agenda for tonight's meeting will be a quick presentation by HyBlue's President, Matthew Sutton, on his new data security solution, IceLock, followed by a Response Point Hands On Lab. The lab is being run by PSSBS member Van AuBuchon who ran the lab for SMB Nation East earlier this year. Van is a long-time system builder and early Response Point reseller.

The other major change is the update by Culminis of our SharePoint Website. We have been upgraded from SharePoint 2.0 to SharePoint 3.0. The redirect from www.pssbs.org has been made and the new address is https://ug.culminis.com/sites/PSSBS. I am still working with Culminis in getting the home page open to anonymous users, so for now you have to authenticate to view anything. Will have that resolved soon so we can have the events calendar public facing again.

If you are in the Puget Sound area and have tonight open, head on over to Lincoln Square and join us for the PSSBS meeting! If you have any questions or need directions feel free to call me at 206-255-3214 or contact me via email at steve @ banksnw . com (you'll have to push all that together).

Steve

Mike Iem will be doing a MS Partner Webcast next week for Microsoft Office Accounting 2007

steveb — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 19:47:00 GMT

Taking a psuedo advertising break here.

Mike Iem, a member of our local Puget Sound Small Businss Server User Group and the liason working with SBS Partner/User Groups throughout the United States asked if I would pass this along. Mike does some great Webcasts so should be worth your time if you are a Microsoft Partner. Thanks Mike for the heads up! - Steve

Greeting partner group leaders,

I will be doing 2 Live meetings for the Office Accounting team next week (Monday morning at 8am PST and Wednesday afternoon at 3pm PST).

I will be joined by Jason Harrison of Harrison Technology Consulting and Microsoft to give you an update on how to make money with this new product.

Please feel free to forward this to your members.

Description:
This is a special webcast for Microsoft Partners defining partner opportunities with Microsoft Office Accounting 2007. This feature-packed, easy-to-use business management application represents an immediate opportunity for partners to sell high-value deployment and customization services to millions of small businesses in the United States.

Take advantage of Office Accounting 2007 as a new and profitable revenue stream for your business. Your small business customers can benefit from groundbreaking new features and unmatched ease of use. You can provide valuable customization, deployment, integration, training, and maintenance services that can improve your bottom line.

Join Mike Iem for a deep dive on how Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 offers partners the opportunity to build long-lasting, deep, and profitable relationships with clients. Learn how partners can now broaden the conversation with their clients from simple networking and IT infrastructure deployments to strategic business issues like productivity, profitability, and responsiveness to customers.

Date	Time	Dur	Event Title	Presenter	Abstract Registration Link
12/4/2006	8:00 AM	60 min	Small Business Webcast: Growing Small Business Opportunities with Microsoft Office Accounting 2007	Mike Iem	http://www.msreadiness.com/WS_abstract.asp?eid=15004829
12/6/2006	3:00 PM	60 min	Small Business Webcast: Growing Small Business Opportunities with Microsoft Office Accounting 2007	Mike Iem	http://www.msreadiness.com/WS_abstract.asp?eid=15004830

Thanks,

Mike

Michael Iem

November 16th PSSBS User Group Meeting - Dana Epp presents on Strong authentication for Small Business!

steveb — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 06:03:00 GMT

Dana Epp, Microsoft Security MVP, will be presenting at this month's Puget Sound Small Business Server User Group Meeting. If you are in the area, come join us at 6 PM in Building 43 on Microsoft's Redmond Campus, home of the SBS Development Team!

Time: 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM

Location: Microsoft Redmond Campus, Building 43, Room 2200 15580 31st St, Redmond, WA 98052

Topic: Strong authentication for Small Business

Speaker: Dana Epp, MVP

(Blog: http://silverstr.ufies.org/blog/)

Speaker's Bio: Dana Epp, Scorpion Software Corp's founder and CEO, researches software security and sets the vision in the convergence of information security principles and practices with digital information asset protection for small business. As a computer security software architect, Mr. Epp has spent the last 15 years focusing on computer programming with a particular emphasis on security engineering to offer a safer computing environment for business. His latest research has been on risk-based authentication, focusing on strong two-factor authentication for small business.

Mr. Epp has been twice awarded (1999 and 2000) the Community Spirit Award for Business in recognition of his ongoing initiatives in promoting high technology industries in his community, and won the 2001 Chamber of Commerce "Young Entrepreneur of the Year" award. In 2006 Mr. Epp has been honored with the award and distinction of "Microsoft Windows Security MVP" for his work and expertise in Windows security.

Mr. Epp is the author of "Computer Security Concepts: Managing Business Threats in a Wired World", a book written to explain at an executive level how to handle the threats of online risk as companies move to the new digital economy, and is the author of the popular security blog "Dana Epp's Rambling at the Sanctuary".

The Puget Sound Small Business User Group (www.pssbs.org) meets the third Thursday of each month on the Microsoft Campus. PSSBS is now a chapter of the SMB Technology Network (www.smbtn.org).

If you are interested in joining the PSSBS User Group, email me at steve @ banksnw . com (remove spaces).