No  one can make you serve customers well…. that’s because great service is a  choice.
Harvey Mackay, tells a wonderful story about a cab driver that  proved this point.

Wally the Cab Driver made a different choice. He  decided to stop quacking like ducks and start soaring like eagles.
How  about us?   Smile, and the whole world smiles with you…. The  ball is in our hands!
A man reaps what he sows. Let us not become weary  in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not  give up… let us do good to all people.
Ducks Quack, Eagles  Soar.

And this is fine if you expect people to leave their brains at the door on the way out of the building and their mobile devices at the door on their way in. The problem is that neither of these are practical in the world today (OK certain security-sensitive organisations do actually require that you NOT bring mobile devices into the building but they kind of fall outside of my scope of general business here). So even if the strict policies of the organisation are enforced at the desktop, folks are still able to access Facebook, twitter, blog-spaces and the like from their “mobile  phones”. I’m quoting here because as time passes these devices have become so much more than phones and the name increasing doesn’t fit. These are the the small screens which make up the screen triumvirate of most of our lives; small screens = mobile devices, mid-screens = desktop systems (PCs, Macs etc) and large screens being our TVs which are also becoming a source of rich media and not just TV broadcast.

But I digress, the point here is that very few organisations have put in place policies and guidelines to help the individual employees understand what they should and should not share outside of the company, how they communicate what they are doing and who that communication is available too. An example of this would be the Facebook invitation to ‘Friends’ to attend a party. The intent was honest but the method and audience hadn’t been properly considered, the result was several hundred people turning up and a seriously wrecked house. Translate that into Business terms and you get my point.

I’m not any sort of advocate of nannying at all, and I believe that in the majority of cases common sense prevails and individuals are reasonable sensible. HOWEVER, we live in a statistical universe and given enough people, someone will do something stupid and potentially damaging unless strongly advised otherwise, simply out of ignorance or lack of thought.

So policies ARE necessary to help to mitigate these statistical certainties and to enable businesses to protect themselves. As an employer, ask yourself these simple questions:

• If someone blogged about their working day, could they unintentionally reveal sensitive information?
• Could someone updating their Facebook status as “This place sucks, no-one EVER listens!” reflect poorly on you as an employer?
• Could a Twitter update of “Another meeting, I wonder what bad news is coming now?!” impact your business confidence?

While it’s true that the comments of one person may not even register, it’s also true that it only takes one person to start a rumor.

Being able to identify and address ANY sort of communications channel and how it could be used or mis-used is vital. Those forward thinking businesses have adopted social media as a marketing medium and done so with great success, so it MUST hold true that bad news has the same, if not greater, impact.

And I’m as guilty as everyone else! When ones livelihood depends on the adoption and deployment of technology you sometime have to kick back and ride the wave and certainly there are new technologies emerging which are simply fantastic and would not have been possible without the recent developments in browser/OS/platform technologies. The Software as a Service Cloud is probably the most visible evidence of this, I can now write a document, put together a spreadsheet and edit graphics and a myriad of other cool stuff using free online services – brilliant!

But there’s another side (or two) to the picture. Let’s not forget about the techncal layers, the Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service versions of the “Cloud” definition. In particular I’m more than a little smug that, what I would have termed well designed, internal infrastructures are now being heralded as ‘Private Clouds’.

We did a project in the Middle East nearly two years ago which involved the deployment of a virtualised environment for a corporate development team. The idea was to provide the team with a scalable platform within which they could spin up or down servers and systems without needing to refer to the IT department for every build. The stated business goals here were improved productivity, reduced overhead costs and flexibility with control. The control element came into play by allocating ‘points’ to each developer allowing them to create and use ny specification of virtual server or servers as long as the ‘cost’ fell inside their points allocation. Simple, easy and all delivered within the functionality of the chosen underlying technology.

This, dear reader, is a Private Cloud, we were doing it before it had a name! Of course there are now entire solutions built around the idea of the Dynamic Data Centre and the technology has moved on to allow even greater levels of administration, deployment and management to be achieved but the concept is the same; abstract away from the hardware and introduce services which are scalable, flexible and resilient without even needing to think about how these features are achieved.

And pretty much any business can take advantage of this kind of solution for a minimal level of investment. I’ll put good money on most businesses have at least one important if no critical systems or service which runs as a single point of failure. It’s economics, running multiple physical servers for resilience costs money. Not only in the original purchase of the time and it’s ongoing update/upgrade/replacement cycle, but also the power, cooling and administration side of things too.

By using virtualisaion and some central storage (this is were some investment may be needed) EVERY service can be resilient, monitored and flexible in it’s consumption of resources. Private Clouds are not just for giant enterprises and Universities they are for anyone who values their technical infrastructure and who would love to see their IT move from being an overhead cost to forming part of the strategic assets of the business.

Today’s announcement that the pricing for BPOS is being dropped and the mailbox spec increased is surely going to cause more growls and shrugs. The simple fact is thought that Microsoft tried over and over again to place Exchange Server, SharePoint and OCS into the hosing space through it’s partners and it simply didn’t take off the way that it should have done.

There are as many reasons (or excuses) for this as there are HMC – the MS hosting solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration – partners out there, but the main ones are simply that the product was never positioned by any partner the way that Microsoft has positioned BPOS and that the investment in making it easy for the customers was almost totally missing.

BPOS customers are able to migrate their users, groups, contacts and mailbox contents onto the hosted platform with little deep technical knowledge being required. They can also elect to keep some mailboxes locally if they need to.

The release:

New Pricing Announced for Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS)

Let’s take a look at one of those prices in particular: Exchange Online.

With these price releases organisations can now get an Exchange Server 2007 mailbox – with a built-in upgrade path to Exchange Server 2010 – for £3.35 per user, per month. Take a look around the hosters and see what the pricing is… really. Then have a think about the cost of a new server, the OS and Application licenses, the backup tapes / disks and the administration resource and tell me it makes sense to run Exchange yourself as a business who’s core competencies are NOT technology!

And to the hosters out there who are, today, throwing their arms in the air and screaming betrayal; you had the opportunity over the last 3 years to develop a significant business offering your own BPOS solution and put yourselves in this position but you didn’t, you put an Exchange Server logo on your web site and sold the TECHNOLOGY not the SERVICE. If you don’t have a migration plan for new customers then you are simply saying you don’t actually care about their needs.

I’ve been banging on about this stuff for quite a while now and it seems that the proof is finally coming to roost.

1. Do it first
2. Do it best
3. Do it cheapest

Those are the keys to making money in hosting. If you can get a combination then it’s pretty much a cast-iron guarantee.

If you’ve simply built an HMC platform, created some plans and then marked up your SPLA pricing thinking you have a solution you’ve missed the point, significantly and now MS are making it for you.

To Hosters
You have a choice now, provide your Exchange products as a value-added part of a larger solution like ERP, CRM or the like, position your solution against BPOS with good, solid business support and services, OR resell BPOS and make a solid recurring referral fee. It’s really become that simple

To Businesses
Give your TCO a serious look. BPOS now offers a significant benefit in both technology and financial terms as an alternative to running your own systems. If you believe you have a more difficult technological issue to overcome then talk to a Systems Integrator (like Planet Technologies of course!) who will be able to not only identify how your systems can be structured but also how ‘Cloud Services’ such as BPOS can and should be leveraged for your business and help you to migrate, quickly and easily, to BPOS if you make that decision.

I made a decision a few weeks ago that if I was going to be espousing the benefits of Cloud Services, as well as assisting businesses with understanding how to take advantage of them in their various different guises, I should really see what it’s like to be a small-scale consumer of these things and I set out to make MY life as easy as possible using the technologies associated with The Cloud.

Virtualisation is the main hanger for these service. Virtualised storage means access from anywhere – in theory. Virtualised machines provide portability and flexibility. So here is my situation.

I use Macs as my workstation of choice, there are many reasons for this, but suffice it to say that I can do what I want and need to do with ease. There are however a couple of items which mean I also need a PC- read Windows – environment to work within:

1) Visio – I do systems architectural diagrams and exchange these with others
2) Project – Project plans need to be built and shared
3) Groove – As a virtual team we use Groove for shared document library storage and for projects

These applications are not available for the Mac – Boo Hiss MacBU in Microsoft! I know that there are alternatives around which will read file formats etc, but the important thing is that I exchange these with others and I’ve not found a ‘clean’ conversion which works both way in any of the options. Groove is simple Windows only.

My adopted solution is to use Parallels Desktop for the Mac and run a virtualised PC o take care of ‘that side of things’ in my working life. now this has been fine for many months and I actually run the PC off a Firewire connected portable drive so I can use it on my iMac at home and my MacBook when on the road; a nice solution as far as it goes but there is still a catch. My data lives on that Windows PC image. If it goes, it’s gone.

This would be bad in a number of ways, all of which are, I’m sure, clear to all. YES! I could take regular backups, but that is mitigation not resolution I needed to be more portable and more de-risked. My solution is a Cloud Service: Microsoft Live Mesh.

The Mesh allows me to publish a folder structure and subscribe to it from many devices including Mac’s natively, updates are made through the Mesh to all of the devices and things are kept up to date. I no longerneed to carry data around with me. But if we think about it, that means I actually no longer need to carry my Windows PC around with me either, I just need access to one wherever I am.

A new virtual PC was created on each of my device ‘locations’ and was added to my Mesh, now with the right aaplications installed and my Groove workspaces also synced, wherever I am I have access to my data. The Mesh also lets me access my library via the web so if I’m guesting on someone else’s PC for an hour I can still work (No Groove, but.. well… a move to Mesh for the team seems VERY likely!). It’s also worth noting that our email service at Planet is hosted, another Cloud service, so it also follows me around or is accessible via OWA.

I should also mention that my new virtual Windows PC’s are running the Windows 7RC. As I write this, I have a Mac running OSX Leopard with Parallels running Windows 7 AND a Windows XP virtual machine too (Groove syncing!!) and eveything is right with the world. I can leave me desk go to another location and have EXACTLY the same functionality, data and access without carrying anything other than my login details This makes me happy.

And things seem to be moving along nicely too. I read with GREAT interest the updates coming to OSX with the Snow Leopard release, in particular the inclusion of Exchange server support in the OS! As quoted from the Apple site “something even Windows PCs don’t have”.

But I am a multi platform user and I have to say that Windows 7 DOES seem to work… on the whole. I’m aware that it’s RC and that there will be a few niggles so I’m living with them for now, but those aside, it’s reasonably speedy (remember I’m running virtualised too) and easy to use. Having bypassed Vista, my XP tuned brain is re-learning how to do things, but it’s not too bad! Niggles a around file extension handling – especially with Groove!!! – and the way it sometimes provides a little too much technical info about  a file type. The apps work well and I’ve not broken anything yet.

Anyway, think about the Cloud but not as a distant goal for corporate strategy, think of it as something hat, with a little planning can free you from the constraints of 1 system, 1 OS and 1 location, wander free and be productive for now is the time!

Microsoft have poured extraordinary amounts of marketing dollars into positioning Exchange Server as an SaaS platform and the result has been that the majority of hosters who have implemented the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) solution – this incorporates the delivery of Exchange Server in a stuctured architecture – have seen less than stellar returns on their investments. The reasons on the whole for this are that the type of customer which the majority of hosters have see email, even ‘business class’ email, as a commodity rather than a value service and as a result are reluctant to pay for it. Even the much vaunted mobility eneblement is not a key decision point as the majority of email enabled mobile devices support IMAP and when paired with an IMAP client at the desktop and a web-mail interface at the server provide email anywhere.

In the case of Exchange its value lies in its integration with and support of larger solutions as a value-add, not as a product itself.

Microsoft has seen the relative failure of this product and solution in the market sector serviced by the smaller hosters and, in an effort to see off the ever-growing threat of Google’s Apps suite, have done it themselves. The positioning of the Live solutions are questionable and have caused some considerable consternation amongst the hosters who have implemented HMC based on the guidance and advice of Microsoft’s marketing engine. But the rationale is clear, Microsoft’s solutions and applications MUST be available via the internet. The problems of adoption however are not even the most serious ones, they lie within the organisation itself.

There are organisations, business units and product groups within Microsoft who have very clearly defined targets in terms of market share and revenue etc and also in terms of where that revenue comes from.
So imagine a scenario whereby an opportunity exists to exploit the cresting interest in SaaS and S+S but the Microsoft product group for that particular application have no revenue targets from hosted solutions, only from ‘traditional’ sales. They are positioned, in the interests of their own internal sucess, to dismiss the hosted solutions and the SaaS/S+S model and to actively persuade their partners that the traditional on-premise implementations are better.

From the perspectives of the product group this makes sense of course, why would they spend any money on promoting a solution which effectively erodes their ability to deliver against their targets. But this position is dramitcally undermined when seen from any other perspective. The product is, after all, the same so why should it matter how it is consumed?

It is especially frustrating for the Microsoft partners who are pressing for the adoption of the applications under the S+S model to be told “We think it’s a great idea but we don’t have budget to support that this year.” THIS YEAR! This is the internet we are talking about here… in a years time we’ll have all moved on and done something more interesting, yet we see the high level marketing and listen to the strategy presentations where Microsoft is all about flexible delivery, SaaS and S+S and partnerships.

So here’s the thing, I have a program all laid out just waiting for someone to fund which will bring together hosters, partners and the various pieces within Microsoft to establish a solution for this. It’s not rocket science it’s just common sense, and who knows we may even be able to deliver products out to the customers at the end of it!

“HMC provisioning issue: Adding machine into default OAB CAS Pool in Exchange 2007″

- J.

ATTENTION HMC hosters – are you telling your customer you support iPhone? Figures this morning told of 1 million iPhone sales since launch.

Here’s the link the the EHLO article

- J.

I have always been of the opinion that a ‘presentation’ is given by a person and that tools such as PowerPoint or Keynote should be used to deliver punch, highlights and provide a flow to the message. The details of the message can be included in speaker notes for sure, but the actual delivery comes from the person.

I’ve sat through more than a few (too many if I’m honest) presentations where the ’speaker’ simply reads through the information presented on the screen in fabulous verbosity! not fun and certainly not a valuable use of either of our time! So here’s my new presentation paradigm, put highlights on the screen to get attention, use graphics and animation where appropriate and timely to do so – a picture can say a thousand words, but sitting through pretty builds can just get boring. Make sure the notes supplied contain all of the information you are going to use – that’s what note are for, the slides should be clean and crisp.

And finally if your presenting, present, don’t simply read from the deck. Anyone can read, you have to engage.

- J.

I wanted to share this little bit of knowledge, I couldn’t find any information out there so I played around until things worked.

Scenario:
I buy Office 2008 for the Mac – Home and Student Edition because it’s cheaper and I don’t have an Exchange server.
I update as updates come along, like the diligent user I am (should user be highlighted there.. I’m not sure!)
I use the Mac Mail application for ALL of my email, because I like it and it works well. I use iCal for my appointments for the same reasons.
I take on a job where I’m given a mailbox on an Exchange Server. Now, Mail will connect to an Exchange server using the IMAP protocol and this is fine on the whole, unless that Exchange SErver is 2007 in which case appointment invitations are irretrievable (this is an Exchange issue I believe as Outlook on a PC connecting with IMAP does the same thing).
Joy! I’m allowed to download Entourage with Exchange access from the service provider of the Exchange system – it’s hosted you see, a solution i wholeheartedly support of course!
Pain! I install the new Entourage and then am prompted to do an update, the update fails with the message:-

"You cannot install Office 2008 12.1.0 Update on this volume. A version of
the software required to install this update was not found on this volume."

This is of course no fun, it’s even less fun when I find that non of my Office applications now work either!

The solution was to remove the Office Suite from the machine (dragging the folder from Applications to the Trash and emptying it), re-booting, re-installing the Suite from the DVD, re-installing the new Entourage from the DMG I downloaded and then letting the updater loose on the system.

It looks like the bottom line on this is – if you change ANYTHING in Office, do it from a FRESH installation before you update. This is more than tedious, even today I had to re-downloaed SP1 and then get the 12.1.1 update too, this process is only going to get longer until the restrictions that the updater seems to be hitting are mitigated.

But it’s working now so I’m (reasonably) happy!

- J.