Don’t let the title fool you

The Millionaire Fastlane by M. J. DeMarco
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really wish I had read this book when I first started out in business. It contains so many of the things that I have discovered to be true over the years but would have loved someone letting me know ahead of time and saving me the heart ache. I also found the no nonsense style of writing very appealing.

At first glance, the title of the book can be deceiving. Put those fears aside and read it, you’ll be glad you did. This is a book that will challenge your perception of being financially successful and give you a practical formula to what brings results.

As with many successful ideas you’ll probably have to go against the grain and do things differently from what is generally accepted. This is where this book will challenge many misconceptions and provide recommendations on what really drives success.

For some, the book may be very confronting and this could perhaps turn readers away. However, in many respects if you really want to be successful you need a jolt to make you think, to challenge the path you are on and help you understand what you want to achieve.

Being a fan of the four hour work week I was a little disappointed that it was referred to in a negative light. However, upon further consideration I accept that many people do not understand the principles it espouses. The same could be said of this book which covers many similar concepts but in a different way. Neither book encourages ‘quickie’ solutions, they challenge the reader to understand what they want and how to practically achieve it.

All in all, I would highly recommend this book and have included as one of my preferred business books to revisit on a regular basis. I found that it provided excellent information as well as solutions that you can implement. It is certainly easy and enjoyable to read.

Don’t let the cover fool you, this is a must read book for anyone who truly want to achieve the freedom to live their dreams. The book isn’t about short cuts or fantasies it is about doing the hard yards but doing them in practical and intelligent manner.
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You can obtain this book through my Amazon affiliate store at:

http://astore.amazon.com/c00ef-20/detail/B004BDOUAI

Any sales provides me a small commission that I put back into obtaining books to review.

P’s are more than you though they were

In Office 365 there are range of licenses for different suites. The P SKU is the one aimed at Small Business and Professionals. It is also priced to compete directly with Google Apps (read cheap).

 

The documentation for P SKU’s was that they only included ‘community support’. This mean that if you purchased these you’d really get no ability to log tickets or get a guarantee of up time.

 

Here in Australia, for customers with less than 125 licenses, Office 365 is sold through a major telco (Telstra). All the information I had seen from Telstra indicated that the Australian P SKU’s would also come with ‘community support’. Wanting to understand exactly what was and was not provided by Telstra here I pursued the matter for clarification.

 

Interestingly, it now turns out that Telstra does provide full support on the Australian P SKU’s just like all the other enterprise SKU’s. Here’s what I have been told by Telstra:

 

“The P-Sku customer gains the same support as all other customers”

 

That is certainly great news for people on these P SKU’s but it raises some questions in my mind.

 

Firstly, although this is good for resellers who support customers on P SKU’s I feel it may mean that such customers will seek out Telstra’s assistance first before contacting their reseller. The clients typically on the P SKU’s are going to be looking for the cheapest method of support and if Telstra is providing it free with P SKU’s where does that leave the reseller?

 

Secondly, does Telstra really know and understand the extent to which they are going to get support calls from P SKU customers? Are they going to help them set up their workstations? Are they going to help them do migrations? What happens when Office 365 being to scale up? Are they going to able to cope with the inevitable flood of support calls from customers? Are they also going to support customer issues on PC’s that appear to be Office 365 related but aren’t (as is typically the case). This is a real can of worms from Telstra’s point of view and I don’t think they have thought through how demanding the lower end of the SMB market will be.

 

To me, Telstra also hasn’t thought through the impact of this provision of support for its resellers as it certainly appears they are cutting the resellers out of the loop and that is not going to do anything for that relationship (which they say they are trying to build).

 

I am still awaiting full information about exactly what is and what is not supported on the Office 365 P SKU’s. When I know I’ll post it here along with my comments.

What I learned about Office 365 customers

I recently had the privilege of attending the Microsoft Australian Partner Conference. In one of the sessions they brought two Office 365 customers onto the stage to speak about their experiences. Although it is only a very small sample what they said, I believe, resonates at a much greater levels. Here’s what I learnt:

1. Smaller customers are doing their own IT work. When asked whether they were using managed services from their new IT providers or simply using ad-hoc services, both said they couldn’t see much need for managed services. Why? Because most of the basic technology skills are pretty common or easily found using search engines, few are willing to pay for basic IT services.

What does that mean for your traditional IT reseller who believes managed services are the be all and end all? Simple, it ain’t. Traditional managed services will continue to work for those customers with legacy on site infra structure but if you want to sell cloud managed services you are going to have to rethink your business model, period.

2. Customers know what they want and more importantly want their needs taken seriously. The experience of one customer on stage demonstrated at how ‘old world’ most resellers are. The customer said they went through several IT providers and not one provided any option of moving to the cloud. When quizzed they all said it was a bad idea but didn’t really provide anything further than that. The client wanted to reduce their costs and complexity. They had done their research and they wanted to move to the cloud.

That should be a wake up call for traditional IT resellers. Your clients want to move to the cloud. They are doing their own research. They want to see at least the option worked into quotes. If you fail to do that as a reseller you look old, tired and obsolete. Worst of all, chances are the customer will go elsewhere.

3. The cloud delivers excellent solutions. Both clients where extremely happy and surprised at not only how well the process of migrating to the cloud went but also what additional functionality was available to them. The main reason for both customers initially moving to the cloud was for email but once they got into Office 365 they discovered the wealth of possibilities around SharePoint and Lync.

SharePoint and Lync represent the greatest opportunity for resellers to benefit from Office 365. Most customers have not seen what either product can do. There is also a wealth of additional consulting services that can be tied to each product that most customers are clambering in their business. SharePoint and messaging have been around for a while now so there is no excuse not to have some expertise in them. If you don’t then someone with the skills has the opportunity to step in and speak to YOUR customer in language that appeal to them. If this happens the chances are you’ll be more and more sidelined as the online relationship develops potentially to a point where you are no longer part of conversation.

I fully agree that two customers don’t make a majority but they are the saying the same thing I’m hearing and seeing from others out there. If you are a traditional reseller and you ignore this then you do so at your own peril, because at the end of the day you have no business without the customer.

Domain names in Office365 P Plans

With Office 365 P Professional and Small Business (P) plans you are required to switch the name server (NS) records to point to Office 365 hosted name servers. Office 365 Enterprise (E) plans do not require this.
 
Once the domain has been added to the P Plan Office 365 will automatically create all of the other DNS records (MX, TXT, SPF, etc) needed to run Exchange Online and Lync Online in the domain.
 
Once the domain has been verified in Office 365 you can create custom A and CNAME records using the Office 365 DNS management features. If you want to hosted email and instant messaging with Office 365 but host a web site with a third party you can accomplish this with Office 365 domain management.
 
Office 365 P plans only currently support creating custom A and CNAME records. You cannot create SRV, TXT, etc records with Office 365 DNS management tools at this time.
 
A good reference and how to video can be found at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQbdWXFTJfw

 

Domain help (E plans) – http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/ff637610.aspx

 

Domain help (P plans) – http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-smallbusinesses/gg593305.aspx

Using Windows Explorer in SharePoint

Many locations in SharePoint can also be accessed directly via Windows Explorer (file manager). To do this simply navigate to the location you desire.

 

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Then click the Library tab in the top centre of the window (to the right of documents in this case).

 

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This will reveal the command ribbon as shown.

 

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image_14_51062EA6

 

To the right hand side of the ribbon, under the Excel icon you should see an icon that appears as a computer and folder as shown above. If the icon is greyed out it probably means you are using a non IE browser. Such interactions with Windows requires viewing SharePoint in Internet Explorer.

 

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Once you click this icon, and wait a few moments as Windows Explore is launched, you should see a list of the items from SharePoint displayed.

You can now drag and drop as well as work on these files directly as you would any other normal file in Windows.

Beware that one of the down sides to using Windows Explorer to manage files in SharePoint is that additional columns (metadata) are not active.

Book Review

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Applications on Windows Phone 7 by Todd Spatafore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I must preface this review by firstly saying that a copy of this book was provided to me free of charge to review and secondly I am not a developer. I would also say that in many respects the demand for such a book would be limited given the current poor penetration of Windows Phone 7.

That said the book does achieve what it sets out to achieve, basically. I view this book as more of an introduction of what is possible rather than a deep dive into creating Windows Phone 7 SharePoint applications. My expectation was that the book would focus more heavily on the Windows Phone 7 application development but it was disappointed that it spent a significant amount of time running over the basics, especially of SharePoint.

As a general introduction to both Sharepoint and Windows Phone 7 I think the book really hits the mark, especially when it comes to Windows Phone 7. However, I felt that it should go deeper, which may be an incorrect assumption on my part. I am left feeling that there is so much more that could be achieved but this book doesn’t quite take me there.

I would certainly commend the book as a great introduction to Windows Phone 7 and what is possible when combined with SharePoint. However, I’m puzzled by which audience it is aimed at. If it is developers then the book probably doesn’t go deep enough. If it is for SharePoint users then the Windows Phone 7 parts add a distraction.

In summary, the book is an excellent introduction to the world Windows Phone 7 and the integration possibilities with SharePoint. However, it is not something designed for the hard core developer looking for a deep drive technical reference.
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You can purchase the book at – https://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-sharepoint-2010-enterprise-applications-on-windows-phone-7/book

Office365 doesn’t replace SBS

I am always amazed at how many people are under the mistaken impression that something like Office365 (or Google Apps) can replace an on site network system (like Microsoft Small Business Server). In short the answer is no. Yet.

Office365 is designed to remove some of the ‘heavy lifting’ from on site networks by moving complex and hard to maintain applications like Exchange and SharePoint into a place where they can be managed by the people who designed and developed that software. However, even with those applications removed, local systems are still performing a lot of functions that the cloud cannot do well presently.

A good example is Windows Update Services (WSUS) which provide patch management for local machines. Microsoft does have a cloud product (Windows InTune) that does something similar but it is still in the early stages of development so it currently doesn’t have all the features the onsite equivalent has.

An very important phrase here is ‘currently’. The plan seems to be that Windows InTune will one day rival any onsite solutions (especially for small business), however it still has a way to go to reach parity. What many also overlook is the fact that cloud solutions like Windows InTune will improve far more rapidly than traditional on site software.

So even with Office365 and Windows InTune many small business have third party applications that depend on onsite solutions and infra structure. Those that use things like SQL will also eventually move to the cloud under something like Windows Azure but they won’t until developers rewrite their software to take advantage of the cloud offerings. Until they do, businesses will have to retain on site infrastructure.

Rather than believing that the cloud replaces everything currently on site you need to look at cloud technologies as reducing the requirements for on site equipment. With Office365 many business probably only need something like SBS 2011 Essentials, rather than the full blown SBS 2011 Standard. Think downsizing, not elimination. Yet.

As any business moves to the cloud they also need to carefully consider their connection to the Internet. Generally, most businesses have been able to get away with ‘consumer grade’ broadband. As they move to the cloud they must step this up to faster and more reliable pipes with redundancy. Most modern internal networks run at a speed of 1,000 Mb, while broadband typically only delivers 3 Mb consistently. Currently, you’ll never get the same performance but broadband speeds are always improving but they are not yet equivalent to on site speeds. Yet.

Finally, in all this talk of moving to the cloud, traditional things such as backup and security don’t magically disappear, they simply need to be re-thought and re-engineered. Just because your email moves to the cloud and Office365 does that mean you shouldn’t back it up? Certainly for me it doesn’t. I know that it is backed up at the data centre but since it is ‘my’ data I still backup regularly. Admittedly, this is still cumbersome and not totally automated as it is with on site situations. However, the key term again here is ‘yet’. It will come as demand increases.

So, in summary, can the cloud totally replace what you have with the your on site network? Almost certainly no. Will it? Almost certainly yes. The only question is when. In the meantime rather than thinking of eliminating think down-sizing locally when it comes to the cloud.