Monday is the day. The last day of a steal of a deal. It's the end of the early bird sign up for SMBNation East. What's special about SMBnation east held April 30th to May 2nd? I'll be there for one. My talk.. or rather my open session with you is about Windows 7 a year later.
What's worked for you, what hasn't? What annoys you? What doesn't? It will an honest look at Windows 7 in a small business.
Join me at SMBnation east.
And check out how the hotel is included in the price. Cool!
Once upon a time we had a Pepsi machine. It was over 20 years old, and the company wouldn't rent it to us anymore. And a firm without their caffeine is ...well.. not pretty. So we had to find a replacement machine. So I went online to ebay and on the web to search for refurbished Pepsi/Coke machines. Finding a company was not a problem - through ebay I found a company that sold refurbished ones. They were out of a machine that had a certain logo that we were used to. So I had to settle on another logo'd machine.
Finding a company to deliver it from Rancho Cucamonga to Fresno, also was not a problem.
Getting in through the door of the office and set up in the kitchen THAT was a problem.
First lesson learned, don't go with the cheapest price, it will always cost you more in the long run.
I always see people say that you don't have to reformat a system after they've found malware on it. But the more you read about rootkits, about the only way you'd know for sure is if you put a port sniffer on the outside and looked at the traffic of the box. Are we to the point that you want to have a virtual machine that is only used for online banking? After reading that it makes you wonder doesn't it? Business banking accounts do not have the same safety net as the regular consumer credit accounts.
I'm not one to throw my XPs out the window and replace them with Ubuntu but definitely googling on a XP with admin rights is like holding up a loaded gun and playing Russian Roulette these days.
Last week Steve Ballmer gave a speech at the University of Washington on Microsoft’s cloud computing strategy. This speech was an important step in illustrating to customers and industry how Microsoft’s comprehensive cloud strategy is helping change the way people and businesses use technology.
On Wednesday Allison Watson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Group, will speak to members of the Microsoft Partner Network via webcast about the opportunities cloud computing offers for Microsoft partners. The webcast will air Wednesday, March 10, at 11 a.m. Pacific, and will be available for replay afterward.
In a nutshell... if you have Massachusetts customers.
If you have name and SSN or credit card number or something that would lead to identity theft in the wrong hands
You need a written security program
You also need:
(1) Secure user authentication protocols including:
(a) control of user IDs and other identifiers;
(b) a reasonably secure method of assigning and selecting passwords, or use of unique identifier technologies, such as biometrics or token devices;
(c) control of data security passwords to ensure that such passwords are kept in a location and/or format that does not compromise the security of the data they protect;
(d) restricting access to active users and active user accounts only; and
(e) blocking access to user identification after multiple unsuccessful attempts to gain access or the limitation placed on access for the particular system;
Many people don’t know that there are only two legal ways to acquire a full Windows desktop license for a new PC.
1. The first, and most economical way, is preinstalled through your PC manufacturer.
2. The other option is via full packaged retail product.
Microsoft Volume Licensing programs such as Open License, Select License, and Enterprise Agreements cover Windows upgrades only and do not provide a full Windows desktop license. Once the PCs have a full Windows desktop license, a Windows Volume Licensing agreement can be acquired and used to provide version upgrade rights.
What ! So I get a volume license and it's only good for an upgrade. That's a load of bull in my opinion and makes the volume license not even worth it.
And then he questioned my sanity (rightfully so :-) for all of my beating of my head against the VLSC web site.
You know how the guy on serverfault theorized that "NTLM authentication is not persisting behind the scenes, causing continual reauthentication attempts throughout the session. " Well that may be what it looks like, but that's not what is going on under the hood. The WSUS API is apparently a bit of a chatty cathy and it's normal for it send out a lot of IIS calls. Each call sent to the site goes through the 3 phases of integrated security negotiation that you are seeing there as it's supposed to do. What looks like a bug to our untrained eyes, isn't.
So what we call a lot of failures, what we call excessive logging, what we call a really big waste of hard drive space that can put you at risk for stopping email service and what not, is really the console doing what it
(please note there's a new captcha on the blog to slow down the spammers sorry about that)
So.
As Vlad pinged me this morning and asked if I was mourning and I said no because they hadn't nuked SBS. He and I both responded with (yet). And therein lies the rub. The elephant in the room is the concern that the small partner/small business owner like me has when looking to the future. Will Microsoft continue to service the small market just as they just re-evaluated the mid market? What's next?
The info from Microsoft's PR arm by way of WindowsSecrets read as follows:
"Hello Susan,
As someone who follows the SMB space, I wanted to let you know that today Microsoft announced the decision to streamline their server product portfolio and discontinue future development of Windows Essential Business Server (EBS), effective June 30
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