Posts Tagged ‘SMBiTPro’

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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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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SMB Community Events in Australia – Registration now Open

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

There’s been a heap of hard work to pull this together from fellow Aussie SBS MVPs Dean Calvert and Stuart Applegate and myself, but I’m now very happy to announce that Microsoft are sending two of their top team members from the SMB/SBS team here to Australia in June.  Not to miss out on the party, Jeff Middleton has also volunteered to come out and help educate us on how to better migrate our SBS servers.  Below is an invite I sent out today to members of SBSfaq.com newsletter.  Please register for this event and support your local SMB Community.

A rare chance to talk directly to the Microsoft SMB Team in Australia along with Jeff Middleton aka the King of the Swing Migration.

Nick King, Senior Product Manager in the Windows Server Business Group & Adrian Maziak, Senior Program Manager in the Home and Small Business Server team are coming to present, listen and take feedback on the Microsoft SMB Server products.

Jeff Middleton, the master of the swing migration will be presenting a session on how to migrate from existing SBS environments to SBS 2008 to any combination of Windows 2003, 2008 and Exchange 2003, 2007 or 2010 platforms.

You will also be able to find out more about your local SMB IT Professionals group and understand the benefits of being involved in the growing SMB IT Professionals community here in Australia.

This invitation is a rare chance for you to talk directly to two key members of the Microsoft SMB Team when they visit Australia in June.  Make sure you register now using the link below. Note due to timing, Nick and Adrian will only be presenting at the Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne events.  Jeff Middleton has volunteered to be at all four events (thanks Jeff).

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

This event is being hosted by Microsoft and your local SMB IT Professionals group.  If you have any question about this event, please feel free to email me direct.

To find out about other events like this and information relevant to the SMB IT Professional Community sign up for the SMBFocus Newsletter here

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Microsoft to visit Australian SMB IT Pro Community

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

I’ve been working on this for the past 3 years now and recently while in the USA, I was told that they finally had budget for it :-) The aim was to get Microsoft to send a real Product Manager from the SBS team here to visit our SMB IT Pro Community.  Finally it’s paying off.  Microsoft have confirmed that they will send not one, but two members of the SBS team to Australia to visit and present with the SMB IT Pro Community.  These events will be held in Microsoft offices in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and will give a chance for you to meet and ask questions first hand of the people behind the product.

Adrian Maziak and Nick King will be coming.  Nick has been here before and originally hails from New Zealand (but we won’t hold that against him).  Nick has been responsible for things such as developing the training materials that we’ve all had comment on.  Adrian Maziak is the PM responsible for amongst other things, the Reports and Alerting system in SBS 2008 and future SMB Server products.

Both have been with Microsoft in the SBS/EBS teams for some time and will be able to talk pretty clearly about most anything you can ask.

Dates are listed below.  A start time is not yet confirmed but is likely to be either 6pm or 7pm in the evenings

Brisbane: June 16th :  MS Building, PTY MR Brisbane theatre 2

Sydney: June 17th :  MS Building, PTY MR SYF Theatre 1

Melbourne:  June 21st : MS Building, PTY MR Melb Exhibition

Registration for these events is not yet open but will be announced as soon as finalised along with the start time.

Make sure that you block aside this time as it’s a great chance to meet these guys, get answers and give feedback to help make the products better suit your clients needs.

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Free Wireless Network Analysis Tools

Friday, April 9th, 2010

One of the great things about the community is the way we share information.  At the recent SMB IT Professionals workshop here in Sydney, one of our members, Mark Wilton showed a few of us this really cool and FREE Wireless Network analyser tool.  I used it today to look at a problem with a client site that had some very intermittent wireless drop outs to find there were a few other “hidden” access points in buildings close by that were causing interference.

Here’s some of the graphs you can get from this tool – the first one showing channel allocation at my home.  There’s me in the blue and a few neighbours in the green and red.  On the client site today we had 5 other devices all sharing channel 6 and they were stacked on top of each other where the green bar is.

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This 2nd graph shows a spectrogram of the channels and signal strength – hard to read but very cool.  There’s also some cool logging features in this tool that you can use to record signal strength as you walk around a building – great for a basic wireless survey.

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Thanks Mark for sharing this tool with us.

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Are you coming to this?

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

Are you coming to the SMB IT Professionals – Sydney Backup++ Workshop on 21st and 22nd of May?  If you are not then you’re a bloody idiot… ok – maybe not but hey it sounded good when I said it out loud.. :-)

imageSeriously though, we’re running another of our successful workshops, this time focused on all things Backup and Restore.  We’ll be having a shoot out between various backup vendors to see what works, what does not, what’s great and what is yet to be great.  If you want to find out more, come to our website here and check it out.

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Security and Optimisation Workshop Wrap up

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

Wow – what a day… my brain is bleeding and that is saying something…  The SMB IT Professionals group in Sydney has today been holding a workshop focused on Security and Optimisation of your SBS 2008 network.  We had multiple vendors involved and around 35 members from the Sydney group as well as a few ring ins from Brisbane and Melbourne.  Via Livemeeting we had Dana Epp and Susan Bradley presenting from the USA and Canada giving the event a truly International flavour.

Dana Epp opened the morning by scaring the pants of the room. I watched as jaws around the room dropped as he showed  how easily he could use features of SBS 2008 to access computers remotely – all he needed was some basic credentials and he had control of pretty much ANY PC in the remote network.  Now this is not a security vulnerability per se- more the way a feature of the product that could be used in a different manner than what Microsoft intended it to be.  Dana also provided a few clues on how to refine the SBS 2008 configuration to reduce this potential concern.  I believe he will be doing some blog posts about this in future that will help us all better understand.  Of course – AuthAnvil from Scorpionsoft is an easy way you can enforce security and ensure the identity of the people connecting to your network.  A few members in the room volunteered their thoughts on Dana’s product and how it worked for them.

Doug Wilson from HW Systems said “Scorpionsoft has THE BEST SUPPORT team of ANY vendor… they go to great lengths to understand and help client requirements”

Dana also talked about how we can evaluate the AuthAnvil product ourselves easily by requesting an evaluation from their website.

Susan Bradley then gave us a deep insight into Patch management and made many think about what questions we need to understand prior to patching client environments.  Microsoft normally release patches on the 2nd Tuesday of the month for security related issues and the last Tuesday in the month for any other bits and pieces.  However if patches are released at any other time of the month then and then you SERIOUSLY need to consider patching faster as Microsoft only do this when there are vulnerabilities in the wild.  Susan also went over why we should patch and primarily this related to the fact that if you do not patch, your system will get owned by the bad guys… you will no longer have control over it and can no longer trust it.  Susan then went on to go cover the bases of what OS’s are being actively patched by Microsoft and highlighted that we need to have our clients up to XP SP3 by July in order to get patched in the future.  She also discussed how to diagnose patches that are not applying correctly and mentioned the pending.xml file that causes your computers to get stuck on the “Applying updates 3 of 3″ and provided step by step instructions on how to get around it.

Morning tea saw lots of great discussion around the topics presented so far and the muffin grab was fun (had to be here).

Trend Micro was up next and Malcolm Pooley and Kieran Cook presented on many of the updates that Trend are doing in their WFBS 6.0 product. Kieran shared with us the results of some internal testing that they did locally with their product and the feedback they are providing to the R&D team.  Kieran also gave us an overview of the future roadmap for Trends products in the SMB space, but he asked us to keep it quiet for now.

Lunch up next and some great food – just enough for everyone.  No complaints from anyone either which was great.  Some interesting discussions through lunch about things we talked about during the morning.

We’re running a bit behind so the session for UTM / Firewall devices was held over till after lunch.  Robert Crane is now leading a vibrant discussion (almost and arguement) about the best UTM and Firewall devices on the market.  Points for discussion include;

Funny comment made during a discussion on email filtering “Nothing wrong with Symantec filtering… it stops everything… even the server…”.  I’m sure that was true in the past, but hey – twas funny :-)

Patch Management is up now… and the first question asked is “What patch management solution do you use?”  The majority of the room is using WSUS, with smaller percentages using Kaseya or manual patching.  Similar to the discussion on security, our clients still don’t get the concept of needing to patch their computers. Many of them assume that because they have a relationship with us as IT Professionals (which may be just a break/fix relationship) that we are constantly protecting them from these nasties.  This as we all know is wrong.  No one would ever do anything for nothing and if we don’t have business relationship that involves some form of fee for service that the client can not expect we are doing anything to protect them.   Interesting question raised “How many people wait for Susan to say it’s ok to patch before they patch?”… interestingly around 50% are waiting for “others” to patch before they do – and that does not guarantee that they won’t have problems themselves in their environments, but an indication that they are wanting others to feel the pain before they do.  Scary really if you think about it.

Ok – I was up next and delivered a session focused on Server Optimisation.  I talked about many things from the hardware, through to what is the right size page file, or RAID configuration.  There were a lot of interesting questions and one of the best things discussed was RAID configurations.  I asked the question – if you had 4 hard drives in a RAID array, would you use RAID 5 or RAID 1+0?  What gives the best random access performance for the average client?  Most people in the room said that they would use RAID 1+0 which in my tests is actually NOT the best RAID to use with 4 disks.  I’ll be blogging more about that later. 

Ryan and John followed on with a presentation about how to build an Untangle Firewall for use in the SMB space.  Very cool demo and for those that have not seen Untangle before, it’s certainly something to look at.  Untangle looks to be a very cool option for many of us in the SMB space, and there are options where we could build a device ourselves and then provide this as a service to our clients :-)   Lots of great questions put forward from the attendees.  Ryan and John did a great job presenting this – well done.

Many people asked via twitter, emails and so on how they could get copies of todays presentation – they are available to all members of the SMB IT Professionals.  Well – you can go one better than that. You can register for our next workshop in May 2010 – right here.

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Security and Optimisation Event today

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

Right now we’re running an event here in Sydney focused on Security and Optimisation – you can follow on twitter if you follow #smbitpro

Email me if you want to know more.. I’ll provide a summary later today of what you missed out on!

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