PSSBS

February 27, 2010 PSSBS SQL Saturday

Steve — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:31:04 +0000

Bring your lunch (usual soft drinks, coffee and juice will be provided) and join the Puget Sound Small Business Server User Group for a half-day (10 AM - 2 PM) of SQL training as it relates to Small Business Server environments. Mike England, Senior Database Administrator for Best Buy, will be presenting from 10 AM - 1 PM, with questions and answers from 1 PM - 2 PM. We will be meeting at our normal location at Microsoft’s offices in Lincoln Square in Bellevue, Washington - 700 Bellevue Way NE - Lincoln Square, Bellevue, WA 98004 (http://www.pssbs.org/about).

We will be collecting $20 a person at the event to compensate Mike for his time. There is a US Bank ATM on the first floor of Lincoln Square if you need to grab cash on your way. We will meet on the 1st floor of Lincoln Square and take the elevators up to the meeting room, so please be there by 9:45 AM. Call Steve at 206-255-3214 if you arrive late or have questions Saturday morning.

Steve Banks, SBS MVP
http://msmvps.com/blogs/steveb
http://twitter.com/stevenabanks
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevebanks
http://www.thirdtier.net/who/steve-banks
https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/Steven
http://www.pssbs.org
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pssbs/join
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2145158
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February 18, 2010 PSSBS Meeting CANCELED

Steve — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:16:22 +0000

There will NOT be a meeting Thursday, February 18, 2010. Due to scheduling conflicts with the Microsoft 2010 MVP Summit, we are “moving” the meeting to Saturday, February 27, 2010. We will have a half-day SQL Server training session from 10 AM - 2 PM on 2/27, with more information to follow, so please check back here for location and agenda updates.

Thanks,

Steve Banks, SBS MVP

http://www.pssbs.org
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pssbs/join
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2145158
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=103175053982

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January 21, 2010 PSSBS Monthly Meeting

Steve — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 07:22:03 +0000

The focus of this month’s meeting is the running of your SMB consulting practice. To start off the conversation, join us for a presentation by PSSBS member, Brenda Luper, with the Washington Branch of Franklin Computer Services.

The Franklin Moves division of Franklin Computer Services was started in 2001 when several of their clients were looking for project help during their move process. Franklin’s services helped facilitate the needed communication and tasks between IT, General Contractors, Facilities, and Employees and enabled their clients to achieve a well executed move.

Franklin Moves For Small Business is a service that Franklin Moves can provide to your client with the tools and services necessary to execute a successful, organized, cost-effective move, resulting in minimal downtime, enabling your clients employees to return to their primary tasks as quickly as possible. Franklin’s process involves your input to the plan so you remain the clients trusted advisor before, during and after the move.

Following Brenda’s presentation, we will be continuing the conversation in a roundtable between all members of the group, so bring your business questions and we’ll do the best to answer them for each other.

Meeting will be at our normal location in Microsoft’s Lincoln Square offices in Bellevue, WA. Pizza and beverages will be sponsored by the Microsoft SBS team thanks to Jim H., so be sure to thank him when you see him at the meeting!

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December 17, 2009 PSSBS Monthly Meeting

Steve — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 01:56:33 +0000

Microsoft Exchange Team Veteran Scott Roberts will be at the PSSBS meeting tonight in Redmond!

Scott Roberts has 12+ years at Microsoft under his belt and is currently the Test Lead for the Exchange CXP [Sustained Engineering] team here in Redmond. For over 5 years, he has been on the Exchange CXP team and before that he was the tester for DSAccess and other Directory related tools. Scott was also responsible for manually testing IMAP/SMTP/POP3 for an older Microsoft Product called MCIS.

Scott lives in Redmond and has resided in Washington for over 12 years. He is looking to attend several of the Washington State user groups over the next year to answer any questions that may arise around servicing, tools, Microsoft Update, and other related areas so that he can ensure that the CXP team properly understands the customer scenarios that are out there.

If you are a user group leader in the northwest and would like to get connected with Scott for possible presentations, drop me a note with your email address and I’ll make sure it gets over to Scott. Possible topics he’ll consider for group meetings include:

1. Servicing via Microsoft Update, WSUS, SMS/Systems Center, 3^rd Party

2. Silent install versus UI based install

3. Servicing Cluster Scenarios

4. Servicing E14 DAG Scenarios

5. E12 specific servicing pain points

6. E14 Rollup 1 experience

7. Servicing SBS

For those of you in the Bellevue area tonight, head on over to the Puget Sound Small Business Server User Group meeting in Lincoln Square. Check out http://www.pssbs.org/about/ for directions.

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November 19, 2009 PSSBS Monthly Meeting

Steve — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:29:41 +0000

Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer Tool

Shawn McGrath, Lead PM in the Customer Driven Quality team who interfaces with the Exchange Product Group. Working with a developer, he created the Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer Tool. Have you heard of it? You’re about to.

Shawn will be giving an overview of the tool & demo at this month’s PSSBS meeting over at Lincoln Square.

Since Microsoft is presenting and already providing the room and beverages, bring a few bucks to chip in for pizza.

Date:	Thursday, November 19, 2009
Time:	6:00pm - 8:30pm
Location:	Microsoft’s Lincoln Square Offices, Bellevue, WA
Street:	700 Bellevue Way NE
City/Town:	Bellevue, WA

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September 17, 2009 PSSBS Meeting

Steve — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:39:16 +0000

Symform’s Praerit Garg will be presenting at this month’s Puget Sound Small Business Server meeting on Symform’sbackup solution that goes live next week. To quote what I heard another Symform beta partner say earlier in the week, “Every once in a while a technology comes along that makes your head spin and Symform is one of them. They have created a distributed cloud computing solution for online storage that is absolutely amazing and all so practical for our industry.”

You won’t want to miss this!

Steve

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VitalSigns™ Program from Core Connex

admin — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:04:48 +0000

• Set and track financial performance goals
• View trends in your business to see where adjustments are needed
• Compare your performance to industry benchmarks
• See forecasts based your company’s trends
• Receive business alerts to keep you focused

SMBTN Membership not required. Set up of Corelytics™ financial dashboard, trend analysis and goal setting session done with business advisor.

Contact bob@coreconnex.com or call 425-533-0773 to learn more about this valuable business resource.

VitalSigns™ program page: http://www.smbtn.org/vitalsigns.htm

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Active Disaster Recovery for the SMB

admin — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 06:42:17 +0000

Doyenz, Inc., the first company to deliver an end-to-end virtual appliance lifecycle management platform for the small to mid-sized business market, today announced the release of version 2.5 of its Automated Virtual IT™ platform. The new release of the Doyenz Automated Virtual IT platform brings several key capabilities to market, including Active Disaster Recovery, Failover in the Cloud, and support for Failsafe Migrations in the Cloud.

Proliferation of virtualization and cloud computing in the SMB is inevitable, and Doyenz is leading the way with Automated Virtual IT. It’s a managed service for VARs that leverages virtualization and cloud services to automate the delivery and management of IT infrastructure. A hybrid solution that acts as a bridge to the cloud for the SMB, Doyenz allows VARs to manage their SMB clients’ IT infrastructure either on-premise, or hosted in the cloud.

With Doyenz Active Disaster Recovery, backups are no longer just bits that collect dust in the cloud, but an active virtual appliance that can be used for failover, testing, and migrations. VARs can now configure, test, deploy, manage and restore servers in just minutes with Automated Virtual IT. Complex configurations and migrations can now take place completely in the cloud using a simple web browser and software systems will fail over automatically and run from the cloud in case of interruption.

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Zenith Infotech

admin — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 06:24:54 +0000

Zenith provides Infrastructure components to YOU — our partner, to allow you to build your Managed Services in the most cost effective and efficient manner. By infrastructure we mean – tools, processes and people.

Our trademarked SAAZ platform provides a comprehensive hosted environment with tools for desktop management, server & network monitoring, an Advanced Scripting engine, a reporting engine and a ticketing system. Our data center is located in Fremont, California in one of the world’s top-ten rated collocation facilities. There is no need for you to add servers and redundant infrastructure at your support center.

We also provide a 600+ person fully trained Network-Operations-Center support that compliments your efforts in providing proactive IT infrastructure management services in the marketplace. With over 3 years of NOC support experience and 10,000+ sites under management, our team provides unparalleled level of 24×7 support- giving over 2700 partners an edge over their competition. With matured processes in place, Zenith NOC is well poised to scale and provide on-demand back end support when you need it most.

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Symform Storage Cloud

admin — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 06:04:37 +0000

Symform is a Seattle based stealth-mode startup formed in late 2007 by two ex-Microsoft veterans. We are creating a game-changing technology that provides a seamless, green and significantly more economical way of running internet services. With billions of dollars going into building and operating data centers, only a few companies can afford to run such services. Symform hopes to provide a new alternative that will dramatically lower the barrier to entry.

Feb 2009 UPDATE: We have launched a private beta of our service to a set of partners. If you’d like to participate, please send an email to info @ symform.com. Our website is in the process of being updated with details about the service offering and the underlying technology.

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