May 2006 - David Overton's Blog

Every so often I get a mail telling me how MS Support was poor in one way or another. Recently I have been getting the other type of e-mail - how GOOD Microsoft support is. Yesterday, Paul sent me this e-mail: David i found your email address on the sbsbpi.co.uk website, i thought it appropriate to drop you a mail asking you to pass on praise to the relevant people for the technical support i received from Microsoft today. the problem was quite complicated and both support representatives who dealt with it seemed knowledgeable, thorough and also easy to get on with on, all the essential requirements for a telephone support engineer, lots of bad things are said about the support available from Microsoft but today i experienced something very different, please pass on my thanks to the SBS support team. How nice it is to get these, but also in the forums, someone posted this: http://uksbsguy.com/forums/thread/401.aspx I have used Microsoft support a bunch of times over my entire career and a few times since I have...

The PTS Team (the group I work for - Partner Technical Support) are recording regular small videos to explain what we do and what it means to partners. One of my hero's in the team is James AKrigg. You will know if you have ever seen him present - he is very passionate about technolog and getting the most out of it - very much like me - and he was also one of the original architects of the SBSC programme idea. So (being one of my favorite words), what has he done, well he has recorded a small piece on PTS-TV about Information Worker. My advice to you, go spend 7 minutes learning what he has to say - you will find it valuable, and possibly funny as we seem to be leaving in outtakes :-) Where can you get it? - http://www.microsoft.com/uk/partner/blog/pts-tv/ let me know if you like it :-) ttfn David

Howdy, I have seen plenty of system failures over the last two weeks and while some nice new hardware is due to arrive soon, I will be moving the whole system to a virtual server environment on another box that has been a stalwart. If you see the site down, it will almost certainly be rebooting - I have identified it two a couple of drivers (either NTFS.sys or my AV provider) - once it is virtualised, it will remain so until new hardware arrives. One thing I will do is fully document the process I took to move from physical to virtual without the use of an Enterprise Server (which is required to use the MS provided tools). More blogs posts soon - once hardware issues are off my mind. thanks David