1/24/2009
Big Easy? Yes it is.
I was sitting at a client’s office yesterday madly installing and configuring some new stations when I received my Microsoft newsletter. Taking a quick break I quickly scanned it and was hit right away by the Big Easy logo, which caught my attention. Because I had learned in detail about Big Easy from our now infamous SBS web portal I pondered about checking it out just one more time. You have to know that in the past I have never found an offer for which my open licence purchases had ever qualified, so normally I gave up on looking at these “incentives” (okay BIG lie J, I looked but knew the only thing that was going to result was disappointment.) But seeing that not only had they extended the offer but also increased the number of products they were offering rebates, piqued my interest. Since we’re all trying to “do more with less” the idea of saving clients money that they can pour right back into technology products or services, i.e. you and I, I plunged into the site, with some reservation. Often, not only are the rebates never applicable to anything I sold, but the paperwork had been, to put it bluntly, annoying. Well in about a total of 10 minutes (including reading and rechecking the list because of my utter disbelief) I had just fired of a request to save my client $1283. It took a few quick screens and the only thing I had to enter was the authorization and licence number and press submit, save for the screen where I go to input my partner info. This is a service I did for my client, but frankly for the fact that it took only a few minutes I get a twofold “prize”. My client will be delighted I found this opportunity to do them a favour and I know this money will ultimately end up back in my pocket in some form. And the added bonus? Now my client will push ahead with the balance of the Office 2007 licences he may have put off to a later date. And maybe just maybe add something else because the savings are just too good to pass up. We all need incentives to push the economy along. I think the Big Easy is a big push towards making that happen in our industry. At the very least it’s a big step in the right direction.
Happy Sales!
Elisabeth 1/24/2009
January is almost over and already I have seen or been part of some really interesting "things" for lack of a better word. In the first week we saw a kind of confusion over what we might expect after ending the year with the still devastating stock market collapse and continuing bank instability. Mind you that didn't stop them from notifying me this week that they are raising their interest rates!!! Are you kidding me??? How can they possibly do this on my back when they've already helped deplete my retirement savings, thank you very much.
Walking into clients offices was a bit like walking into a myriad of differing viewpoints, concerns and also hopes that business will "carry on". Into week two and I was busier than ever with clients deciding that technology investments were still a good investment, especialy when they see productivity increases as we saw going into week three. I also was a part of a soon to be released article in Momentum magazine and Redmond Channel Partner Magazine. As the founder of and current member of the local and international committees of IAMCP's Women in Leadershp and Technology, RCP made a great story about the bottom line profits that can be increased when partners by bring more women into leadership roles in their businesses. With work skills shortages looming in the near future and in some areas already affecting partner's businesses , WIL&T is very much about bringing more people into the tech sector to fulfill those positions. On March 9th 2009, Microsoft will host the inaugural WIL&T networking event at the Microsoft Canada's head office. We will have speakers including Lora Gernon and Carol Terentiak. A link and detiais will be in a future post.
And then there was a nice surprise when the Big Easy offer (see prior post) was not only relaunched but with more product rebates. I took advantage of it immediately and plan to be able to sell even more sooner.
The only thing that has me unnerved in Canada is the increase of prices at the pumps when oil is at an all time low. Maybe they haven't heard of the word collusion but I can tell you that when every station on the island of Montreal raises their prices 20 percent something stinks and it isn't the smell of gas fumes but corporate greed. SO much for helping out the little guy and helping ease market issues.
I ended the week with having done more hours with clients than I would have imagined a month ago. Good yes, but the year has only started. So the thing we all have to do is keep our eyes and ears open and certainly think about what we can do to build a good momentum going forward. What will you do? 1/29/2009 Remember those silly Glade commercials for their Glade plug ins? Well today was a real stinker of a technical glitch that just goes to prove that you need think of the dumbest thing when something won't work and that's probably it. Today I was retestign RT with another web cam. Round Table delivers a great picutre (okay it should be for that price) BUT remote users need a good and I mean good web cam if they're to ensure a decent experience for the people sitting at Round Table and looking at you. For that reason I teste the Logitech Orbital Webcam. WOW. However before getting to that point I had set up the RT and of course plug it in. Well it decided it would light up but not all the way??? After a few moments I did what any good tech would do. I got mad and decided it might be my OS so I changed machines which meant changing locations and wall plugs. Seems RT did not like my power bar. Directly into the wall the whole things lit up and it showed up on my desktop within seconds. Go figure. SO if your RT is being picky then don't waste time. Plug it in, but just not into a power bar! 1/29/2009
Date: March 9, 2009
Time: 4:30 PM
Location: Microsoft Office - 1950 Meadowvale, Mississauga, ON
Women in Leadership & Technology are pleased to invite you to our first Canadian “Meet & Mingle”. The purpose of this event is to network with women in technology and leadership at Microsoft, women in technology and leadership in the partner channel, and women outside of the channel who are considering the benefits that our eco-system can offer.
The evening will include many opportunities to meet new colleagues so bring lots of business cards.
There will be both an informal and formal portion with both Microsoft and IAMCP presenting. The intention of Women in Leadership and Technology in Canada is to form a consortium that serves the needs of our community, so, bring your ideas, there will be opportunity for you to give us your feedback both at the event and afterwards.
We look forward to meeting you. It will be a wonderful evening. Please feel free to forward this invitation on to any colleagues who might be interested in attending.
Light Refreshments will be served.
About IAMCP Canada
Women in Leadership & Technology is a networking and mentoring group of like-minded women professionals in the Microsoft Partner eco-system who are committed to advancing the mission statement of IAMCP and upholding the highest standards of business ethics.
Register Online at https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=135084 11/14/2008
You’re mobile, agile, quick to respond to your client’s every needs. Basically you are a “super partner”. But while you’re working to make your clients business number one, who’s helping you taking care of yours. Well for me that little helper is the new Response Point system from Microsoft. In its first iteration, RP has been surprisingly easy to install and configure (I did it in one afternoon between several interruptions for annoying telemarketers. Hmm I know RP can help me with that too with the pop up display on my desktop screen). I love the automated receptionist and the pre-recorded messaging. Alas Bienvenue Chez Conamex” is not possible, as RP is not as yet multilingual (but rumour is it’s coming very soon) so I was forced to record my own message. That said what really turned my head was the ability to allow callers to bypass the receptionist by putting their numbers into a list which then directs them to the extension of the person they really want to reach (someone in development was obviously thinking like a customer). It was so simple to direct all my voice messages to my inbox in Outlook. All this for a lot less than your clients would ever imagine. What was probably one of th smartest moves and in a move to protect consumers and partners Microsoft ensured each manufacturer’s phone components would work with each other. So if I prefer the Syspine phones, the Aastra base unit and the Dlink gateway I can easily mix and match to let everyone have the option of the phone of their own choice, while being able to quickly set up other offices with whatever equipment is available in their region.
This baby is really well loaded with enough features that make it quick to get up and running and agile enough to make a small business appear to be much larger and savvy as its larger competitors down the road. SP1 is out and I suspect the next one is close to release and will be focused on delivering more of exactly what many partners are coming to expect of Microsoft, products that not only are great for our customers and present numerous opportunities to grow our business, but finally give us a something we can love as well. Thanks Bill!
Elisabeth Vanderveldt 11/14/2008
As a SAM specialist I thought this would be a great time, with the pending release of SBS and EBS, to talk about the revenue potential a SAM engagement with current and potential clients can mean to SBSC partners. The recent introduction of the new SAM Optimization Model provides partners with a new guideline and roadmap, that will help you determine what stage your client is at in the SAM maturity process and is a great way to approach your customers on how you can provide them with an invaluable service that can:
a) save them money (finding that they can use volume purchasing)
b)prepare them better for software and hardware life cycle management
c) help them utilize licences they might already have but didn’t know about (because no one is keeping track in the first place)
d) protect them from compliance issues. A bigger problem often caused by careless purchasing practices or due to working with multiple vendors.
e) help you sell them the non-OEM product by showing the advantages of doing so.
f) reduce or eliminate security issues. We saved one client up to $10,000 daily (potential client revenue loss) with policy changes implemented that focused heavily on security issues.
g) Top of my list: creating and preparing for disaster recovery. I use Groove in this case to create a SAM client workspace; this is protected, and between our firm and the client. Should the client lose all equipment including the machine the workspace was kept on, we are able to spring into action to supply all relevant data to the insurance firm and immediately start the ordering and replacement process. Since theft of IT equipment is still quite frequent, the ability to determine quickly what inventory is missing and get it rapidly replaced is more important than most businesses realize, until it happens to them.
Some of the above points to potentially crippling occurrences for small and medium businesses. In an economy that is more and more unstable there is more reason than ever to justify this process. Not understanding the value of one’s IT infrastructure is something that can spell trouble especially for growing companies and ones that may also wish to be acquired. Ignorance is not a “bliss”. In fact it has been proven that companies end up spending on average more than they need to in adopting new technologies or additional licences. It just isn’t good business sense and is all about more sound business practice.
A SAM (which also includes hardware) is our first step in engaging a new client. We won’t take on a client’s IT infrastructure without a clear picture of where they are and where they want to go. A SAM sets out the foundation for solid planning of software and hardware initial purchases, refreshes, upgrades and other services as well as helping them budget for it now and in the years to come. SAM isn’t a one-time project, so starting the SAM process let’s you reconnect with client’s on a regular basis!
What you save a client today can allow you to introduce even more technology to increase their operational efficiency. Isn’t being a hero to your client what it’s’ all about?
To learn more about SAM, the new SAM Optimization module, SAM tools and how to go about getting started, you can link to the following site: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sam/default.mspx
Conamex was the Microsoft World Partner Conference 2006 SAM award winner as well as the 2006 and 2007 CEA and 2007 Impact Award winner for SAM and Small Business Solution of the Year.
Elisabeth 11/14/2008
Big box stores and their geeky squads. Telecoms offering to connect small business globally, hardware vendors hovering overhead to keep your network safe and operational. Wait a minute. Isn’t that my job? And to add insult to injury the “R” word is threatening to rear its ugly head in the financial horizon: translation: IT spending will get cut.
In the Financial Post on Oct. 28 the headline read “How to Beat Big Box Stores: …focus on providing personal service works”. Let me tell you why that’s going to be true in our services sector now more than ever with a story about a client and his home modem and why you’ve got to love the fact that the big guys still don’t get it and frankly I hope they never do (without coming to me of course).
I have been working with this gentleman’s firm for over 14 years. He’s a bit older and technology is not something he has time to fully appreciate (think technophobe). He has one simple rule: it just has to work and he relies on things that hum 24/7. No problem there. But one day, at home, he had modem problems after an innocent relocation of furniture. Let’s be clear about one important aspect in today’s fast moving if not frightening economy; many executives and business owners and their outsources work as much from home as they do on the road and office, so after being out of service all weekend (unthinkable isn’t it) he skulked into my office Monday morning and meekly told me his sad tale.
“Did you call the telco people?”. “ Yes. And they told me it was my computer and they won’t help me.” Okay I can deal with that, but somehow the steely answers he was getting were sending up red flags. For my own curiosity I inquired as to the conversation and lo and behold to my utter shock (sarcasm) at 10p.m. his wife was talking to an offshore tech support person. Can you say “scripted tech”? (more sarcasm). There was my second red flag. I didn’t hesitate to send one of my techs over to take a look and as I suspected the problem was the modem supplied by the telco. Since we could not intervene (for privacy reasons) at that point, on their next call I advised them to request a Canadian help desk rep. In the interim another call had taken place during which the Ontario rep told her to call abck and ask for an Ottawa/Quebec rep because some tech notes were in French and she couldn’t read them!
Segway: That reminds me of the joke about the lady in California (my client’s branch office researcher working from home) and her modem that disrupted her service, every 2 days. After $75 and the “geek experience”, I got the call and asked her if she had been asked to try rebooting the darn thing. Of course not: that was all it took. Under 2 minutes, problem solved: no travelling fees, no hotel, no per km charge, etc. etc. You have to wonder what kind of “technical scripting” and training these big box guys provide. Made me look good. I can live with that.
Back to the story: So now the telco asks my client why they have such an old modem. Are you kidding me? Who is supplying this stuff. They are! In the end they got anew modem and of course it wasn’t all plug and play so we went over and configured it and everyone is happy.
Why is David the winner? Well can you imagine without David, the client was at the mercy of Goliath who had not only refused to offer an on-site service, they gave them the wrong answers to begin with. And worse the offshore rep couldn’t read some tech notes from a previous call because they were written in French. Where does the agony end? With David of course.
Lesson learned: Goliath may coast through this economic crisis but he will not come out unscathed. David will have a rough ride, since those that focus solely on IT will see spending pull back, however as things improve and the money flows who do you think most businesses are going to trust with their most critical operations? David because what matters deep down and sticks in a client’s mind: service. Even if that means going out of our way, even just once. Remember bad press travels fast, good work may spread slower but the path you take is paved with clients, ones whose trust you have in some measure already gained!
Elisabeth
11/14/2008 Getting a Grip on the Market
Here we go again with grim news from Nortel, once the Canadian darling of the telecom industry, suffering an immense 3rd quarter loss and as of this writing was down 28%. Now when it seemed they might even be a formidable partner or competitor in the UC and VOIP market, one wonders what will be next for a firm that has produced some of the best telecom equipment globally. Why should that be of interest to small business ? Well it proves a few things. One we’re not out of the woods yet when it comes to the industry heavyweights suffering further downturns and as SMB’s ourselves we can look to take advantage of this opportunity to push UC solutions without having larger firms run us over.
As the industry behemoths falter around us perhaps this is an opportunity to do one of two things (or both):
a) Look for opportunities to partner with them. E.g. the big telcos are trying to get partner programs going with select partners. Obviously they need to take some lessons from the leader in partnering, Microsoft, as it’s obvious they don’t quite understand the investment that needs to take place.
b) Start developing more of your practice around the solutions that will best serve the SBSC community and the processes they need to modify to reduce costs and increase revenues.
To prove my point I just received an article (with the excerpts chosen below): an interview with Allison Watson. She points the way for VAR’s and what SBSC’s nee dot know about SMB’s to better hone in on the solutions they need to sell.
“ there's plenty of opportunities for VARs to grow, as long as they stay focused on projects that improve energy efficiency, boost productivity, and drive down costs.”
“How is the current economic situation influencing your conversations with partners?”
“There are three main things that SMBs are doing right now to reduce costs: reducing travel, becoming more energy efficient, and driving cost out of IT spending and toward more revenue producing areas.”
http://www.crncanada.ca/index.php/CRN-Tech/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=1&category_id=72&flypage=shop.flypage&lang=en&page=shop.product_details&product_id=2598&vmcchk=1
Note the “driving cost out of IT spending” but also recognize the need to “reduce travel”. Now the trade off here would appear to be increased long distance and teleconferencing costs (maybe a T1 line?). But that doesn’t have to be the case and here is where solutions like Round Table and Response Point can put you right back in the ball game.
There are other things that we’ve mentioned in previous articles like performing a SAM/HAM to see what equipment and software that a client is using may actually be reducing staff productivity and using more energy than required.
Suffice to say that there really are opportunities to not only to sustain your business but add to it with new sources of revenue. The rest, as they say, is up to you!
Elisabeth 11/14/2008
Installing EBS: A Diary
So now that I have a day or two to play (and need it up already!), I decided to start installing my Essential Business Server environment today. This is not my first kick at this can (I have installed eight or nine previous iterations in either beta or RTM Escrow) so I know there are a number of challenges that I can run into. I am going to diary the entire process from soup to nuts, and hopefully help you avoid some potential stumbling blocks.
Diagram 1: Physical Hardware
 The first thing I should call out is my environment. The Physical Hardware diagram is the layout of the devices that I have to contend with. In the grand scheme of things it is an extremely simple layout with fewer devices than an average EBS environment would have. Nevertheless because I wanted to implement the network properly, I still took the time to plan things out.
The Network Plan diagram shows the relevant portion of the new network infrastructure. All of the EBS servers are virtualized within the MDG-Server box. I want to remind you at this point that this EBS network is essentially supporting a single user; For a production network I do NOT recommend virtualizing the three servers in a single box; one of the disadvantages of housing all servers in a single box is that, like with Windows Small Business Server (SBS), you have a single point of failure (SPF) – if your hardware goes down (and even the best servers are prone to do so) so does your entire network. I have known businesses running SBS on the best servers that were brought down by a defective fan.
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Diagram 2: Network plan  |
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I give my virtual machines domain names that start with v- so that should my organization grow I will still be able to easily tell which machines are physical and which are virtual. As well I decide to switch to a Class-B address design for the internal network – the connection between the Internet router and the Security Server will keep their Class C addresses. My reasons for this are because eventually I will add a virtual SBS box for demonstrations, and the different addressing will be easier to distinguish. Remember that this is not a scenario that is licensed for production use, and my SBS box will remain completely segregated from the network. I am leaving my physical server on the external address range because I still want to be able to log on remotely using Remote Desktop directly to that box, and not to the EBS infrastructure (which I can still access remotely using Remote Web Workplace (RWW), or by logging onto the parent partition and then accessing the Hyper-V Manager.
A New Error…
I have installed Windows in its various incarnations literally thousands of times without exaggerating. This is the first time that I have ever gotten a warning (when selecting the volume to install to) that Windows requires a system volume on the partition to install. I got a warning, then a STOP error. Weird, and it happened on both the Management and Messaging systems (for those of you who thought I wrote sequentially without going back). The solution is to create a new volume on the Un-partitioned space before proceeding. I do this for both the C and D drives… I don’t know why. The EBS Installation will (when selecting the Data store) give us the option of opening the Drive Management tool to create that partition when the time comes.
EBS Preparation & Planning Wizards
On the parent partition I ran the EBS Preparation Wizard and then the EBS Planning Tool – I was not joining EBS to an existing Active Directory infrastructure, so I could run this from anywhere. These two wizards (on disk 1 of EBS) must be run prior to deploying your EBS infrastructure, and they make sense – they make us think about the questions we might otherwise forget. The wizards create an XML file called PlanningWizardData.xml which is saved to your Documents folder, and can then be copied to a USB key to be imported into the EBS installation process. The problem is if you are installing to a new virtual machine you can’t simply plug in a USB key. Here is my workaround for that problem:
- Store the data on the parent partition;
- Before starting the virtual Management Server add a second NIC to it, and configure it on the same network as your parent partition;
- After the operating system has installed and the Management Server Installation prompts you for the file:
- Press F10 to temporarily break out of the installation process into a Command Prompt window;
- Press Ctrl-Alt-Del and set a password;
- From the Command Prompt window run explorer.exe;
- Create a new directory in the C drive, and share it;
- (From the parent partition) navigate to the share on the Management Server (\\172.16.0.10\<sharename>) and authenticate with Administrator and the password you set;
- Copy the file PlanningWizardData.xml from the parent to the share;
- (From the child partition) reset the Administrator password to <blank>; and
- Exit all windows except the EBS Management Server Installation.
- Navigate to the directory where the file was and select PlanningWizardData.xml.
The Management Server will take quite some time to install – it is creating a domain, installing System Center Essentials (SCE), and other other important tasks. Plan from start to finish two hours for the Management Server. If you want to save a little time you can kick off the deployment of the OS for the Security Server; you can’t install the EBS components, but you can get a head start here.
 So once you see the Continue Installation screen in Management Server Installation you can proceed with the Security Server Installation. As you can see on the screen shot the EBS installation process gives you a lot of visual feedback… in a very nice ‘graphical progress bar’ we see each step, and the ‘Good job, boy!’ Green as I have taken to calling it. You should have seen screens like this in the Preparation and Planning Wizards as well.
My security server – the only one with a single hard disk, though again not the recommended setting – has multiple NICs… one connected to my Internal network (which is not bound to a physical network interface in the parent server) with a Class B address, and one connected to my External network (bound to the NIC that connects to the physical router) with a Class C address. For some reason both of them got addresses from the Management Server’s DHCP Server, so both had Class B addresses. In Hyper-V I opened the settings for the Security Server, disconnected the External adapter; I was then able to distinguish and select the Internal NIC in the setup process. I then reconnected the (virtual) external NIC and continued without incident.
The Security Server Installation rechecks the environment, and if you haven’t disconnected anything in the process it should return a bunch of ‘Good job, boy!’ Green check marks. It reboots several times during the configuration – domain joining and all that rot – and then asks you to confirm the network addresses you will be using. 
Because the security server is the first one on my network that will be ‘hot’ – externally facing – I am always careful to allow it to download and install security and critical updates right away. You really should do this for all three servers, but Security is the first point of contact.
It will reboot on its own of course… several times at this point. if you did kick off the Messaging Server deployment then you should wait until prompted by the Security Server before continuing with that server’s installation.
I just noticed one Update Failed message on the Security Server. It is for Microsoft Silverlight, an important update certainly on Vista or even server workstations, but not for the headless security server on EBS. I will not try to go back and remedy that one.
 Once my Security Server is done I get my ‘Good job, boy!’ Green screen, and go right on to my Messaging server. Historically this is the one that I have had the most issues with… some having to do with settings, one or two because of ‘beta bugs’ and a plethora caused by environmental factors – Active Directory restrictions and such. In the Hyper-V machine settings I remembered to uncheck the ‘Time synchronization’ in the Integration Services set… I have spoken with people who say that this should not be an issue and I agree, but it always has been for me, and frankly I am bored with dealing with it.
Once you have told the Messaging Server the domain name and password you cannot just walk away… Once it checks and then joins the domain it will ask for more interaction… After the Domain Join is complete it will check the environment, including DNS and Exchange pre-requisites, then ask you IP Address information, and before you press GO on the actual installation you can (as with the other servers) save your Server Configuration file, which I always do. From there calculate about 90 minutes that it will work without you.
 I got my ldifde.exe error again… the one that I blogged about recently. It is strange because I do NOT have another domain controller running – I was careful to take my SBS box off-line (read: OFF) before going ahead. I will try the same fix (disconnecting the external NIC on the Security Server) and see if that works…
The problem with this particular error is it can take up to half an hour to materialize, all the while I am waiting patiently. As it happens I know that this fix did not work, because if it had the progress bar would have moved… even a little, slowly. Once it does crash, I move on to my next possible mitigation – switching the (internal) virtual network to a private virtual network. If it doesn’t work I have another half an hour to consider what to try next.
After the third failure I decided that tweaking it might not be enough, and that it might actually need a kick. I restarted the Messaging Server installation from scratch – wiped the partitions and literally started from zero. It seems to have worked, because for the first time the progress bar on the Exchange Server Installation line is moving quite nicely… slow, but steady.
 Once the Messaging Server Installation is done (and gives us one more ‘Good Boy!’ green mark) we go back to our Management Server to continue with the Guided Configuration and Migration Tasks. From here on in the Management server is where we will spend most of our time, not only during the Installation process but for the life of our servers. The Guided Configuration and Migration Tasks list is essentially a checklist that takes you from zero to production environment; some of the tasks you are forced to do (Tasks 1, 2, & 3 are Install the Management Server, Install the Security Server, and Install the Messaging Server). Some are informational (i.e.: Migrate DNS), and some are wizard-driven tasks that once completed can be marked as done. Each task will have an estimated time commitment (Management Server being the longest at 2.5 hours). Of course these are estimates based on best-case scenarios, and do not account for two hour delays in the Messaging Server installation due to FSMO issues, Time Synchronization, or intermittent network issues, all of which are issues that I have encountered along the way.
Most of the tasks are important for a production server, but for my purposes they are unnecessary. I do not have multiple sites, I don’t have a SAN, and (at least for the time being) I am not publishing any web sites that are not pre-configured. I do decide to let EBS manage my DHCP Server for me, which involves a number of steps:
- Verify the DHCP scope in the EBS Management server;
- Disable the DHCP service in my DLink router;
- (Because I am working in a virtual environment) bind my virtual Internal network to a second physical network adapter in my server that is attached to my wireless router.
The rest are tasks that you should pay close attention to, but I am not going to discuss because they are as straightforward as they are different on each network. All told, including the installation of SharePoint on my Management Server, I probably spent nine hours installing my EBS environment. I wish you luck with yours, and look forward to hearing your stories!
11/14/2008
Our Partner Marketing team at Microsoft Canada is pleased to announce that the Microsoft Partner Portal homepage in Canada has received an exciting new facelift!
If you haven’t been visiting the portal regularly before, the new features and easier interface are definitely worth a look. These features include:
- Quick access to the most popular resources, communities (including SBSC!), and downloads
- Hidden treasures showcasing information and tools you probably didn’t know were available
- Latest local events and training listings
- Most viewed and top rated pages
- Support information box
As the portal continues to evolve, you can expect to see more RSS feeds, targeted sites, enhanced contact options, and a revamped French language homepage. Thanks to Sunita, Mike, and Julie at Microsoft for bringing this to us!
thanks to Satish Kanwar for this post 11/14/2008
How Office Live Small Business can help you create value-add for customers
Written by Jason Brommet, Senior Product Manager for Microsoft Office
Why do 43 percent of Canada’s one million small businesses use the Internet to learn more about companies they want to work with, but almost half do not have a website of their own?
For a small-business owner, it’s no mystery that time and money is either a business’ best friend or worst enemy. Having interacted with many small business customers, I now understand that their time is of utmost importance and that every second or penny spent, better yield some type of valuable return. If you ask a small-business owner today why they don’t own a website, the same reasons come up – either it “costs too much” or “it’s too difficult and I don’t have the time”.
 But why does it have to be the case when it comes to web? It doesn’t and you, as their trusted business advisor, can help take small business customers online by taking advantage of Office Live Small Business – a complete set of easy-to-use and affordable Web-based tools that help small-business owners get online, attract customers, and manage their business.
Being a Trusted Business Advisor
It’s easy to say that you’re a trusted business advisor, but the challenge here is a commitment to provide more than surface-level services that support small businesses. Now more than ever, it has been increasingly important to dig deep and better understand the problems they face every day. But like any beloved accountant and/or lawyer, being a trusted business advisor comes with great responsibility and creating value while building trust that go beyond a one-time buyer-seller experience is a key part of that credibility (in addition to expertise, of course).
By offering Office Live Small Business as part of a comprehensive package of both offline and online solutions that service everyday small business needs, you are indeed creating customer value.
Key features of Office Live Small Business include:
- Domain name registration with 100 business email accounts
- Free hosting and web site creation tools to allow small businesses to easily create or transfer over an existing website
- Optional Email marketing
- Collaboration via Office Live Workspaces enabling small businesses to easily share and transfer documents with free 500MB storage
- Better manage and track customers by integrating with Contact Manager, unified analytics, and easy to use document sharing, along with seamless and flexible integration with Microsoft Office
Here’s the Perfect Opportunity!
So what’s in it for Microsoft partners? By encouraging your customers to sign-up for Office Live Small Business today directly or as part of a deployment of Small Business Server (SBS) 2008, already available in Canada through most channels, partners can help their small business customers overcome their time and cost barriers to having a online presence.
Not only is this an easy opportunity to create value-add beyond current services, it also presents customers with great rewards and little to no risk. To learn about how Stuart Crawford, Small Business IT Professional and SBSC partner, is offering Office Live Small Business as part of an overall solutions package, read his blog here.
Are you ready to help your small business customers get online? Watch our small business customers tell their story today by visiting the Office Live Small Business Canada Launch virtual press kit.
Jason Brommet
Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Office
Microsoft Canada 11/14/2008
A recent discussion has raised the issue of how to drive profitability from your billable resources. After all, these are among your most expensive people and they can make a huge difference to the bottom line of your company. I will share 2 measurements that have really helped our business, Bralin Technology Solutions, to become among the best in class for service profitability.
KEY #1: Measure Utilization by billable person. The industry best practice is 75% utilization. Many would look at this as an unattainably high number for a typical field engineer. In fact, many companies are trying to break the 50% utilization mark. But think of that another way - if you billed 8 hours per day for 9 months, you could take the other 3 off. So, 75% utilization still leaves a lot of time to cover off personal time, training time, admin and meetings etc. At Bralin, we discuss that in hours, and bonus all our people if they make more than 30 billable hours in a week. Guess what, once we started incenting on it, we consistently are at or above 75% utilized.
There are 2 considerations around encouraging higher utilization:
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The first is managed services. If you bill your clients flat rate, but bonus your techs to do more billable hours, you may find techs that will start to hide out doing too much 'billable' work for your managed services clients. The solution is to also measure your effective hourly rate for your agreement clients. If that rate is at or above your normal billable, you will then know that your techs aren't hiding out.
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The other key is what all do you include in measuring utilization? Is travel time considered 'utilized time'? What about time spent doing research or paperwork related to a client issue; is that billed and considered utilized time?
Let’s walk through this in more detail with an example of a field engineer. What do you include when you bill for a field engineer - just onsite time? We can learn a lot from more mature industries that bill for their time, such as legal or accounting offices. They also bonus their people on billable time, and they typically expect a lot more than 75%. However, they bill for all the time spent on a client matter. So, for example, if someone was tied up from 9 am to 11 am on a client matter, they would bill 2 hours even if some of that time was spent to do research, or to travel onsite, or whatever. They simply look at it this way - "my staff member was unavailable to work for someone else because they were working on your matter, thus you get billed for the full amount of time that was spent". Even my plumber bills that way. Yet, most of us in IT would say "they were only onsite for 1.5 hours, so I'll only bill for that time", and the other half hour is gone forever. Yet, your engineer was unavailable to work on anything else, so why aren't we billing the client for that time?
So if we think a field engineer cannot bill more than 50% or 60% of their time - probably the best place to start is to reconsider our view of what is considered billable. Then, we can start to drive our utilization rates up.
KEY #2: There is one other measurement that comes from industry best practices - a billable resource (inside or outside) should bill at least 2.5 times their earnings for the year (in the US it's a multiple of W2, in Canada it's a multiple of T4, not sure for other areas). We set the goal at 3x, and are happy if it stays above 2.5x. So, for example - if you paid an engineer $50k per year, his goal is to bring in$150k of revenue.
Some examples to tie it all together:
EXAMPLE #1 - A senior engineer that earns $100k per year - it will be really hard for them to bring 3x their wages, or $300k in annual billings, but can they even try to get to $250k to be at 2.5x wages? To do the math, 75% utilization is 1560 billable hours in the year. Even that might be high, as there are public holidays, and personal days, so let’s use 1500 hours. If you have a bill rate of $125 per hour for 1500 hours, this employee contributes $187,500 for the year, far less than the goal. To reach their goal of $250K per year, they would need to have a rate of $167 per hour for 1500 hours billable. So you can see it gets tougher to meet our targets as we start to look at the top end of the market. Do you pay people this much? (I know those who do) Can you charge them out at almost $170 per hour? (many don’t). What if you bill them out at $155 per hour? Now, at 75% utilization, they contribute about $230k, or about 2.3x earnings.
EXAMPLE #2 – A solid $80k per year engineer. Is 3x or a goal of $240k billable reasonable? If they're billing at $125 / hour, they would need 1920 billable hours, which is 95% utilization and won't happen. So we set the goal at 2.5x for them, or $200k billable per year. Now, that gives them a goal of 1600 billable hours, or about 80% utilized. That is the top end for us; we simply cannot pay more than that when our billable rates are at $125 per hour.
EXAMPLE #3 - The $40k per year technician who, at 3x, is expected to contribute $120k per year in billings. These people may still bill out at $100 per hour, so they only need about 1200 hours to meet their goals, or about 60% utilized. By setting a team bonus that requires all levels to get to 75%, we push everyone the same. So, we adjust this goal upwards to be $150k (1500 hours x $100).
To sum up, our ratios look better on the low end but worse on the high end, but by pushing all to the same goal, profitability is ensured at all levels. You could also argue that realized dollars are a sliding scale with top performers contributing more total dollars, and you’d be correct. In the above examples, contribution over pay would be: example #1 (at $155/hour) would contribute $130k profit, example #2 contributes $120k profit, and example #3 contributes $110k profit. So, you can see the contribution starts to become very close, but the key is that all need to make their targets of 75% utilization.
Note that these numbers come from the likes of IPED and Service Leadership - those who study “best in class” in our industry, aka the top 20% of small VARs in North America. If you want to become “best in class”, the above numbers can be a good starting point. 11/19/2008
In this week’s Financial Post the headline article talk was all about how small business are seeing customers tighten their belts which in turn makes us all pay in reduced orders, services and thus our own ability to maintain our revenue and our sanity. So if no one is buying or they’re budgeting every paper clip and telephone call, then where does that leave small business? How are the banks reacting to all this? When so many people are still in need of ongoing credit or just trying to get started what imposition/s will the banks place on small business.
Who are we going to sell our IT solutions too? Can we offer an alternative?
As one gentleman pointed out the businesses that are renewing the terms of their current financial credit from the banks are going to be asked some of the hardest questions, but equally hard hit will be new and current businesses that are looking to get that first IT system or acquire funding to make their operations more efficient and reduce the need for travel (teleconferencing and VOIP technologies more specifically, touching on solutions we could provide). For those having put off this decision until now, they may just find themselves stuck with antiquated equipment which won’t help them on a competitive level, when now is the time to be so in order to stay ahead of the game.
Microsoft has always been sensitive to the difficulties that their partners have had since the tech bubble burst years ago and started a program called Microsoft Total Solution Financing (and yes there is a version just for Canada!)
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/financing/totalsolution.mspx#CanadaTotalSolutionFinancing
Previously only packaged as Microsoft Financing (for licensing) Microsoft extended it to include everything in one monthly payment.
Allison Watson, Corporate Vice President World Wide Partner Group made note of this point in her recent interview in CRN:
Is Microsoft Finance seeing an uptick in the number of channel partners seeking resources?
“We're definitely talking with partners about financing. Microsoft Financing has been fairly underutilized because financing has been easy to get. We want to make sure partners know it’s available. It isn't just free financing, however. Companies have to qualify in order to receive it.
Financing options are available for hardware, software, and services. Partners have great opportunities now to leverage assets of the total deal bundle wrapped into the bundle. And we are seeing partners interested in leveraging that.”
http://www.crncanada.ca/index.php/CRN-Tech/7-questions-for-Microsoft-channel-chief-Allison-Watson.html
This looks to open a door to you to make available to prospects not only your solutions but the financing option to make it a done deal.
How does that work?
Two requirements that are important to partners are:
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· The financing agreement minimum is CDN$3,000. Subsequent additions to an existing financing agreement are in increments of CDN$3,000. |
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Your financed solution must be obtained from a Microsoft Certified Business Solutions Partner.
Hey Microsoft is telling customers to call us! Isn’t that exactly what we’ve been waiting for?
With the economy far from being stable for the foreseeable future, offering an option to be competitive without having to run to the bank or emptying the piggy bank, is a great offer your clients should be willing to take a serious look at. |
Elisabeth 11/19/2008 11/19/2008
Take a listen to Allison Watson on how to take advantage of the current economic uncertainty to keep revenues solid. 9/17/2008
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If you're interested in our products/services, you can send us a message using contact form. 9/17/2008
Yesterday saw the official launch of the new servers for the SBSC community and its clients. Since it's code name Cougar to its oficial launch today the community has awaited the arrival of SBS/EBS with great anticipation. I would like to thank Andrea Russell and her global team of SBSC members worldwide for working hard to ensure that partners have the training readiness and resources to make a successful launch in theri communities. In Canada that job has fallen to Satish Kanwar and as you can see from the new resource sites he has doden a great job and created an amazing set of resources sites for Canadian partners.. In particular the new SBSC Canada blog is a great place to find information on the latest "gossip" in the community: http://blogs.msdn.com/cdnsbsc/
And since this is the time to get off the ground running I suggest you head to this link especially if you want to get started learning about the most up to date info on SBS andEBS:
http://www.microsoft.com/sbs/en/us/pricing.aspx |