Posts Tagged ‘Travel’

Give me feedback on StorageCraft ShadowProtect

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

As part of my new role with StorageCraft, I’m heading to the USA on Saturday to spend a week with the team in Salt Lake City (my first visit to this place).  I’ll be talking to everyone I can from the CEO down to the guys on the support desk.  I’ve got my own thoughts on what they do well, and what they can improve on with the product, support, marketing, you name it.  However one of the biggest things I’ve learnt is that it’s not just my thoughts that count but those of the community, so I want to take direct feedback from the community to StorageCraft. 

So my question for you is this… what do you like about their products and company and conversely what do you not like?  What can they do to improve the ShadowProtect offerings for us as resellers?  Please feel free to email me direct here or leave comments on this blog post.  I’m really keen to take as much feedback to them as I can.  Thanks in advance!

Tags: ,
Posted in Blog | 19 Comments »

Travel Tips for the Frequent Traveller

Monday, August 30th, 2010

I travel a lot in my job – sometimes seeing multiple cities, multiple times in the same week.  So it’s certainly something that I’ve become accustomed to and am quite proficient at.  Here’s some of the technology that I travel with and why. The photo below shows you some of the technology laid out on the table.

 

P4250004

Here’s a breakdown of what is there and why.

1. The top right cable is a 7metre VGA cable.  Using this I can link my laptop to the TV in my hotel room and use it as a 2nd monitor which can make you very productive at times.

2. The Microsoft Bluetooth Wireless keyboard and Keypad allow me to have full functionality of a decent size keyboard.  If I choose to use the VGA cable to display my laptop screen, I can easily relax on the bed with they wireless keyboard and get some work done.

3. The Microsoft Bluetrack wireless mouse on the bottom right – this works on any surface – yes – even the glass desktop you see here.  It’s also designed to fit in your hand and therefore reduces stress.

4. The 4 port power board – when you are travelling, it’s easier to take one International power adaptor and a power board than multiple power adapters.  I can then plug in all my powered devices, charging phones, camera batteries etc without needing individual adaptors for each device.

5. The Motorola Bluetooth headset is very useful.  This is linked to my laptop and I use it in conjunction with Skype to make calls back home, clients, etc.  I can walk around the room using it without an issue and it charges from a standard USB port which means it’s one less charger to think about.

6. The International Travel adaptor – that’s the black thing on the left of the Motorola bluetooth headset – this one adaptor allows any to any power plug conversion and is fully self contained.  I have two of these – one in my travel kit as above and another in my backpack so I can use things outside of my hotel room.

7. The last things I have are two USB 400GB hard drives – those are the black and blue cases you see here. The Blue Hard Drive is fully encrypted using BitLocker to go and I store a lot of information on it that I don’t need on my laptop.  I use BitLocker To Go to ensure that if the drive is lost, it’s contents can’t be accessed at all.  The Black Hard drive is totally non encrypted and used for backup purposes to backup my laptop while I travel.  I use StorageCraft ShadowProtect and each backup is fully encrypted to prevent others reading it.  Using this if my laptop had a massive failure, I could either restore it to the same laptop, or access the data from a replacement laptop if needs be.

Other things I carry in this travel bag that are not shown include, a Leatherman tool, and a small multipoint screwdriver as well as come cable ties, spare baggage tags and a very small fold up umbrella.

This photo shows how it’s setup :-)

P4250001

Ok – that’s a couple of travel tips that I have – what tips do you have?

Tags:
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »

TechEd 2010 Essentials

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

TechEd Australia is off an running now.  One of the things I’ve learnt over time is that when you are in a place for any length of time, the way to make it feel like home is to get a few things that help make it easier for you… and they can save a few bucks too.  I’m up here for both TechEd, some client work and some rest and relaxation and I’m here for 8 days in total.  Here’s a photo of a few supplies I picked up… Note the chocolate… and fresh fruit… oh – there were apples and Milk too to but they are missing as I forgot to put them on the table.

P8210021

In all seriousness though – staying at a serviced apartment instead of a hotel means the cost is kept down.  Shopping at the local supermarket for things like breakfast cereal, and some late evening snacks will save you a heap of cash and having a few drinks in the fridge means you can avoid the crush at the bar if you want a drink before bed. 

Tags: , ,
Posted in Blog | No Comments »

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.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »

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…

Tags: , ,
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »

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.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »

Trend Micro visit – Day 1

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

Today marks the start of our community members visit to Trend Micro here in Taipei, Taiwan.  Karen Christian, Steven Banks, Kevin Royalty and myself have all been invited guests of Trend to come talk and present and discuss real world scenarios and problems with the R&D team here.  The objective is simple… take our real world experience with their WFBS products and go direct to the developers writing the code and tell them what works, what does not, what needs to be improved and what should be cut.

Trend’s Taipei office is located in a 19 storey building where they occupy most of it.  Here they have teams not just focused on R&D for SMB, but also other areas that link into SMB such as the core technologies, the Exchange SMEX components and so on.

 

The photo below gives you an idea of the level of attendance at today’s session.  We had people from the various sections of the SMB team including HIE (everything you see visually in the product and documentation), QA (product testing), SE (bug fixes and service packs) and RD (figuring out how to build better product and then building it).

There was a lot of information sharing from the four of us and we gave them a very good idea on how a vendors products affect our clients, our business and our profitability.  We were able to clearly show them examples on how their design decision affect us both positively and negatively. We discussed the past and the future of the current products and gave them many ideas on things we’d like to see in the future.  The Trend teams were keen to understand things like our managed services models, and how they can help us do a better job with our clients to reduce our workload.  We also discussed support, and how Trend’s support teams could improve and provide better service for us.

Tomorrow we get a good look at the next version of WFBS.  I might not be able to say much about it but will hope to include a few clues for you in my posts :-) Thank you Trend Micro for a great day 1 today.

明天我们会好好看看 WFBS 的下一个版本。  我不能说这件事很多，但会希望在我的帖子中:-) 包含为您几个线索 谢谢你伟大的一天 1 今日 Trend Micro。

Tags: , ,
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »

Visiting Trend Micro in Taipei in April

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

A couple of other community members and I will be visiting Trend Micro’s SMB R&D Team in Taipei in a few weeks.  Our mission – to take our real world experience into the heart of the team and show them how we deal with the problems we face on a day to day basis.  I’ve already got a list of things I feel are important, but wanted to reach out to you all and see if you had anything you wanted raised at the same time.  It’s been two years since I last did this trip, and I can see how they’ve adopted many of the suggestions I took to them in that time.  So please – post comments on this blog post so I can take the feedback right back to them and help them understand how WE need their products to work for US and our clients.

9th April 2010 – UPDATE: Karen Christian, Steven Banks and Kevin Royalty are also coming on this adventure to Taipei.  We all want to take back as much community feedback as we can to Trend Micro, so please give us lots of ammunition to take.

Tags: ,
Posted in Blog | 19 Comments »

Disaster Recovery for the Travelling Executive

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

This weeks blog post I did for CRN Channel Web talks about DR for the travelling exec based on personal experiences.  You can read it here

I’ll be doing a review of the technologies I use to support this over the coming weeks

Tags: ,
Posted in Blog | 2 Comments »

Cleaning up my Inbox – Part 1

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

The one thing I’ve learnt over time is that the trans pacific flight from Sydney to LA gives you around 10-12 hours of quality alone time. Time in which no one can contact you, no emails can interrupt you, and the only thing asking questions of you is the flight staff as they get you your next drink. :-)

Like most people email is my main form of communication these days.  Maybe unlike most, my mailbox has gotten out of control AGAIN.  Despite having rules in place to move email to various subfolders, today I had over 2000 emails in the root of my inbox.  Many of them I’ve not read as they didn’t seem important at that point in time.

Well – I’m pleased to say that after 4 scotch and cokes, and around 6 hours, my mailbox now has 117 items in it.  All of which are now read and require action once I get Internet access once more.  I also have 146 items in my outbox – replies to various emails that have been sent to me – some long over due. So if you get an email from me in the next day and wonder why it took so long for me to respond… now you know :-)

I’m considering having a monthly work day where I will unplug from the Internet, turn off my phone and go to a location where no one can contact me.  I’ve found that the time alone gives you the ability to focus greatly on many tasks.  Knowing that people can not interrupt you gives a sense of freedom.

What are your tricks to get things done?

Tags: , ,
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »