The Sikh Geek

…and we’re prepared to pay in cash!

So, the issue of Case Studies from SBSC Partners came up recently when I was talking to Karl Noakes of Microsoft, who heads up Small Business. Apparently, not one case study was submitted after the Small Business Symposium events! Okay, that surprised me because I know Partners who have but have been waiting on responses from Microsoft. But, it’s easy to blame Microsoft and I know as Small Business Partners we’ve got great stories to tell, so why don’t we share them! We are, by nature, shy and retiring (NOT!) partners who don’t like the limelight, the praise and the glory!

So, have you sent a Case Study to Microsoft and not got any feedback? Would you like to know how to do it through a webcast or a session at an event? I’d be interested to know what people think, so leave a comment.

The Partner Portal is the first point of call for Case Study information as well as Dave’s Blog.

It makes so much sense to do, it’s good for you, for Microsoft and your customers. There is a wider goal in this, that we show the good work we’re all doing and how innovative we can be. We’re not just a bunch of “hobbyists”, we’re serious business people with serious businesses. So, we want to show people like Steve Haddock there is value to the Programme, otherwise Microsoft will just turn round and say we’re just not getting anything back from this relationship.

On the Premium Office Live account you get 2 GB per mailbox, 2 GB website space and 1 GB for Workspaces. Now how much would you guess at for extra storage? Well it’s going to cost £2.99 per month for ….1 GB - well er no! …more like 100 MB! So, for an extra 1 GB of Workspace storage it’s going to be about £30 per month. It’s not going to cost Microsoft a whole lot of extra money to provide additional storage. Surely it should be about £2.99 or even £4.99 for an extra 1 GB of space? That’s what Google would do and probably will do!

Arrgghhh!!!

Read the story, the usual Stallman diatribe.

…and that’s what doing damage to Free Software, that kind of attitude! It’s apparently about “ethics” according to Stallman!

Doesn’t this sound like “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” type of attitude?

Oh, and by the way Free Software promotes “democracy” according to Stallman. In fact I think it could actually bring about world peace and reverse global warming! It’s so simple, why didn’t I think of that …doh!

Oh yes with video!!

Check it out from Las Vegas courtesy of a link from a comment on Matt McSpirit’s blog.

This is something Gordon Ramsay might say!

…and apparently BT are enlisting his services in a new TV campaign to get small businesses to use BT’s outsourced IT services. It’s also got some sort of business social networking platform called Tradespace, but then hasn’t everyone?

Anyway the adverts should be entertaining if nothing else! Is the BT service going to be a challenge to local IT Consultants? I’ve heard rumblings that Microsoft and BT are talking about the small business area! Maybe they should use Microsoft Small Business Specialists to support their service? 

Microsoft kindly gave us access to a Premium Office Live account after a great suggestion by Susanne to Microsoft. So, here is our initial effort for AMITRO. My initial thoughts are that we can really make good use of it. I’m spent some time this weekend looking at some aspects of it and has some great features. Our site will remain a work in progress for a while, so expect things to change and develop over time. The idea is that members of the Group will be given logins to the site which consist of an email account of the form username@amitpro.org. Since Office Live is built on Windows Sharepoint Services v3, then collaboration can be done through the Team Workspaces/Wiki and discussion forums. The look and feel of the site can be modified using Sharepoint Designer 2007 and I’ve opened up the site using this tool and it allows things like Webparts to be added. Another great feature of Office Live is that it can talk to external applications using web services and I’ve added the Contact Map Virtual Earth Mashup, which allows contacts to be added to the Business Contact Manager and then displayed in Virtual Earth. This would be really useful to see where each member is located for things like providing geographical support. So it terms of enhancement I’d like to investigate the ability to register for events online which should be feasible as you can add in web parts and ASP.NET code.

That’s the good stuff but there seems to be some limitations which are either real limitations or just my lack of knowledge at this point. There isn’t the ability to add a blog, eventhough WSS v3 supports this. I ended up using the Feedburner suggestion from the OfficeLive Blog but it’s not really what I’m looking for. There doesn’t seem to be a way of adding RSS feeds (through the templates), this can probably be done through code?

I’d be interested to hear from other people who’ve played around with this stuff as developer information is rather thin on the ground at the moment. If I get anything useful in terms of code, I’d be happy to share it with people.

UPDATE

• You can’t use Sharepoint Designer 2007 to change a public web site (the master page can’t be modified)
• RSS feeds can only be displayed but not created
• Server side code can’t be executed

Anything that involves full contact carries dangers with it and after seeing this story in the Leicester Mercury it got me thinking about who is responsible for injuries. Christopher White was left paraplegic after breaking his neck in a scrum and damages were being claimed from the Rugby Union and Stamford Rugby Club. Apparently, he was playing hooker but was used to playing as a Back. I had to stop playing Rugby over 10 years ago after having a clean break of my radius bone in my lower left arm. I had to have a metal plate in my arm which I still have today. My arm never recovered to the point where I could play with the same intensity and committment as before. Anyone who plays Rugby accepts the risks, it cannot be made free from injuries. People who are experienced front row forwards break their necks in scrums, it’s a known risk when scrums collapse. This echoes the story of Matt Hampson a Leicester Tigers player and a promising England pospect who broke his neck when the scrum collapsed. We do these things because they contain risk but when they go wrong can we really blame our Clubs and the RFU?

Good old Sam Ramji of Port25 has made his thoughts clear on the Gapingvoid Opensource debate. It echoes my own thoughts on this subject and really Hugh’s argument holds no water. I wish he’d just admit it! So when people in Microsoft are saying “hang on, this isn’t our strategy”, you have to take notice. Let me say it again, walk into any enterprise company in the world and they’ll have a mix of systems running. Opensource has produced some serious technology and to think or say otherwise is just so off the mark that it just shows your own ignorance.

Sam mentions JBoss which is a perfect example of opensource making money. JBoss was the first opensource J2EE 1.4 certified application server in the world and was developed by Mark Fleury, who couldn’t intially get any funding for it. However, when it started to take off and challenge BEA, IBM and SUN, then VCs were falling over themselves to invest. He declined the money and eventually sold JBoss to Redhat for $350 million. Now, Hugh that’s real money! Redhat has revenues of $278 million, again real money!

No one in Microsoft has ever said to me opensource is rubbish, don’t deploy it. What they say is we think our products deliver more value, try them yourself and if you agree sell them to your customers. It’s a grown up approach, it’s something I can relate to. Dave Overton’s approach is to say to Partners deploy the solution which best serves your customer’s needs. As IT Consultants WE make that decision for our clients, not Microsoft or IBM or SUN or anyone else!

Funny how Hugh, while trying to be “edgy” and “different” is coming out looking quite out-dated. Unfortunately, The Blue Monster is seeming more and more like a “pre-historic dinosaur”! I’m with the message, “Microsoft, change the world or go home” but the approach has to be about “engagement” and not “confrontation”!

I feel passionate about this!

P.S. Nice to see Microsoft people feeling uncomfortable with Hugh’s post and coming out quite strongly against it. It shows how far Microsoft have come. I hope the Opensource guys are taking notice of Microsoft’s defence of it!

No, this isn’t a throw back to the sixties and “free love”! I just noticed I had a new blog link appear from Andys Techie Blog and looks like he’s a fellow SBSer and as he’d kindly linked to my blog, I’ve returned the favour. He’s got some good tech tips on it so it’s well worth meandering over there! Unfortunately there’s no contact details for him, so Andy if you’re in the Midlands area get in touch and drop me an email at vijay@iqubed.biz

So “sharing the love” means getting some cross-linking going. My aim is to get into the top 100,000 of Technorati and as we speak the blog is currently at 316,131 which is not too shabby! In comparison Dave Overton is at 60,818 and Susanne Dansey at 191,920 which are great rankings considering how many blogs Technorati tracks!

Well you might think you can but according to this recent case it’s not so clear cut. The Human Rights Act allows for reasonable privacy whilst at the workplace. I think what it means is that you should have an IT Usage Policy which has been signed by each employee and that you cannot routinely track people’s net usage just because you feel like it. So, if you’ve installed ISA Server with all its nice monitoring features then you might want to point this out to your customer. I wonder if Freeth Cartwright have got something about this on their blog?