Past Meetings
November 2008
CrashPlan PRO and Code 42 Software
Robert Casserly, VP of Business Development, CrashPlan PRO presented the first and only backup solution that combines
an extremely people-friendly client with a sophisticated enterprise server to continuously
protect your business. Mission critical data on remote laptops, desktops and servers are
backed up in real-time to multiple destinations regardless of location.
Matthew Dornquast, CEO, Code 42 Software presented his company's software.
October 2008
Mytech Partners & Success Computer
Mytech Partners and Success Computer shared the SBS 2008 migration preparation and migration process. View their
PowerPoint presentation.
September 2008
SBS 2008 Roadshow
In September we were fortunate to have two members of the SBS 2008 Product Development Team
visit us as part of the SBS 2008 pre-release Road Show. They filled us in on many of the details
around the upcoming releases in the SBS/EBS server family. They covered features, technical
details, and licensing. Now is the time to purchase SBS with Software Assurance to receive the
lowest available price. The last date to order SBS 2003 is October 31, 2008 and the official
release date for SBS 2008 is November 12, 2008.
Some of the high level details discussed included price increases for the Standard/Premium
OS Sku’s, as well as the distinction of Standard and Premium CAL’s. We learned that Standard
and Premium CAL’s can be mixed and matched as needed, as well as User vs Device CAL’s. The
standard CAL’s are less expensive than the current SBS03 CAL’s, so for larger implementations
the licensing cost may be significantly lower than the 2003 pricing. The second server in the
Premium Sku may be used to provide Terminal Services access, but the TS CAL is not included with
the SBS CAL and will need to be purchased separately. All the ‘connector’ licensing etc. that are
available on the ‘regular’ Windows server sku’s can also be applied to the SBS servers.
We discussed upgrade paths, installation and migration details, and special offers that would be
available. At the end of the meeting representatives from My Tech Partners and Success Computer
shared some of their TAP experiences. They are also the featured speakers for our October meeting,
so you’ll want be there to learn more about the in’s and out’s of SBS 2008! SBS 2008 and EBS 2008
are included in the October Action Pack shipment, so we can start working with this before it is
publicly available to our customers, a welcome change!
August 2008
SYNNEX and HP
Frank Gross from SYNNEX Corporation shared the benefits of doing
business with the 3rd largest IT distributor in the nation. Established
in 1980, SYNNEX is a Fortune 350 company offering computer systems,
peripherals, system components, software and networking products.
SYNNEX is HP’s #1 distributor in channel sales and warehouses $150
million in HP inventory across their 13 warehouses at all times.
SYNNEX is an HP PartnerONE Center of Excellence with a large support
staff to help you uncover programs and rebates to stay competitive
and profitable.
HP’s Channel Trainer, Aaron Blosser, provided an overview of the
HP server portfolio: ML, DL, and BL servers. The emphasis throughout
the presentation was HP’s management suites. The ease of use, reliability,
and security is what makes HP’s servers stand out from the rest.
When it comes to the HP Blades servers, we discussed which customers
are ready for blades and how blades will change your customer’s
business. In the end, it will be simple to determine which server
is right for each customer based on their budgetary, management,
and expansion needs.
July 2008
We were fortunate to have Naseem Saab from Results Software join
us, coming in from the Washington DC area!
"Results" is a CRM software that tightly integrates with QuickBooks,
and allows import of e-mail from Microsoft Outlook so that all of
our customer communications are in one easy-to-use package, including
visibility to financials and automated business processes. It also
allows you to standardize business processes, and assign and manage
resources. It's been called "Goldmine on Steroids".
Naseem Saab is the president and founder of Results Software
with more than 22 years of experience in the computer consulting
and software development industries. Naseem leads the strategic
direction of Results Software and is a recognized pioneer in the
CRM industry and office technologies. Naseem is a frequent speaker
on topics including business growth strategies, office automation,
leveraging CRM to boost sales and streamlining business processes.
Naseem will be demonstrating the product, and fill us in on how
we can partner with Results and offer this product to our clients.
Make sure you register for the July 8th meeting. More
information regarding Naseem and Results Software here:
http://results-software.com/About_Us/index.html#NaseemSaab
June 2008
Comcast: This month we have Comcast sponsoring our group, and
they will give a short presentation on their services, new technologies
they are rolling out in our area, and how they can partner with
us to help our customers.
Susan Bradley: We also had Susan Bradley join us remotely. Most
of you know her as E-Bitz or the patching lady. She'll be talking
about "What freaks Susan out about PCI and "best practices" in general".
In particular the places in the PCI benchmark that she believes
block a SBS box from containing PCI data, and facilitating an open
discussion of concerns of where the benchmark is good and where
it may be overreaching.
And last but not least we had our own Joe Jarrad with an update
of the current Microsoft offers, and what we should make use of
before Microsoft's year end by the end of June.
April 2008
SBS2008 and EBS2008: Jeff Middleton, SBS MVP has joined
us remotely and shared his experiences so far and impressions on
where Microsoft may be going with certain details based on his workings
with Microsoft. We'll had an interesting presentation including
a screenshot demo, and discussed how to be prepared and what opportunities
are coming up, and what to do now. With Server2008 released, and
SBS2008 coming up, isn't it amazing how many environments we run
into that still run on (unsupported) Win2000 server based platforms?
What do you recommend to these customers at this time?
March 2008
In March we were fortunate to have Karl Palachuk speak about Project
Management in IT shops.
Most of you probably have heard about Karl or read one or more of
his books, like "The Network Documentation Workbook", or "Service
Agreements for SMB Consultants". He started a SMB IT book website
at http://www.greatlittlebook.com/ where you can find his and other
IT related books Karl has started a very successful Small Business
IT consulting practice in Sacramento California, has a blog at http://smallbizthoughts.blogspot.com/
that is intended primarily for Small Business Consultants like us,
and he just published "The Super-Good Project Planner for Technical
Consultants" not too long ago.
February 2008
We had Mark Crall for a presentation on DR Recovery to Virtual
environment or dis-similar hardware. Mark is the founder and acting
CEO of Tech Care Team Inc. a managed IT services provider in Charlotte
NC with a focus on SMB. He is the founder of the 250 member Charlotte
SBS Group (www.sbs-charlotte.com) and serves as the Meetings Director
for the 6000 member Carolina IT Professionals Group (www.carolinait.org).
More information on his blog:
http://sbsc.techcareteam.com/about
http://sbsc.techcareteam.com/archives/81
In addition we had Jerry Moore from Call Management Products visit
us from Colorado to demonstrate the Syspine ResponsePoint System!
Quanta, the SysPine ResponsePoint manufacturers, are sponsoring
this month's meeting and sent Jerry to demonstrate it to us: You've
probably heard about the new Microsoft ResponsePoint offering, see
for more information here here http://microsoft.com/responsepoint
or http://blogs.technet.com/.aspx.
The ResponsePoint phone system is a great entry in the SMB Market
with an easy to install easy to manage VOIP phone system that (currently)
connects to regular POTS phone line.
January 2008
SonicWall:
Tom Barr (Territory Manager) and Ben Ellering
(Systems Engineer) were present. They are local SonicWall
resources based in the twin cities are and provided a brief introduction
of SonicWall and covered their portfolio at a high-level.
They also discussed the SonicWall Medallion Partner Program.
On the technical side they covered in more detail their firewall
products and Total Secure Unified Threat Management (UTM) offering,
Continuous Data Protection (CDP) data backup and recovery solution.
Zenith InfoTech:
Todd Wolpert, Account Manager visited
us from Pennsylvania. He introduced Zenith InfoTech and talked
about Managed Services and Zenith. He demonstrated their Partner
Portal features to manage client's networks and talked briefly about
their Backup Disaster Recovery offering.
November 2007
One of Microsoft's, TS2 presenter Peter Gallagher gave an
enlightening presentation on Exchange 2003 maintenance and disaster
recovery called SBS Exchange best practices and what to do when
that is not good enough. A valuable topic for all. Day James
of MyTech Partners spoke on How to Grow you business.
Day is Lyf's partner and will had valuable information for
all who attend.
Editor's note: I found this one of the most useful learning experiences
we have had.
October 2007
Constance Potter and Shawn Fletcher of Success Computer Consulting,
gave an excellent presentation on SharePoint. and how it will benefit
our new SharePoint web site - Paul Bunn.
Report from SMBNation by Don Oas.
September 2007
Kevin Remde a Microsoft TechNet presenter gave a valuable presentation
on Windows Server 2008.
August 2007
Paul Bunn and Dale Morgan share some of
what they learned about the Hartland Technology Group #7 (HTG7)
Peer Group
May 2007
Our presenter was Sonic Wall. Also Darren Harbaugh, the Microsoft
Partner Community Manager attended our next meeting. We gave him
a few minutes to address the group at 5:30 before Sonic Wall presented.
April 2007
Exclaimer presentation. a backup program. it Archives all your incoming,
outgoing and internal email to an SQL database. This removes the
need to archive PSTs or Mailboxes separately. utilities including
Spam control and other useful stuff. The price of the SBS Version
is $399 and that includes the first year of maintenance.
March 2007
Shavlik Technologies presented a interesting educational presentation
on their products for Patch Management Anti-Spyware Security and
Configuration Management
February 2007
Acronis backup software gave a presentation.
January 2007
Scott Schmoll from INTEL gave us a good presentation on the new
INTEL processors, motherboards and other products.
December 2006
Jay Erickson from Nor-Tech gave a fine presentation.
November 2006
A very good presentation by Anthony J Julian II covering Group Policy,
some of the mistakes that can cost you many hours lost sleep. The
ways to avoid and reverse those little mistakes. Virtualization,
Microsoft Products and some of the others as well. More about some
of the arcane things we can do. that are really cool, Like
virtual honey pots, terminal servers, multiple servers etc
October 2006
Presentations from Ingram Micro on software licensing, Microsoft
personal and a field trip to an offsite location with Keith McDonald
of US internet, who gave a presentation on Zstorage, an encrypted
online back-up and also some information on our next generation
solution. Gene Randol, COO of VeriSpace, presented their offerings
for Backup and Disaster Recovery. He also gave us a tour of the
facility, which was quite impressive. Gene also hosted the meeting.
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