Microsoft Financing

When I first heard about Microsoft Financing about 6 months ago, I thought it was only for Microsoft Software. But last night at Karl's event, he spent some time discussing this financing and also about how to integrate this in with HaaS (Hardware as a Service) model. You can use this not only for the software, but also for hardware and IT services. I do believe that there is a $3000 minimum.

From what I have been told, there is not much of a credit check and that once submitted, the IT company will have their money within 72 hours. This is something that I am going to pursue heavily with my clients instead of using a third party leasing company.

Microsoft Response Point

I had not seen Microsoft's new product, Response Point, prior to today when Jeff Smith of the Microsoft's Response Point team gave a demo. I was very impressed with how easy it is to setup and administer. This product is intended for small companies (less than 50 users).

Currently, there are only three companies that will be manufacturing equipment that uses Response Point: D-Link, Quanta, and Uniden.

One of the neat little features is that you can integrate the reporting from the Response Point to your SBS Servers Server Performance Report.

SMB Nation - Keynote

Eric Ligman (Senior Manager Community Engagement) and Arnie Mondloch (Director Marketing and Relationship Engines) are giving the Keynote address today.

Microsofts new awareness campaign... http://www.wevegottaguy.com

Useful links from the keynote:

www.dandh.com/sbsc
partner.microsoft.com/us/40026351?msp_id=sbscsecure
www.smbspecialist.com

SMB Nation Pre - Karl's Perfect Project Every Time

I attended Karl's Pre-Conference event yesterday and it was above and beyond what I expected. Karl brings simplicity to project management. He breaks down complex tasks down to their simplest tasks and has created forms to use to track the projects from beginning to end.

The main issue that I have with this is how to track a lot of projects using this system. If you have twenty project binders, how do you know where you are at on each project without having to open up each binder?

I will be spending some time reading his book "The Super-Good Project Planner for Technical Consultants" and incorporating much of what he does into what I do on a daily basis.

AutoTask Pro

Autotask is coming out with an entry level PSA solution for 1-3 users called Autotask Go! their current product has been renamed to Autotask Pro.

Autotask Go is designed for start-up and smaller solution providers and will have the same features of the Pro version but only cost $99/month with no start-up fees.

There will be a number of features that will be added to the next release (due October 9th) but the one that I am most looking forward to is are the new quoting features. I only hope they make it easier for the everyday user to generate quotes. According to the press release the new quoting features include:

Improved Quoting Capabilities for Recurring Services and MSPs. Autotask users can now generate comprehensive quotes for recurring services, managed services, and software as a service (SaaS) offerings. Users can easily quote separate monthly unit prices per device (like price per firewall, server or desktop), quote a price per user or quote a fixed price based on a complex service bundle. In addition, the new quoting update allows electronic quotes to be sent and reviewed online and then updated in real time as changes are made.

One of the features that I would love to have is the ability to save a quote as a template so that I can pull it back up and use that template for another client.

The other feature that is fundamentally necessary is the ability to export quotes so that you can import that information into your billing software. Why you are unable to run reports or export based upon individual quotes is beyond me.

These are two issues that I will be bring up with Autotask here at SMB Nation.

SMB Nation 2207

SMB Nation 2007 is finally here! I flew in yesterday with Rick and Greg and spent some time in downtown Seattle before heading to the hotel. I will be heading to Karl's Pre-Conference event here in a couple of hours.

I will be posting a lot more over the next few days and will also be reviewing Karl's Pre-Conference event later today.

Documenting one computer at a time.

It was brought up in the SmallBizIT yahoo group about the need to document a single computer at a time. For example, you are brought into a new client and you are wanting to document their network. You do not want to install Level Platforms or other monitoring software. What you want to do is sit down at each computer, plug in your USB Drive. double click on a program and have it pull all the necessary information that you can later take back and put into your overall documentation. Another requirement is that there should be nothing to install.

I had already created a tool that you could run from the server that would use Active Directory to get a list of the computers and then would poll each computer for their data. I modified this script so that it would only do the computer that it was running on. I also threw in a routine that would pull the Windows Product Key from the registry.

You can download the program, I call it Professional Documentation (ProDoc for short), here: http://www.computerrenditions.com/prodoc.zip

Documenting the Exchange Server

Documenting an exchange server is very easy. Below is example code on how to get the basic information from your exchange server.


dim strComputer, objWMIService, colItems

strComputer = "zeus"
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & _
"\ROOT\MicrosoftExchangeV2")

Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from Exchange_Server")

For Each objItem in colItems
Wscript.Echo "Administrative group: " & _
objItem.AdministrativeGroup
Wscript.Echo "Administrative note: " & objItem.AdministrativeNote
Wscript.Echo "Creation time: " & objItem.CreationTime
Wscript.Echo "Distinguished name: " & objItem.DN
Wscript.Echo "Exchange version: " & objItem.ExchangeVersion
Wscript.Echo "Fully-qualified domain name: " & objItem.FQDN
Wscript.Echo "GUID: " & objItem.GUID
Wscript.Echo "Is front-end server: " & objItem.IsFrontEndServer
Wscript.Echo "Last modification time: " & _
objItem.LastModificationTime
Wscript.Echo "Message tracking enabled: " & _
objItem.MessageTrackingEnabled
Wscript.Echo "Message tracking log file lifetime: " & _
objItem.MessageTrackingLogFileLifetime
Wscript.Echo "Message tracking log file path: " & _
objItem.MessageTrackingLogFilePath
Wscript.Echo "Monitoring enabled: " & objItem.MonitoringEnabled
Wscript.Echo "MTA data path: " & objItem.MTADataPath
Wscript.Echo "Name: " & objItem.Name
Wscript.Echo "Routing group: " & objItem.RoutingGroup
Wscript.Echo "Subject logging enabled: " & _
objItem.SubjectLoggingEnabled
Wscript.Echo "Type: " & objItem.Type
Wscript.Echo
Next

Copy the code into notepad, change the strComputer = "Zeus" to the name of your exchange server. Save the file as c:\test.vbs (or to whatever directory and name you wish). Now you are ready to run the script. Open up a dos prompt and navigate to the directory where you saved the file. Type the following into the command prompt: cscript test.vbs

Below is an example of the output of that script.

Administrative group: first administrative group
Administrative note:
Creation time: 20060312234931.000000+000
Distinguished name: CN=ZEUS,CN=Servers,CN=first administrative group,CN=Administ
rative Groups,CN=OLYMPUS,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=o
lympus,DC=local
Exchange version: Version 6.5 (Build 7638.2: Service Pack 2)
Fully-qualified domain name: zeus.olympus.local
GUID: {AC977A9B-A731-4C52-959B-00EE8BFC281B}
Is front-end server: False
Last modification time: 20060409062441.000000+000
Message tracking enabled: True
Message tracking log file lifetime: 7
Message tracking log file path: C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\ZEUS.log
Monitoring enabled: True
MTA data path: C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\mtadata
Name: ZEUS
Routing group: first routing group
Subject logging enabled: False
Type: 0

As you can see, this will give you some basic information about the exchange server. On the next post, i will get into displaying the mailbox information for each user.

Level Platforms Install - Day 2

Today was my second day of installing Level Platforms Managed Workplace. One of the issues with using this type of technology is that you need to do a work around to get past the built in firewall on XP SP2. I will know tomorrow if all the client machines get the GPO update and allow the Managed Workplace to get the system information.

This will be the most dificult install of all. Our own network has 4 different IP networks. Two of those four are via vpn tunnels. We also have two different domains. Altogether we have about 100 devices.

When I got in this morning I noticed that only one of the four IP networks had been updated in the System Console. I called Level Platforms and they were helping me fix the problem asap. Turns out that one of our device names was longer than the field length in the database. You would think that they would have thought of that long ago. But the issue was resolved quickly.

One of the things that their product needs is a little bit better handling of errors. First, it needs to be more intuitive. Second, you should be able to assign techs in escellation. If one is unavailable, it automatically goes to the next. n-able does a good job of this.