Youtube Video

@scottalanmiller said:

This is where going to the well often happens

?

@alexntg said:

Internally, if you're having regular meetings on something, something's wrong with your processes.

Good point. I was watching a program about Amazon last week. Sometimes, Jeff Bezos would get a customer complaint about something, and he'd forward the e-mail to one of his staff and simply add "?" to it.

"?" didn't just mean sort out this one customer, it mean't fix the processes so that this type of complaint could never occur again. The staff member would have to refine Amazon's processes, then e-mail Bezos back telling him what they'd changed.

If Bezos was happy with the reply, he'd simply e-mail ":)" to let them know.

? and I just love that minimalism. Compare that with some bosses who talk and talk for hours in meetings. Too often in meetings we discuss the symptoms of an issue, and not the causes.

And I'm a big believer in stand-up meetings. I'd also like to have walking meetings. Steve Jobs used to conduct many of his meetings walking around the block. There's a park next to our office and I'd love to go for a 30 minute power walk with a colleague whilst discussing a particular issue. Unfortunately, leaving the building is likely to be frowned on or colleagues would just think I'm a nutter. I sometimes arrange to have meetings in a bar, with predictably limited success.

I don't want to use iOS or Android at work. I want to use Windows Professional. Maybe one day soon I'll be able to.

@Reid-Cooper said:

Some cities, famously Barcelona, is considered a top world travel destination but often cited as being pretty hard to live in.

A friend of a friend of mine worked for HP in Barcelona for a while. He loved it. The only issue was that they worked to American time-frames but partied to Spanish time-frames. So they were out until 1am every night having fun but then expected to start work at 8am. He burnt out after a while.

Those Home & Business key cards are a pain to administer these days. I wouldn't fancy doing 30.

It's À la carte versus Happy Meal.

You can't join an iPad to a domain either, yet they're widely used in the enterprise.

It's ok, if @ajstringham ever tries to sell me a product I can just search a few IT forums and find out what he *really *thinks of it

@Breffni-Potter, how are you planning on getting clients? (I don't have any advice, I'm just nosey!)

About 18 months ago I took out a fairly standard 3rd line support and holiday cover contract with a local MSP to cover for my one-man-band operation when I'm not here. This is a pretty big MSP, employing dozens of people and turning over millions. As part of the contract, an engineer spent a day documenting our systems, and as part of that audit I gave him pretty much all the information someone would need to come in and manage our environment.

The results of this audit were written up in a Word document and included domain admin passwords, wi-fi/AP passwords, server names and configurations - pretty much everything. The company then e-mailed this document to me, in a completely unsecured e-mail. I e-mailed them back saying I couldn't believe they'd send the domain admin password in an unsecured e-mail and they just replied that they do this for all their clients and I am the first one to ever say anything.

I had to spend the day changing all of our environment passwords.

A few years ago, I employed another MSP. This was small, five man operation. Whilst I was away, one of their engineers was providing telephone to support to one of our users and gave the user the domain admin password in order for him to do something. When I returned and found out about it (the user told me), I asked the engineer if he thought that was good practice and was told that it was ok because the user wouldn't remember it.

I no longer trust external parties with my data. There are too many engineers out there who just don't give a shit about client security, either through laziness or ignorance. Which is a real ball-ache because it makes life harder when I am on holiday. I've created separate domain admin accounts for external support parties, and I keep these accounts disabled until they are needed. But since they are normally only needed when I am not here, enabling them is a problem. They also have their own logmein account running on one of our servers. I understand that cached credentials were vulnerable to Heartbleed, but I don't know if they cached credentials. I suspect they have and haven't bothered to tell me to change passwords (as per Logmein's recent advice).

I despair. If a Microsoft Gold partner, HP Gold specialist and VMWare Enterprise partner thinks it's normal practice to e-mail Domain Admin and wireless access passwords to clients in an unsecured e-mail, what hope do I have?

ARRRGGG

Now I know that most of you are great MSPs, so I'm interested in your best practices. How do you keep client details secure, and how to do you satisfy your clients that you know what you're doing. I still have the problem of how to give external support companies remote administrator access to our servers whilst I'm on holiday. At the moment, I have set-up a domain admin account for a colleague and trained her how to enable and then disable the admin accounts for our external support engineers via AD. I also have the domain admin password printed out and stored in the safe, which about five people here have the key to. I'm working on the premise now to "trust no-one", but still be able to take a holiday.

I wonder how many Chromebook sales are into schools, where low cost is a bigger factor that usability and the user requirements of a 6 year old is a little lower than a 40 year old office worker.

I use them at work, but as an additional device for a specific purpose and not as a replacement to a PC. And I sometimes use them to RDP onto a PC, but that's just using them as a thin-client, which isn't their intended purpose.

In the past, I've always found it easy to move jobs - either because of the offer of a lot more money, or because the job I had really started to suck. But in my current job I have a great boss, complete autonomy, I can walk to work, great colleagues, no pressure, an ok salary and a big variety of projects to work on.

Sounds perfect, huh? The problem is it's not challenging me enough. After 12 years here, I could do the job with my eyes closed. Because I'm otherwise very happy and comfortable, it's very hard to consider leaving. To get a much better job with more money, I'd possibly have to work in London, which is an hour away by train and all the stress that commuting to the city involves.

Facebook and Twitter are for consumers. I don't see any benefit for B2B (business to business) companies to use it. My Marketing Manager disagrees though

I wrote our company website using Notepad entirely in classic ASP and CSS. There is no javascript. It is now looking pretty dated and I need to refresh it. The days of hand-coding websites seems to be over, and I think I need a decent content management system. The only options seem to be Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. I'll probably use Wordpress for no particular good reason.

I bought a book on JQuery and Ajax, which I've yet to read, but as someone who doesn't really do web development the learning curve is pretty steep and I'm not sure it's worth my time trying to learn it.

Regarding classic ASP, I'm not bad at it, but it's too old now. I don't know whether to upgrade to dot ASP.Net or switch to PHP.

My latest toy! I really wanted an HP one, but there's no stock in the channel in the UK and they keep putting back the ETA of new stock:

I have a couple of intended uses.

Firstly, I'm setting up a wallboard in my office (a large screen showing key stats and logs via a browser), and will use a Chromebox to power it.

Secondly, we have a PC in the conference room, and generally users use the PC to make a remote desktop connection onto their own PCs in order to open Powerpoint presentations and the like. They don't have to use RDC, as the PC has Office installed so they could run it straight from there, but they generally feel more comfortable working from their own PC (we don't use roaming profiles). I'm thinking of replacing the conference room PC with a Chromebox, which would force users to use remote desktop whether they like it or not, but would otherwise work pretty well. It would also allow visitor secure internet access if required.

@Dominica said:

A valid consideration here is your family situation - how will a job change affect them, if they exist? Is your perceived job security actual security? In other words, if you stay at that company for another 12 years and they fold, will you be able to get another job, or will you be unable to adapt to a different environment after so long in one place?

I'd like to think I'd adapt, it would be a little depressing to think otherwise. But I still currently feel young enough to make some big changes - that feeling will probably only weaken as I head into my fifties.

I do have family, wife and two kids, and having kids doesn't half change the way you think about your career. I work for medium sized manufacturing companies and the term "job security" hasn't existed in this sector since the mid-Seventies. But we are making a profit, and I'm fairly close to the CEO, so would probably recognise when the shit was about to hit the fan. I would also be entitled to a few grand redundancy pay if my current employer folded and that is always at the back of my mind. In the UK, you basically have no employment rights at all for the first two years in a new job. And as my wife doesn't work, and I have a mortgage and two kids to support, that's pretty scary.

Perhaps @Katie 's next seminar should be "Mid Life Crisis: When to Hold, When to Fold"

@scottalanmiller said in Microsoft Managed Services:

Windows 10 is "free" for all intents and purposes for home use now.

How is it free? Upgrades for the lifetime of the hardware may be free now, but you still effectively pay a licence fee for every new Windows machine you buy, don't you?

I see a disconnect between phones which are generally rented (for both businesses and consumers) for a couple of years and then upgraded (at least here in the UK), and PCs which are generally bought and kept for 5 years or more. I can see why Microsoft (and HP and Dell) would like PCs to adopt the phone business model which is making Apple so rich by persuading consumers to replace their perfectly good iPhones with near identical new models every 2 years because they're under a 2 year contract and so the upgrade feels like it's free (same monthly fee).

I suspect this is more about selling more Surfaces, or helping Dell and HP sell more PCs, rather than further monetising Windows ((although like I said above, Microsoft get a licence fee for every new Windows PC sold). They also need to get to the stage where replacing a PC, and migrating all your settings, applications and files, is as simple as replacing a phone, which is currently isn't anywhere near. One of the main reasons businesses don't upgrade their PCs more often is the sheer hassle of the upgrade process, rather than the cost of the new hardware. This initiative seems to be addressing that problem.

@technobabble said:

If I wanted to go to O365 SB Premium, I would have had to shut down my account, sign up for a new account. Connect to SharePoint/OneDrive for Business and upload all my files ect ect.

This is what I'm talking about! It's nuts!!

I was the other way round, I wanted to go from Small Business to Enterprise, but couldn't. I thought they'd simplified it from when I first took out a subscription (and got my fingers burnt) but it still sounds like a nightmare. I really don't see how anyone can argue that Google Apps isn't a whole lot easier.

Just doing the jQuery one now. It's pretty good.