Posts Tagged ‘Community’

Jason strikes again!

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Jason Jordan – leader of the SMB IT Professionals – Perth group has struck again… and it’s all good :-)   Jason is caught here talking about how his business benefits from Bonded DSL services.  Well done mate!

 

 

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Sydney Business Development and Cloud Services workshop – Registrations NOW OPEN

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

image Robert Crane – leader of the Sydney SMB IT Professionals group has announced this morning that registrations for our next workshop are open.  These workshops have been outstanding successes for all involved and if you are not part of it, I suggest you get moving along to be part of this.  Just because you don’t live in Sydney, does not mean you can’t be part of it.  We’ve webcast these events in the past and it’s open again.

 

Please enroll now for the SMBITPro – Sydney Business Development and Cloud Services workshop, places are limited. Details are:

All information and updates are at http://event.smbitpro.com.au. The front page has an RSS feed for you to subscribe for regular updates.

Date : Friday 20th and Saturday 21st August 2010

Time : 9am – 7pm

Location : North Ryde RSL, Magdala Rd North Ryde 2113

*Dress code applies

Costs (no GST):

Onsite – LIMIT of 35 Attendees per day

Attendee (per day): $96 no GST SMBITPro members, $240 no GST non-members

Attendee (2 days): $166 no GST SMBITPro members, $415 no GST non-members

Inclusions :

Attendee (per day): $46 no GST SMBITPro members, $115 no GST non-members

Attendee (2 days): $90 no GST SMBITPro members, $225 no GST non-members

Inclusions:

Please make payment to (discount codes available from your user group leader. If not contact director@ciaops.com for information on obtaining a discount code)

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SMB Community Events – Next Week – Changes!!!

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

Just a few days to go now guys before we have the start of the SMB Community Events here in Australia.  If you’ve not yet registered for any of the SMB Community events, please do so now.  We’ve got well over 150 people attending across the nation now and I’d really love to see it hit 200 if we can.  The link for all the details is here

Adelaide

There’s an email being sent out to all current registered attendees for the Adelaide event, but in case anyone was attending but not registered as yet, we need to advise that Microsoft have come to the party with premises for the Adelaide event and as a result there’s a venue change and a SLIGHT adjustment to the time.  Details for the Adelaide event…

June 22, 2010 at 06:00 PM – to – June 22, 2010 at 09:30 PM

Microsoft – Adelaide
Level 2, 91 King William Street
Adelaide 5000
Australia

Make sure you make contact with your local SMB IT Professional Group leader while you are there too.

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Local Trend Blog now running

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

Local Aussie resellers will know of Kieran Cook – long time Trend techo dude, well Kieran has had for some time now a very informal newsletter that he’s been doing on an occassional basis.  I’m pleased to say that Kieran has joined the 21st century and now started his own informal blog.  You can check it out here

I’d suggest you all get on over to it and subscribe.

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Your chance to review Eric Ligmans performance

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Eric Ligman, long time Microsoft stalwart for the rights of the SBSC has opened up a can of worms with this one I’m sure :-)

Eric is the man behind the SBSC side of the partner channel at Microsoft from a global perspective.  His passion is “out there” in terms of trying hard to get the things we SBSCs need to survive.  Eric has been a constant face in the community for many years now when he chose to start his own blog, yahoogroup and website so that he could ensure the right information go out there to the community.  It comes as no surprise to me therefore to hear that Eric is now asking for community input for his own internal Microsoft review.

Eric wants YOU – those in the SBSC community that matter, to contribute.  He wants you to help review his performance and you can read it in his own words here.  I’ve got to say it takes balls to do this – kudos to you Eric. This is one very good way to pass your feedback back to him and his bosses.  Eric is NOT responsible for the SBS/SMB Server products so don’t bag him out about Microsoft shocking communications on that front ok? :-)

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One week till the SMB Community Events in Australia

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

We are one week away now from the Microsoft SMB Community Events here in Australia, if you have not registered for them yet, you need to get in now.  Seats are filling up fast and it’s looking like it will be a sell out event (ok it’s free but you know what I mean).  Here’s the registration links again for you in case you missed them last time.

Registration is a must and attendance is free.

Brisbane – June 16th 5:30pm – Register here

Sydney – June 17th 5:30pm – Register here

Melbourne – June 21st 5:30pm – Register here

Adelaide – June 22nd: 5:30pm – Register here

Get along to one of these events now and catch up with your fellow SMB IT Professional community members.

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Trend listens to the community

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Well – in a great example of listening to the community, Trend have now published their updates on their website, so that you no longer need to call in to get them.  This was based directly on feedback that we gave to them in our recent visit to Taipei.  Thank you Trend.

The most current update for WFBS 6.0 SP2 is available here

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Trend Micro visit – Day 4

Saturday, April 24th, 2010

Phew… the last day at Trend Micro. I’ll do a summary post in the next day or two after I’ve had a chance to process things a little bit.  Today was some free time for us to play with WFBS 7.0.  In typical reseller fashion though, we took things on a different tangent and ended up taking over the session and showing the team some of the really cool things that we think they need to do and include in future products.  It was fantastic to see senior VP’s and Directors in the room getting together while we were talking and you could see their faces “We need this feature/tool/idea…”

We finally did get to play with WFBS 7.0 – and initial impressions are that it’s heading very much in the right direction. They’ve already taken input from us and the build they showed us today, even had things that we’d suggested two days ago… now that’s progress!

I want to thank Melody Liu and Henry Liang – Melody is the Product Manager for WFBS, and Henry is the senior director for the R&D team who is building WFBS.  These two people took my idea and in conjunction with senior management made it a reality.  I hope that they treasure the information we’ve given them as much as we have the information they’ve shared with us.

Back to reality in Australia next week.

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Trend Micro visit – Day 3

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Day 3 – I woke up this morning feeling extremely drained.  So far this week it’s been intense, sharing with the team from Trend Micro.  Today we started the morning with an overview of the current QA process and learned that the QA team is not just the team that tests the product at the end of the cycle, but that the QA team are involved before they even write a line of code.  They have input into the product design and are designing test scenarios to go along with the development cycle.

We also got a presentation that dug deep into the configurations that we resellers use in typical scenarios. I’ll do a separate post on that another time, but basically Trend are trying harder to ensure that interoperability with other third party products works smoother than ever before.  We’ve given input to them now on the programs and products that we typically use in their test case scenarios and were also able to correct their beliefs on how we use various aspects of SBS 2003 and SBS 2008.  That will then lead to better testing and lower bug counts in everything moving forward.

After lunch we had the chance to spend some time with Edward Tsai – Vice President of R&D for Trend Micro.  Edward wanted to cut through all the red tape and got from us our honest opinion on what we thought was good and bad about all we’ve seen this week Edward has the responsibility and power to make any changes needed to improve the systems Trend use, not just in the SMB space, but across their product range.  We were able to give him a few great ideas as to how to improve things like their beta programs, and QA processes that we hope will make a big difference moving forwards.

Tonight’s dinner was an interesting one.  They have committed to getting me to eat Stinky Tofu, Chickens Feet and the 1000 year old egg.  Melody Liu, the WFBS Product Manager had to force feed me the Stinky Tofu… there is video to prove I did eat it… and yes – it was stinky and a VERY strange taste for me… not something I’ll try again in the future :-)   Having said all that, it was an interesting experience to try it.  Here’s a couple of photos to prove I ate it…

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Trend Micro visit – Day 2

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Day 2 is over… and we thought Day 1 was exhausting. My travel companion, Ken Garoux made an appearance today and drew many looks as we took him into the Trend building.

 

As we’ve gone through things today, Trend have realised that we can really add value in sharing our experiences with other teams within the company.  Today we got an insight into what is coming with WFBS v7.0 and were able to help refine a number of features to be more suitable for our clients and our needs as resellers.  We can’t talk a lot about this just yet, but we are all very impressed with how Trend are responding to the community input and the feature requests that they’ve heard.  I will say that the top 3 features I saw today really will help many resellers rollout a more consistent Trend environment at a lower cost to install and configure it.

In the afternoon session we got to share with the WFBSS Worry-Free Business Security Services (aka Hosted AV) team.  Kevin Royalty had some specific issues that he was able to show the WFBSS team first hand. Here’s a photo of some of the key team members digging into the issues and resolving them on the fly.  End result is that they can now incorporate this experience into the next version of the product to make it more stable and reliable.

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