Kicking and Screaming I am Bloggin

Susan writes about making your clients sticky but I would argue this is no the way to do it. Don’t get me wrong SharePoint and Office 2007 are a wonderful combination, and there is a lot of money to be made offering combined solutions. But if you want sticky clients, don’t tie stickiness to a product. Software products come and go, but great relationships last forever!

If you want clients that are sticky, put their best interest first! Sell them solutions that will help them make money. Don’t put them in a solution just to lock them into being your client. Put them into a solution that is in the best interest of their profitability. If you are making them money (or saving them expense) they are yours no matter what the latest greatest whizzbang technology is today, because they know you are looking out for them.

Nowadays everyone is paying lip service to becoming a trusted advisor. Well you don’t become a trusted advisor overnight, or by taking some test or training course. You become a trusted advisor over time by giving great advice and putting the client’s business needs before your own  needs.  Don’t lock them into some product or service just for the lock-in value. Lock them into trusting you by always putting their problems and needs ahead of yours. Don’t be afraid to sell them what they need instead of what they want. If you feel a solution is right for them, argue your point, show the value. Don’t just sell them what they may be blindly asking for, if you know it is not right for them. This is the road to becoming a trusted advisor and having sticky clients!

OK as promised at tonight’s Triad SBS Group Meeting, here is the contents of the file I use to restart my SBS servers.

Use at you own risk, the are no guarantees or assurances made.
All I can tell you is, I have yet to have it fail me.

open notepad.exe

Paste these lines into it.

@echo off

@echo “Gonna Reboot the Server Boss”

net stop “Microsoft Exchange Management”

net stop “Microsoft Exchange Routing Engine”

net stop “Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)”

net stop “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)”

net stop “Microsoft CRM-Exchange E-Mail Router Service”

net stop “Microsoft Exchange Information Store”

net stop “Microsoft Exchange System Attendant”

shutdown -r -t 05 -f

Save the file as restartme.cmd or “whatever makes you happy.cmd”

If you don’t have CRM you can rem out that line, if you like. Otherwise it will just show an error and continue on.

When you want to reboot the server just double click the file.

If you are installing patches remotely, schedule the file to run 30 minutes past when you think you will be done, if you get locked out or RRAS hangs, the server will reboot and save you a drive.

Also I would be remiss if I didn’t mention, that Charlie Russell wrote a much cleaner script which Susan posted HERE, it is much prettier than my quick and dirty little file.

Every once in a while you hear about some company (Lowes in this case) or some person (Mark Strenta in this case) stepping up to the plate and doing it the way it should be done. Then you scratch your head and wonder why it has to be the exception instead of the rule. Well here is your lesson for the day, great customer service makes customers for life, it’s not just about a sale today!

Hop on over HERE and read the story and watch the video.

 Pre-Requisite Disclaimer, the young man in the video wearing the Lowes shirt is my son-in-law. But that doesn’t change the fact he hit a home run with his quick response to this potential customer disaster :>)

Yes you read that right, Vlad is stuck and willing to give you a free copy of SBS R2 if you are the first to correctly answer this question for him.

I want to use mrtg to plot two integer values on the same graph. I have a shell script that returns two integer values already, and I want mrtg to paint them on the same graph.

I would help him for free, but alas I don’t know the answer :<(

That is right, if you are a subscriber to TechNetPlus you can download the Vista SP1 update right now, just goto THIS SITE and follow the directions.

Also the slipstreamed ISO will be available very shortly from the same place as noted in the article above.

Happy Updating.

btw once you are happy with SP1 (and why wouldn’t you be) check out Susan’s find to RECLAIM SOME HARD DRIVE SPACE

I have been using SP1 for a long time now through many of the beta versions and I have to say it is ROCK SOLID and it is the version that MS should have waited for to RTM Vista!

So here I am minding my own business after having just approved a slug of patch Tuesday updates, when low and behold I notice a message pop into Outlook.

Alert on 1NEKTON at 2/14/2008 6:13:15 PM

The following disk is low on free disk space. Low levels of free disk space can cause performance problems and prevent users from saving files on the disk.

Drive Letter: L:

Free Disk Space: 201.000000. MB

% Free Disk Space: 0.670089.%

You can disable this alert or change its threshold by using the Change Alert Notifications task in the Server Management Monitoring and Reporting taskpad.

I guess I better take a look and see what is up, I know that is a 32 Gb partition. All it holds is some software install shares and the WSUS updates.

Well back when I originally installed WSUS 2.0 on this server it said something about making sure you had 5 or 6 Gb of free space, so I figured 4x that would be safe. Well along came WSUS 3.o and then SP1 and more things WSUS watches and now with these current updates we see

Now of course that server is on the other side of North Carolina.

But wait, I have ShadowProtectServer installed on it, so I find some available space on one of the Online Backup Drives, Stop the Internal Database SSEE## that WSUS runs on and grab an image of the L drive.

Next I stop the Server Service (I have a number of shares on the L Drive) and then blow away the L Partition, Create a new bigger L Partition, Restore the ShadowProtect Image, Change the drive letter to L, Start the Server Service and the other services that stopped. And finally reboot the server.

Time from the E-mail warning until the reboot 1 Hour and 20 minutes, less time than I would have spent driving one way!

So Thank You StorageCraft for the wonderful Valentines Day Gift, you gave me back my evening to spend with my lovley wife!

Well it is now 7:49 and the afore mentioned lovely wife is calling me for din din,

So Long and Have a Wonderful Evening, I know I will Now :>)

I have been using Vista for quite a while now, and it is finally starting to grow on me, hopefully not like a mold or fungus :>)

One of the things that still drives me nuts is the way it thinks it knows better than me what is in my folders, and not only does it get confused, but it passes that confusion on to other folders. Well someone figured out how to fix it, hop on over to THIS POST ON MY DIGITAL LIFE

And btw, Thankx to the SBS Diva for pointing me to this post.

Now if I could just stop the directory tree from jumping around, scrolling left and right by itself and auto-expanding. I know where I want to go today, and I am getting seasick trying to focus on the directory tree in file open/save dialogue boxes trying to get there.

Update, more info on tweaking folder setting HERE

I am sure you all know Mike Iem from the Ziem Group, he was the director of Harry’s SMB Nation Conference a few years ago. He was the director of the SMBTN Conference last year and he is doing it again this year. He puts out the Windows SBS Partner Group Newsletter to keep all of us SBS Group Leaders and partners up to date on the SMB Info coming from Microsoft, but today I found out he has two hidden talents, he produces his own video content and most importantly he can make HOME MADE PASTA. I knew I liked Mike, now I know why :>)

Btw for those who have never seen it here is a bit of the current issue

A while ago I wrote an article for my how to site about creating the ISA Report. I got a number of request for instructions on how to publish them and everyone I asked said it could not be done.

Well recently I got an e-mail from David Houston of Dame Computers with a link to his article explaining how to do it. I just love when folks figure out how to do the impossible.

I have also updated my original article with this link so you can flow right from creating the report to publishing it.

So let me take this opportunity to welcome in the new year on this positive note.

Have a Healthy and Happy New Year and let me leave you with one of my favorite quotes from WWII,

 ”The difficult we do at once; the impossible takes a little longer.”

This morning I saw a post from Vlad that there was a SIMPLE Security Update to WordPress(the engine under this blog), so I figured why not. I read the simple instructions which said make sure to backup both the content and the database before proceeding. So of course I went to do that, well the content was no problem, I just ftp’d the entire blog to my local hard drive. However then the moron in me kicked in and I could not for the life of me figure out how to backup the database. After an hour or so of clicking links and reading articles, I decided to throw caution to the wind and just do the update.

The update went fine and only took a few minutes, but now I will be up all night realizing I am not smart enough to backup a database that would most likely fit on a floppy disk.

If you would like to see me sleep again some day and you know how to backup a mySQL database from a wordpress blog admin page, I would love to hear.

Happy New Year,

HA