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  • This consumer operating systems stuff is harder than 1st thought – Red Hat and Novell no longer targeting consumers with desktop Linux

    I saw this and it made me smile – looks like building a desktop OS for consumers is harder than people thought :-) And I thought consumers were more willing to put in time to fiddle too, so that makes the enterprise play even less likely for me!! Red Hat skips consumer Linux desktop Red Hat has no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market, but will continue to place its bets on a desktop for commercial markets. "We are focused on infrastructure software for the enterprise market, and to that market we are offering the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop," said Michael Chen, vice president of corporate marketing at Red Hat. "You need a different support ecosystem and applications for the consumer desktop," Chen added. Among the company's desktop goals for 2008 and 2009 is to ensure that its desktop products complement its server and middleware products, Red Hat said in a company blog post Wednesday. Red Hat's strategy is similar to that of Novell , which is currently...

  • How to sell Hosted CRM (CRM Online) in the UK and still retain your customers and a good profit – by working with Increase CRM

    [updated with contact details at 16:38] I have a partners or two that are looking to implement CRM internally and through the conversations about how they could do this came to know of the guys at Increase CRM. The good folks at Increase CRM seem to understand how SBSC partners think because the offerings they have for referral and resellers seem to be quite good to me. if you want the brochure on the subject, let me know, but here is the important piece for partners: What is the Referral Program? Partners in the Referral Program refer their customers to Increase CRM and we offer hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM and support services directly to the customer. Typically, the partner will provide implementation consulting services and may choose to provide first and second line support. Referral Partner Commissions The Referral Program guarantees partners commissions from any customers referred to Increase CRM: Subscribers Commission 5-10 100% of the first month’s subscription fees 11-50 200% of the first month’s subscription...

  • Get a makeover for your Office Live Site as well as a Dell Laptop and cash too!

    I just saw this over at https://microsoft.eprize.net/officelivesaveoursiteuk/index.tbapp and thought I would share. We are offering a makeover, £540 in cash and a Dell Laptop. If you have a site, or know someone who does, then forward this on to them. ttfn David Technorati Tags: Office Live , Small Business , Competition , Microsoft , Office Live Small Business

  • If you are a Microsoft partner who sells SBS, then please fill in the Windows Small Business Server 2008 Community Survey

    Kevin asked a couple of weeks ago if I could share this – so I’m sharing :-) The Windows Small Business Server 2008 WW Community Survey is live This is the third year we have published an SBS WW Community Survey to the SBS Community. Because of the previous surveys, we have made some adjustments in our community engagement. To name a few; we really worked on putting more focus on the Official SBS Blog. Our Sustaining Engineering team runs mini betas with our MVPs before KB's and Bug Fixes are released via Windows Update. We try to get more involvement in our techbetas from our User Groups. The list does go on. To the survey, the SBS Product Team would like to hear from the Windows SBS Community again. This survey is completely anonymous. In fact, some of you may have to sign out from Live in order to take the survey. So, if you get a PAGE NOT FOUND error message, please log out of Live and click on the link to the survey again. We want to know how valuable your experience is with the community resources and...

  • System Center Essentials 2007 on Windows Server 2008

    I got a question the other day asking in SCE was available on Windows Server 2008. From the System Center Essentials 2007 hope page I noticed that is states that with SP1 Windows Server 2008 is supported. Service Pack 1 Is Now Available! System Center Essentials just got better and faster: The new improvements include up to 70% less memory consumption, faster console, support for workgroup joined computers, SNMP v1 devices, improved setup, new update approvals rules, enhanced third-party update experience, and support for Windows Server 2008. Download the trial or update your existing Essentials server . For more information on what’s included, visit the SP1 Resource Page . Now, I’ve not installed this on Server 2008, but apparently there are a few tricks that you need to learn – I’d suggest that you have a look at Permanent Link to Installation Guide for System Center Essentials SP1 on Windows Server 2008 (x8 and Permanent Link to Reinstalling System Center Essentials 2007 . Thanks David Technorati Tags: Microsoft...

  • Microsoft wants to know what you want for the UK SBS 2008 Launch? Time to stop saying you want it better and time to start saying what you actually want and would use!!

    One thing I have never been accused of is holding back my opinion and on the Yahoo Groups recently there has been some discussions around what Microsoft has done for partners. As part of the discussion this blog post from Sonal, the UK Product Manager for SBS 2008 and EBS 2008, came up with a question around what do partners want to see in a UK launch. I thought people who read this blog might like to pop over to Sonal's blog and give a voice to their wants. I've seen suggestions from free beer, which was a Joke I was later told, to license pricing, features and benefits, how to up-sell/cross-sell. The problem with the later items is that they are simply personal to the business doing the selling - why have an upsell to mobile devices if your business can't facilitate it? What do you want to see at the UK SBS 2008 Launch? In May 2006 we had a server event for guys (and gals) who sell server - specifically Small Business Server. We split the event into two - the morning event was for those who were...

  • New SQL 2008 training for UK partners

    Hi, I know I’ve been away a lot recently (closing the year end and then doing some travelling for work), but while cleaning my inbox (ohh, 2500 mails processed, replied too, filed and actioned – yee har!) I came across this and it is bang up to date. SQL 2008 is going to be the hot, hot, hot product for a few months, along with how it sits with other BI solutions, such as SharePoint and PerformancePoint. To help you get started, here are some training opportunities : SQL Server 2008 Database Infrastructure and Scalability This three-day training course will help database administrators understand how to exploit the new performance, scalability, manageability and high-availability enhancements introduced in SQL Server 2008. They will also learn how to exploit these capabilities, ensure application scalability and how to manage a database using the new features. Click here Introduction to SQL Server 2008 BI Solution Development This three day course is designed to give developers the confidence to tackle a BI project...

  • 4 painful days while davidoverton.com transfers ownership and gets powered up again

    Well, this is one of those “I should have called support earlier mails”. I’ve been trying for about 3 months to get my davidoverton.com domain transferred from one vendor to the vendor I use for all the others. All attempts failed, so last night I phoned Australia to try and get it fixed and now the transfer is underway. However, the transfer has a 4 day “cooling off” period, so the domain is in limbo. Most people still access via uksbsguy.com, so most traffic will get through, but expect a few problems!! ttfn David Technorati Tags: personal , uksbsguy.com , davidoverton.com
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  • Want MIX08 in the UK? Then come to ReMix08 in Brighton on 18th and 19th September and save if you book an early bird place now

    I love what goes on at these events. It would be good to see you there. Here is the little advert: Final chance to save £110 . Very limited Early Bird places left - don't say we didn't warn you! 1,000 web developers, designers, development managers and technology evangelists are going to take the media they love to the next level. Why? Because ReMix UK 08 is getting bigger and better. Scott Guthrie Developer Track Bill Buxton Design and UX Track For Designers, Developers, the Community and Beyond Work Julie Howell, Fortune Cookie • Brendan Dawes, Magnetic North • Paul Foster, Microsoft Evangelist • Guy Smith-Ferrier, Capella • Tim Regan, Microsoft Research • Mike Taulty, Microsoft Developer Evangelist See the website for the growing list of speakers... What's in the mix • Panel discussions to Interactive Mash Ups • Designers and developers hand-in-hand to • All day VJs to conceptual walls • Open Source project, CodePlex • Backnetwork to Moo cards • Photosynth master classes to Microsoft Surface • Our...

  • Site updates for next few days

    Hi, I need to update the site again – newer technology, so expect some changes over the next few days and things not looking great for a day or two. Thanks David

  • Developer Events in September and October in the UK

    I just saw this, so thought I would pass it on: Join other developers at free regional Microsoft Technical Events to receive technical know-how demos from Microsoft experts, insights into our latest technologies and a chance to meet and talk to other developers. Events nearest to you MSDN Event: Rich Internet Applications with Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Location: Reading Date: 2 September 2008 MSDN Event: Rich Internet Applications with Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Location: London Date: 4 September 2008 MSDN Event: What's New in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1? Location: Reading Date: 2 October 2008 MSDN: What's New in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1? Location: Bristol Date: 22 October 2008 MSDN Roadshow Re-Run Location: London Date: 24 October 2008 ttfn David Technorati Tags: Developer , RIA , Rich Internet Applications , Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5 , Service Pack 1 , Microsoft , Events

  • Back to blogging on SBS 2008, Microsoft, Developer “stuff” and anything that interests me, including Star Wars!

    Well, I seem to have taken quite a break over the last couple of months.  Towards the end of the financial year I found myself cutting contracts right to the wire, including working with the legal teams until the small hours of the morning to get the orders in.  After that came two trips to the US – Houston for WPC and Atlanta for a Microsoft internal event.  At both these events I spoke with several members of the WESS team (Windows Essential Server Solution) about SBS 2008, licensing, usage scenarios, messaging and many other things.  The good news is that fantastic progress was being made and has continued.  I’m not sure I’m going to have anything gripe about come the launch!! I’ve also had some holiday too, in the UK and I have to say, without much sunlight Now I’m stuck in the “start of year” work, but I think I need to start shooting off quick entries. ttfn David Technorati Tags: SBS 2008 , Star Wars , Microsoft , Personal

  • Watching Pink at in Atlanta

    Just thought I had to add a quick post to explain why I have a bunch of Pink photos on the blog site. While at an internal Microsoft event the final day treat was time at Six flags with Pink. I’m a great Pink fan, although not all Microsoft employees were, which meant that when Pink tried for audience participation she didn’t quite get the reaction she was hoping for. Anyway, some of the thumbnails are below and more on the link above. ttfn David
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  • Can't find the WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) sales and marketing toolkit for SBS 2003 - here it was

    I've had someone ask me about the WSS toolkit that was referenced at How to Sell, Deploy, and Build Business with Microsoft Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 and SBS 2003 R2 . The download location has moved to http://www.partnersalesresources.com/Pages/sbskit.aspx# . ttfn David Technorati Tags: Windows SharePoint Services , WSS v3 , SBS , SBS 2003 R2 , Microsoft , Partners

  • New UK SBSC Blog, welcome to Emily Lambert to SBSC and Sales training on September 30th

    Some things come and some things go.  Unfortunately someone came and went while we blinked for the UK SBSCers, but every cloud has a silver lining and Emily has popped up as the successor.  If you attend the SBS Group meetings around the country then you will have most likely met Emily. Not only has Emily appeared on the scene to drive SBSC value in the UK, but she has started regular updates to the UK SBSC Blog. A classic example is the sales and licensing entry below.   I’d recommend that you say Hi to Emily at one of the SBSC meetings, catch the new blog and explore the new sales and licensing tools :-) New look Sales and Licensing Induction for Partners The Microsoft Partner Readiness Team have just announced the release of the new look Sales and Licensing Induction for Partners . This session is aimed to equip sales people with the knowledge and skills that will enable them to talk to new and existing customers about the business benefits of Microsoft technologies and associated areas such...
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  • Just in case you missed it SBS 2008: Released to Manufacturing and date for launch set

    I know I am very, very, very behind the times on  this, but just in case you missed it …  This means that SBS Cougar is now completely done and now a 100% SBS 2008!! The Official SBS Blog : SBS 2008: Released to Manufacturing! On behalf of the SBS team, I am extremely pleased to announce that Windows Small Business Server 2008 software has been finalized! Today both SBS Standard and Premium are being released to manufacturing, which means we begin the process of finalizing international versions, creating media, building packaging, delivering the product to distribution channels and handing it off to our OEM partners, so it will be widely available by our November 12 launch. (More information about launch will come in the future.) <snipped> We invested in a number of different areas for this release; here’s the big picture of the themes and features in SBS 2008: For IT managers and technology consultants:  · Microsoft’s newest server technologies: Powerful and more secure infrastructure that...

  • Microsoft Microsite test

  • Nick King – Microsoft corp SBS God in the UK on 7th November!!

    Hopefully you have seen this elsewhere, but if not….. 7 th November 2008, Reading: TechNet Exclusive! Hear from the guy that brought you Microsoft’s enterprise computing to small and medium businesses An exclusive opportunity to meet Nicholas King, Technical Product Manager from Microsoft Corporation before the launch of the  Windows Essential server solutions offerings, Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008 on November 12 th . Hear Nicholas and Jamie Burgess  advise on why these solutions have been created and why it is still important to invest in solution infrastructure in  economic uncertainty. With the assistance of Jamie they will go into some technical detail around the two products that make up Windows essential server Solutions. 1. Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2008 is an all-in-one server solution designed to help you keep your data more secure and your company more productive. It provides many of the features used by larger companies, such as e-mail, Internet...

  • London 2008 - SMB Nation – 5th December 2008

    It has been a while since I’ve spoken about Harry Brelsford, but he was one of the founding lights in SBS and partners.  I’ve attended and presented at several of his events and he is back in the UK on the 5th December.  If you have the time, given the cost is $200, so not a huge amount, come along. London 2008 SMB Nation Europe 2008 - Conference Information Featuring an ''independent'' Small Business Server 2008 event! Speakers: • Harry Brelsford (Bio at www.smbnation.com) • Jeff Middleton (Bio at www.sbsmigration.com) Location: Microsoft London (Cardinal Place) 100 Victoria Street London SW1E 5JL Delegate Registration HERE for SMB Nation Europe Agenda: December 5, 2008 – Microsoft Central London 8:30am-9:30am Delegate Registration 9:30am – 10:00am Microsoft Introduction 10am – Noon How SBS 2008 Saved The Economy (Brelsford) Noon – 1:30pm Lunch and HP (Essential Business Server, HP Partner Program) 1:30pm – 3:00pm Migration Techniques for 2008 (Middleton) 3:00-3:30 Come see how Autotask...
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  • How to change where SQL Server looks for it’s master datafiles (master.mdf)

    I’ve found myself moving datafiles around or backing up to new locations before enough that I need to change SQL to point to the new locations before it will start for me to do further work.  The process to get it up and running is to find the SQL instance in the registry and change 3 values. The magical location is: “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10. <instance> \MSSQLServer\Parameters” Under here you will file 3 arguments.  Notice the double backslashes “\\” which is required for each single backslash you want.  For example, for my site, I have changed them from the default instance pointers to: "SQLArg0"="-dD:\\databases\\Community Server\\master.mdf" "SQLArg1"="-eD:\\databases\\Community Server\\ERRORLOG" "SQLArg2"="-lD:\\database_logs\\Community Server\\mastlog.ldf" Change these to the location of your datafiles.  The “-d” is for the master database datafile, “–e” for the Error Log and finally...

  • Internet Explorer security vulnerability fix now available – think of it as an early Christmas present… now about Firefox’s 3 issues this week…

    I think everyone knows that an urgent security issue has arisen in IE this week and Microsoft has taken the (wise) decision to publish a fix outside the normal 2nd Tuesday release cycle. Some have said switch browser because of this issue, but not only can that be complex, but most browsers suffer security issues so once again the only real protection is to wrap in cotton wool and hide. Or, use the built in features of Vista and IE7/8 which means protected mode and NOT running as admin. You might ask why a Christmas present? Well, if this continued un-patched then your information is seriously at risk and that would make for a very bad Christmas if your credit card information was stolen!! Either way, if you have IE on your systems then you will need to update your systems urgently. Of course, my Hyper-V server (or Windows Core for that matter) don’t have IE, so no updates for them!!! Just for completeness, here is the information from the Technet newsletter Internet Explorer Security Update I wanted to...

  • SBS 2008 Forefront Virus protection for e-mail Errors or Warnings - “At least one of the engines enabled for update has not been updated in the last week” – how to solve

    My SBS 2008 installation is pretty good, but one area I’ve noticed some problems was with ForeFront. I either had errors or at best warnings all the time about the scan engines. I would go and hit a manual update, but the bar would be 30-90% across and suddenly stop. When I looked in the event log I could see errors like these below. Searching the internet delivered me the KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939411/en-us which talks about timeout issues, however even with the recommended change things did not resolve themselves. Source: GetEngineFiles Event ID: 6014 Level: Error Description: Microsoft Forefront Server Security encountered an error while performing a scan engine update. Scan Engine: AhnLab Update Path: http://forefrontdl.microsoft.com/server/scanengineupdate/x86/AhnLab Proxy Settings: Disabled Error Code: 0xC0001F58 Description: The operation timed out. Source: Microsoft Forefront Security Event ID: 7003 Level: Warning Description: Not all of the selected engines enabled for updates...

  • Steve from Sytec saw me …

    Steve sent me this earlier in December, but I thought it was worth sharing. Here is the photo he took: ttfn David Technorati Tags: David Overton , Overton , Personal , UK Train Stations
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  • SBS 2008 Update Rollup 1 Released to fix Vista AV reporting issue and GoDaddy domain registration issue

    Hi everyone, the first roll-up of fixes for SBS 2008 shipped today. It addresses some minor issues, which is good, but always worth being aware of. From the Official SBS 2008 blog SBS 2008 Update Rollup 1 Releases Today Windows Small Business Server 2008 Update Rollup 1 releases today. This rollup package addresses the following issues in Windows Small Business Server 2008. Issue 1 The Security tab in the Windows Small Business Server 2008 Console incorrectly reports the spyware and malware status of Windows Vista Service Pack 1-based clients that are joined to a domain. Specifically, some security applications are reported as incompatible in the antivirus and malware status that is reported. Issue 2 The Internet Address Management Wizard exits unexpectedly when you register a domain name. This issue occurs when you select GoDaddy.com as the provider, and then you click Register Now How to obtain this update This update will be available from the Microsoft Update Web site: http://update.microsoft.com More Information...

  • Catalog of Windows Small Business Server 2008 Installation Error Messages

    So there I was talking about migration issues and Chris Pucket pointed to this GREAT store of error messages and resolutions for SBS installs.  I've copied the links for now, but expect them to be updated over time!! Still let me know Migration issues on the link above! Catalog of Windows Small Business Server 2008 Installation Error Messages This topic links to information about errors that you might encounter while installing Windows SBS 2008. If you encounter an error that does not appear on this page, see “Troubleshooting Windows Small Business Server 2008” in the Windows Small Business Server Technical Library (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=111318). Click a link to view information about that error message. An error occurred while installing or configuring a Windows SBS 2008 application An error occurred while promoting the server to a domain controller Anti-spam agents for Exchange Server 2007 cannot be installed Anti-spam automatic updates for Exchange Server 2007 cannot be configured...
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