SMB Thoughts by Brian Williams

As an MSP you should use Comcast’s recent breakdown, http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=4492&rss, as a warning.
Do you know the following about your managed clients;

Who’s your client’s registrar?
Do you or your client know the username/password to the registrar’s website, is that password secure?
Do you know all the contacts who are listed with the registrar?
When does the domain expire, does it auto [...]

Filed under: Business Focus, MSP, Security | No Comments »

This week’s Adobe Flash issue brought up a good point made by Susan Bradley, http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SMBManagedServices/message/20020, MSP providers shouldn’t be waiting for an exploit to decide and patch. The latest release of Flash was released by Adobe nearly a month ago.
So how do you keep up with Microsoft updates, Adobe updates, Java updates, A/V updates/issues…
Well to [...]

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A good friend, and peer of mine, attended an event this week where Scott Hanselman, now a Microsoft employee, spoke. He said Scott had a ton of great content and was a great speaker, here’s Scott’s blog http://www.hanselman.com/blog/.
In the presentation Scott was going big on his talk about cloud services, no not specifically Microsoft, he [...]

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Our vendor relationships have been taking a hit this last month. We lost our antivirus provider, our perimeter based anti-spam/virus solution vendor emailed us today with the 2008 pricing structure and of course there are minimum order changes along with price increases.
We have a spreadsheet to analyze our MSP profit, cost analysis and break-even points. We’ve adjusted our [...]

Filed under: MSP, Partners, Vendors | 1 Comment »

My initial instinct on Home Server is if Microsoft puts a “Home” stamp on a product it should not go in the business, period.
Karl Palachuk posted his thoughts on Home Server in the business place and those consultants suggesting that it be used as a product for their client’s businesses. 
My take on his post is [...]

Filed under: Home Server, MSP | 2 Comments »

While attending SMB Nation this year, I made it a goal to talk to an HP rep about their program. I met a nice guy very willing to talk to me about HP servers, desktops etc. I expressed that I currently recommend Dell and explained my reasons:
1) I know how to spec and price in [...]

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There’s been a lot of discussion and concern amongst the partner channel that Dell’s acquisition of Silverback is a sure sign that Dell wants to compete in the managed services business. In all fairness, considering the margin on hardware, it’s not hard to understand why.
The honest truth is only those executives within Dell truly know [...]

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I’m looking for a way to improve on my MSP tools. At the desktop level and for the smaller peer-to-peer business clients we still support we require raid 1 at the desktop level, with my current MSP tool I’m not able to get real-time alerts of a single disk failure along with some other important [...]

Filed under: MSP, Managed Services | 1 Comment »

I just returned from Central Oregon, a little 3 day holiday retreat.
I had a 4-hour car ride home alone, which gave me time to reflect on the past week and the upcoming week. This drive was great deep thought time along the lines of Karl Palachuk’s focus in his new book ”Relax, Focus, Succeed,” which I’m only part [...]

Filed under: MSP, Managed Services | 1 Comment »

Our project work i.e. new server deployment, swing migrations etc. are great but they’re are labor intensive and high stress not too mention the margin is not as great…especially considering our margin on equipment is nominal.
In moving to the managed services model we took a long time because we had to decide what our offering [...]

Filed under: MSP, Managed Services | No Comments »