The Sikh Geek

Poor old Nancy Williams has been trying to get me on these valuable webinars for the past months since we got back from WPC. For one reason or another my schedule is just booked out these days like crazy and I’m going to miss this as well as I’ll be in London with the family for a few days on their half term break.

The next webinar is on 21st October at 4.00 - 5.00pm BST. The details are below :

If you don’t know about the MSP Services Network then check out their website. It’s the brainchild of Amy Luby and she’s bringing the idea over to the UK and other places in Europe. Amy is firmly rooted in the SBS Community so understands the challenges we all face. Also, with Nancy on board, who has worked at SMB Nation and SBS Migration then you’ve got a very formidable team. Also, as much of what I do is based on relationships, Nancy is one of nicest people around.

MSPSN Masters EU: Selling Value

Join us for a Webinar on October 21

Steve Luby takes us on a deep dive into the MSP Sales Process.  So you have a Lead, now what?  How do you:
• Manage communications
• Communicate your value effectively
• Move your Lead through the pipeline
• Deliver Your Proposal
• Close the deal
Steve will walk you through the Sales Cycle, pointing out pitfalls, tip and tricks along the way.  You won’t want to miss this one!

Title:

MSPSN Masters EU: Selling Value

Date:

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Time:

4:00 PM - 5:00 PM BST

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista

Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.3.9 (Panther®) or newer

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/467488298

Karl has announced that his excellent Network Documentation Book/CD is no longer going to be available but it’s had a major impact on what many of us do. In fact, Karl has had a major impact and if there’s people of "high value" that other colleagues talk of then Karl is one of them. I’ve personally used his comments about Community on the Microsoft OEM Roadshow last year and they have been an inspiration for me to be involved. So to be mentioned in his blog post is fantastic, but again Karl makes a key point which is

The community of SMB Consultants and Small Business Specialists has dramatically raised the bar of professionalism within our profession.

Even this great book was not Karl’s best work nor the Service Agreements for SMB Consultants book, for me it was the SMB SAN Primer. An absolutely excellent title on using SANs, setting up/configuring them for an SMB scenario. It was a book way before its time and remains so …but it will have its time. I will put money on this and if you haven’t got a copy get one quick! It might just make you rethink what you do and how you deploy things.

SANs have been coming down in price all the time and it was no coincidence that Dell bought Equallogic.

As great as WPC was, there was one regret for me that Karl wasn’t there.

Now, before you get too excited I think this is US only. But there are details of an Autotask offer to SBSC Partners which I believe is quite interesting and after David Salzberg of Autotask came to our SBS Group meeting, I understand this might arrive in the UK sometime as well.

If you’d be interested in this being available in the UK, then maybe leave a comment and I can try and feed this back to Autotask.

To be honest I had never heard of this until the recent Kaseya meeting at our SBS Group. It sounded pretty cool and actually very useful. It is the ability of the latest Kaseya offerings to monitor and control machines which have the Intel vPro Technology regardless of power state and regardless of the Operating System. Don’t ask me how it does it, for all I know it’s done by telepathy or something

Read the Kaseya Press Release and the Intel Overview of this "Voodoo" technology.

I came across this a while back and meant to blog it. Microsoft has a set of Resources on the Partner Portal for Managed Services which includes such things as the Managed Services Handbook which is described as a set of guidances for how to develop, market and sell a Managed Services offering to your customers. They have presentations for to help customers understand the value of your Managed Services offerings. There’s a load of templates to use as well. It’s amazing what you find on the Portal sometimes!

This was one of the hot topics from the SBSC Symposia and I recently attended a seminar run by Bull Terrier Systems regarding their hosted Kaseya solution. There are some good solutions out there such as Level Platforms, Kaseya and Hound Dog but I have a problem with these. Since Microsoft mandated that all new products should have a MOM Management Pack, then I would like a solution which plugs in to this. Running MOM for SBSers has been a problem, because the solution has to be cost effective and work over a multi-domain environment where there is no trust relationship between these domains. Microsoft’s System Center Essentials 2007, holds out some hope for those running SBS boxes for customers, although this product is currently in Beta 2.

You know what it is like looking at event logs, they can be very esoteric (that’s the way developers are when reporting back errors to users!). Anything which actually allows a deeper understanding of what’s gone wrong and how to fix it is a good thing. Also, SBS 2003, does a great job out of the box for having a managed services approach and is one of the key reasons to chose it over something like Linux.