SMB Nation – Day 1

After a hearty breakfast I headed off to attend the opening ceremony of SMB Nation 2009.

Whacking Weasels – Making the most from SMB Nation 2009

After a brief intro from Harry Brelsford, Wayne Turmel kicked off the conference with some interesting assessments of SMB Nation. I agree with his major point that you need to seek others out at the conference from whom you can benefit from. This being my second year, I have become critically aware that this is extremely important and hopefully something I can make the most of.

Now came the keynote for the day:

How to be relevant in the cloud computing world – Mike O’Brien (Zenith Infotech)

I think perhaps the title of this presentation should have read more like, ‘How to compete in a flat world’ because it focused on product provided by Zenith around outsourcing of IT. This is really the way everything is going and there are some people take great advantage of services like this. The success of business like Zenith strongly reinforce my opinions that most IT (especially, infrastructure) has become a commodity. A traditional business model will no longer succeed and Zenith is one direction you could take to remain competitive.

An interesting stat divulged was that apparently 3,000 businesses a day sign up for Google Apps. Interesting to know whether it is in fact true.

Next was:

GS402 – Virtualization for the SMB World – Wayne Small & Dana Epp.

A very relevant and informative presentation however it was hampered a poor connection to the Internet which was out of the control of the presenters. However, as the Internet continued to drop out (again, through no fault of the presenters) it made the presentation appear unprepared, which is far from the truth. The other thing that counted against the presentation was the room layout, very long and narrow, which made the screen very hard to read the further at the back you were. It concerns me that this is the room I’ll be presenting in so I’ll have to do what I can to make it better.

Overall, when I talked to other people who attended the session during the day they gave a generally favourable response, which is good given the work the guys invested in preparing the presentation.

then:

SM302 – How to become a Twitter Twenius and profit from social media – Dan Hollings

I thought this session was rather poorly attended actually, especially given the focus on social media at this conference (having its own track and all). When I talk to people during the breaks. it seems to me that most are still attending all the ‘tech’ or ‘geek speak’ sessions.

I did get a few pointers from the presentation but was a little disappointed that it didn’t go further. I suppose it is hard to determine exactly where to pitch these sorts of presentations. Do you start at the beginning or do more advanced topics? Given that you have no idea what level your audience is, not easy by a long shot.

then:

CSS3 – Profit from the cloud. Become a Google Apps reseller – Jeff Ragusa

This session turned out to be poorest performer of that day for me. The content was fine but the way it was presented gave me the impression that the whole session was simply thrown together at the last minute. I would say that it was not a ringing endorsement of Google Apps at all. I think that the layout of the room didn’t help at all, with an extremely small projection screen making it very difficult to actually read what the slides said. All in all there was worthwhile information but I felt that it was delivered very hap-hazardly.

Note the baseball cap in the lower right of the picture. The story is at the end of this post.

Finally:

BS301 – Selling IT Services: How not to suck at it! – Stuart Selbst

Probably the pick of sessions for me today. Was perhaps let down by the colours used in the presentation. They were very hard to read under normal lighting which detracted, at least until the lights were turned off, from the start of the presentation.

I have followed some of Stuart’s work over the years and have always been very impressed by his content and focus. It was a bit of a shock to see how confronting he is in person. I have no issues with that but it is not exactly what I expected. In the end what he is telling you about selling is all common sense. However, in many cases you can’t see how simple it is until you have it pointed out to you. Although some of the ‘home truths’ are confronting and abrupt they are totally on the mark, as is Stuart.

Now the story of my new CIAOPS hat. I was talking to a bloke in a shop that sells embroided hats here in the Hotel and turns out he was having trouble with his internet connection. His issue was configuring his Netgear router and he had been on the phone to Netgear for 2 hours trying to get it to work with no luck. I said I’d happy have a look at it if we could do a deal on a CIAOPS hat. He said sure, so I went to work. A few minutes later I had it all up and running as well as a nice new CIAOPS embroided hat. A good deal was had by all with this transaction I believe.

Tomorrow morning is my SharePoint presentation at SMB Nation. It is GS202 in Capri 114/116 if you are here at the conference. Also don’t forget my podcast from the tradeshow floor with Karl at 2:25pm local time. I’ll report on both here tomorrow but now it’s off to put the final touches on my slideshow.

Preparing for SMB Nation – Day 1

As I am still working on Australian time even though I’m here for SMB Nation in Vegas I’ve started preparing for what sessions I’ll go to over the next three days. If you haven’t been able to make it here yourself then download a copy of the event details from:

http://www.smbnation.com/mobile/guide.pdf

and let me know any suggestions you have. I like the look of social media stuff as well as the cloud computing topics as well. You can’t attend everything, I know, and hopefully I can find some good souls to let me know what the other sessions are like.

At this stage the only MUST ATTEND session I personally have is my SharePoint session on Saturday morning at 8am. For those who are here then it is going to held in the Capri 114/116 rooms, which hopefully I’ll get a look at today so I have a feel for the joint.

After breakfast and the keynote I think I’ll be starting my day with the session “Virtualization for the SMB World” presented by Dana Epp and Australia’s own Wayne Small who has just been re-awarded MVP status from Microsoft. Congratulations to Wayne and it nice to see him continue to receive recognition for his contributions to teh community over the years. Now that said, it doesn’t mean he might’nt cop some friendly ‘Australian’ heckling from the floor during his session, because I’m sure I’ll be coping some, so best to get in first eh?

One of the major reasons I attended SMB Nation was to network with people here and that has already started. Last night I had a great conversation with Jim McNelis from www.ditoweb.com. Jim’s a big Google Apps reseller and it was very interesting to hear his business model and what his plans are for the future. I’m really encouraged by the success he is having with the Google ‘cloud’ as I think much of the same model translates to the Microsoft ecosystem. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be interested in getting some Google action as well, but you play to your strengths at least at first I believe.

So how did we meet? Twitter of course! I tweeted that I was looking to meet other SMB Nation attendees for dinner and viola up popped Jim. I don’t know if I would have had the opportunity to hook up with Jim otherwise, so score an extra point for Twitter.

There will be Wi-Fi available at the conference tomorrow, so hopefully I can do some more tweeting from the floor is anyone is interested. If you haven’t hooked up with me on Twitter yet my handle is @directorcia and my page is at http://www.twitter.com/directorcia. I am going to be interested to see what the Twitter usage is like at this conference and whether SMB resellers are using it. There are plenty of Twitter style sessions that really look worthwhile attending and I’ll report on those I attend. So if you wanna connect with me during SMB Nation try Twitter first because I’m really keen to see how well it works in something it should be well suited for. I’ll be using the hash tag #smbnation generally as well as the session code (i.e. #gs202 for my session) to help people follow the conversations around SMB Nation.

So I’ll try grab some more shut eye before the big 7am kick off this morning and stay tuned for updates from the floor.

Touch down in Vegas

I have just arrived in Las Vegas in preparation for SMB Nation 2009. So what am I doing here? For starters I’m here to attend what is probably the preeminent (vendor agnostic) SMB reseller focused even in the world. What else am I doing here? Well on Saturday morning I’ll be giving a session on SharePoint called:

GS202 : SharePoint – You’ve got it now what?

The least known component of SBS 2008 is SharePoint and yet it offers the greatest opportunity. This session will explain to you in simple terms exactly what SharePoint technology is and how it can be utilized to improve your business and that of your customers. You’ll also learn how to take SharePoint beyond the default install to configure an installation that truly provides business benefits to you customers. You’ll learn how software like Microsoft Office, SharePoint Designer, Search Server Express and third party add-ons work with SharePoint and more importantly how you can extend your skills quickly and easily to sell these solutions.

Also on Saturday I’ll be doing a podcast live from SMB Nation with Karl Palachuk. Details are:

Saturday Oct. 3rd:
2:25 PM to 2:55 PM (local Las Vegas time)
SharePoint Podcast with Karl Palachuk / Robert Crane
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/749350137

Hopefully this podcast will also be recorded so people can listen to it later on.

Also importantly, I’ll be trying to network with all my peers to learn as much as I can and hopefully forge some new relationships.

Looking back on what I gained from last year’s SMB Nation I can honestly say that there was plenty of content that really helped my business in the last 12 months and I’m looking to get even more out of it this year. I certainly hope that if you are at this year’s SMB Nation you’ll come to my presentation or stop me in the halls for a chat or maybe even organise a get together over a coffee later on. If you want to meet then I’m more than willing to oblige.

If you can’t make the event then I hope that you’ll at least keep up to date with my thoughts on SMB Nation as I post them to this blog and listen to my SMB Nation podcast. Once the presentation is complete I’ll be working hard to get all the relevant documents up for those who are interested to download.

SMB Nation 2009 – Bring it on!

Keeping up

So many people now face an impossible challenge of keeping on top of the information that is “part” of their job that is affecting them physically. As recent article “Information Overload” notes:

Researchers now say that the stress of not being able to process information as fast as it arrives – combined with the personal and social expectation that, say, you will answer every email – can deplete and demoralise you.

Interestingly, that same article also points to the following:

Still, a survey of 2,300 Intel employees revealed that people judge nearly one third of the messages they receive to be unnecessary.

The reason for this is simply the fact that it is far too easy to ‘publish’ information now. Previously, if you wanted to communicate with someone you had to find a pen and paper, sit down, think about what you wanted to say, write down your thoughts, put them in an envelope, address the envelope, pay for a stamp and then mail the letter. Now people can readily blast off volumes of email with the click of a button. The emphasis has shifted from composition and creation to reading or consumption.

The problem with this shift is simply that the not only has the cost of publishing decreased but also too has the quality. Look at the number of irrelevant, poorly formatted, grammatically incorrect emails you receive. What does that tell you about the sender? What sub conscious message does it convey when you read a sloppy email? At the end of the day, it’s about your image, typing mistakes and poor grammar are the same as walking into a room looking unshowered and dishevelled. Good emails show you have both professionalism and class. For starters ask yourself what impression you form of a sender when you receive a “badly formatted” email? Now ask yourself whether you are in fact committing the same offence. And don’t forget that emails always end up being archived somewhere so your “bad” email can come back to haunt you in the future.

As I have spoken about many times in this blog before, one of the major reasons why emails are such a productivity drain is that they are set to constantly alert us to their presence. This means that most people are constantly interrupted by an ever increasing number or arriving emails, whether relevant or not. There are been a number of studies about the impact of these interruptions but here is a new one from the same article:

A study by Microsoft found that once their work had been interrupted by an email notification, people took, on average, 24 minutes to return to the suspended task.

Think about this. How much work could you expect to get done in a day if you receive and interruption every 5 minutes or so and it takes you 24 minutes to return to the original task? based on these numbers you have to say that it certainly doesn’t appear much of anything is getting done does it?

How has all this happened? Simple. We have allowed the technology to dictate to us. We have created a monster and allowed to escape and ruin our lives. Wasn’t technology suppose to free us from stress? Wasn’t it supposed to give us more time? Wasn’t it suppose to allow us to get more done? By simply accepting the defaults that come with technology we are doomed to become its slave in a struggle we can never win. Yet there is hope but it comes at a price that is usually too high for most people. Eliminate the distractions, only read and respond to emails at certain times because do you get paid to process emails? Generally, most people get paid to work and as this article demonstrates there doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of that going on! So turn off the emails, put the gadgets to one side and learn to live your life in control not dominated by entities that are constantly running low on power. Chances are it’ll lower your stress levels and you’ll actually start getting stuff done.

If you want some suggestions about dealing with email frustrations see my books at: http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=3557478

or visit my Slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/directorcia) for a number of other articles on productivity improvement.

Metrics

I think most people have heard of the saying “if you can’t measure it, then you can’t manage it” and yet many people seem to be failing to even do basic measurements. Give the plethora of free measurement tools that are available on the Internet these days (Google Analytics is probably the best example), there really isn’t any excuses.

What prompted me to write this post was a blog post from Seth Godin called “Everyone gets paid on commission”. It details how a writer got laid off from the Washington Post because his blog posts where no generating enough traffic. It illustrates how in today’s world you can very quickly determine how many people are reading or looking at the stuff you have on the Internet. As Seth concludes, “in a digital world where everything can be measured, we all work on commission”.

It again illustrates that fact that we are living in a very different world from the one that many people believe they inhabit. Personally, I spend a regular amount of time each week recording a number of key metrics around my business online. Such monitoring has highlighted issues that I am working to address. It has garnered results from tests that I have performed so I know what does and doesn’t work online. I have really come to appreciate in the last year or so how important metrics are to a business and why if you are not performing metrics you are simply fooling yourself.

It may take some time to determine what key metrics you need to track but the more you invest in determining, tracking and reacting to these the more profitable your success will become. I am always on the look out for more quality information sources as well as tools to provide metrics on how my business perform. If you know of any that work well for you please let me know via director@ciaops.com.

Google ninjas

I’m on a number of technical email lists. These lists allow people like myself to post technical questions that get read by a whole group of other technical people. The hope is that someone on the list knows the answer or has some experience they can share to help the person making the initial request. It was the sort of thing done before all the Web 2.0 stuff came along, and yes, it is really ‘old world’ stuff but for the technical people who use these lists they are yet to come into the 21st century. As I have said many times, just because you work with technology don’t assume you understand technology. Nothing could be truer than in this case. That issue, however, is not the focus of this post, it is instead around how Google is having a major impact on technical professions.

What recently used to happen on these technical email lists was that someone would post a question and someone else would tell them to use Google before they posted the question. Fair enough in my book. Now I see questions typically start with ‘I have a problem that I can’t solve using Google’. Recently one such question resulted in a reply from another member of the forum that they found the answer on Google as the top result in their search request so why could the original person find it on Google? This exchange raises some very interesting issues.

Firstly, with the vast array of information available on the Internet, in-depth technical information on just about every product and technology is available for free. How can you therefore compete on a technical ability any more? Google allows someone with much less knowledge and experience than you the ability to find a solution in potentially less time than you ever could. So, you may have spent years building up your technology knowledge but guess what? Google has just about made the playing field equal for all players no matter what their technical skill or experience level.

Secondly, no longer is it your technical ability that will distinguish you, it is your ability to find relevant information faster than your competition. However, I ask whether many people actually spend time improving their informational sources? Likewise, I ask whether many people actually spend time improving their searching skills? I know for a fact that most people do neither! Most people don’t know that Google has advanced search options. Most people don’t know that Google allows the use of operators (+, –, AND, OR, etc) in searches. This means when they use Google they get millions of results rather than thousands. Give that order of magnitude difference with results returned how effective do you think learning more about improving your skills with Google is going to pay off? Seems like simply math to me but nobody seems to do it.

So don’t be fooled into believing that all that technical knowledge you have accrued over the years is going to put you in good stead. Your most likely younger and smarter competition are investing their time in improving their informational sources as well as improving their ability to search these sources. Honestly, as the power of search technology improves and the amount of information available on the Internet increases, your ability to compete technically doesn’t stand a chance. So spend time improving your searching skills grasshopper and become a true Google ninja.

Game changer

For those who aren’t aware, the next version of Microsoft Office (Office 2010) will come with a free web version. It will be known as Office Web Apps and will integrate with Microsoft Skydrive for file storage (Yeah!) as this blog post details. Here’s a video demo of Office Web Apps that is well worth a look:

<img src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-8k5KoHV_aFg/UQhbnhlZ3jI/AAAAAAAAIGE/zM41DoMoX3s/video20a8196c5b11%25255B5%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" style="border-style: none" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('03cc49ad-7d59-4ada-8c1f-7ebdffe71801'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "

http://www.youtube.com/v/nAvBfuaVluI?hl=en&hd=1“;” alt=””>

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

If you are someone who makes a living selling PC’s then the most common application you sell with every PC is probably a version of Microsoft Office. If you’re a smart cookie then you’ll also make money from installing the software as well as continually patching it. I hate to tell you that the majority of all this is going away when Office Web Apps goes live. Why? Simply because most users are not only stingy with their money (especially at the moment) but they also generally use less than 20% of Microsoft Office functionality. This means that a free online version of their favourite Microsoft Office apps is going to be very appealing. In short, why would they buy a version of Microsoft Office with their workstation when they can get for free online?

I think that if Microsoft provided a ‘paid for’ version of Office Web Apps that included more functionality people would pay but as I have said for quite a while now this is the way it is going – to the ‘cloud’. I agree that everyone isn’t going to go ‘virtual’ overnight but the trend is very evident and more importantly the business and economic reasons are also very powerful. As the economy recovers and businesses get back on their feet they are going to look at upgrading their technology. I reckon that many are going to start asking serious questions about whether they should be utilizing more applications from the ‘cloud’.

To a large extent by Microsoft moving applications like Office to the ‘cloud’ provides a significant amount of legitimacy in the minds users for this style of technology, making it a self fulfilling prophecy in some ways. Failing to ignore these trends is going to have ramifications down the line no matter what sort of business you are. The great things about Microsoft apps moving to the ‘cloud’ is that they still provide the ability to host the same applications on site if desired (unlike Google). It also allows the implementation of hybrid approach as well (i.e. some offsite and some onsite).

Office Web Apps has now gone into limited beta testing and is expected to open up to more soon. Personally, I can’t wait to get my teeth into it because I can see the huge potential it offers around the thing that has always been the most profitable part of technology – assisting users with their implementation. If you are a reseller who doesn’t believe in the potential of ‘cloud’ apps like Office Web Apps I say GREAT because sooner or later customers are going to come looking for someone to help them implement a ‘cloud strategy’ and I’m ready willing and able.