After it became apparent that I could make money at this work, I resigned from my Job at a Fortune 100 company and started doing IT work full-time. I formed a company and partnered up with another IT guy. No big deal, we had done a couple of projects together, and got along pretty well. His skills and knowledge complimented mine, so it was a pretty good fit at first. After a while though, things got strange. We had gone into business together, without me he could do it. I thought we were partners, while I had let him take care of business matters and whatnot, I took care of IT things. Soon enough, though, he began to see me as an employee rather than a partner. At first I let it roll off my back, he knows the business side of things, as long as he stays out of my way, all is well. But then he screwed over one of my clients and was just generally not seeing the relationship as a partnership, rather as his business and I was just there.

So I left that. I learned a couple of big things about myself, about people, and about business. The biggest one is that in business friendships are quite tenuous. Another was that people are who they are, there is no point in trying to change them. So based on this experience, I set up an IT consulting practice under my mom's accounting firm. She had an established client base, many of whom were already my clients, so it made sense. We get along and our businesses are, for most small businesses quite complimentary. Not long after this we started investing in a deeper relationship with Microsoft. While in the Small Business Accounting world Quickbooks is KING, Microsoft rules the desktop, application platform, and the server room.

Additionally, we stumbled along with the local Microsoft Partner Community Manager and the local SBS user group. We were building a reputation as a quality group of IT Professionals and partner companies that took the business of small business IT consulting seriously. And this is my next point, if you are a Sole Proprietor with no employees, partner up! Find a group of like minded individuals who can compliment your body of work. What happens when you are hit by a bus, or get sick for a week? What are your clients going to do then? We did just exactly that, and it was very good. At various moments we have had employees and interns and what not.

As time passed, we spent more and more time with Microsoft people out at the Irving office as well as community events. People started to know and recognize us. When Microsoft needed partners to go do an event, we were regularly ready, willing, and able to go. This has led to a variety of benefits, besides traveling and evangelizing technology to small businesses all over South Central, we also picked up some clients and some partners. But the biggest benefit has been that our small practice has eked out an place in the Microsoft Partner Ecosystem. It's not much, probably does not register on their radar, but we have hitched our horse to their caravan, and we are better for it.

Next time, what happened leveraging that Microsoft Team.

A very common method for IT folks to supplement their income while working full time is to moonlight. For most businesses it's ok if not explicitly authorized, mostly because the business owner or manager does not fully understand what the IT guy does, so as long as it is not adversely affecting the core performance of the IT guy, go for it! Like many, I started my business this way. It started out as helping out at the church and local NFPs or at a friend's small business who needed some help with their email. These were all simple gigs, nothing formal, and partly based on the underground economy of beer and pizza. Maybe a couple of dollars came my way, but nothing more than gas money. Soon, however, my phone was ringing quite regularly, 'Hey can you swing by and check out our router? Our Internet has been down all day, and we don't know the first thing about this stuff!' This kind of thing was happening regularly, to the point that I was running major equipment and system upgrades on weekends and running a help desk from 6-midnight every night. After a while I started making almost as much money doing that as I was in my job, and my job was not going anywhere, so I resigned and went into business for myself. No boss hanging over my head, bugging me about inane projects, no co-workers disappearing for hours at a time not contributing to projects, just me and my skills…

This is a dangerous time for EVERYONE involved. There was tons of risk and tons of liability hanging in the balance. If anything happened it could be really bad. For the IT guy, it really isn't that bad, as long as they are ethical and capable. For the small businesses that use these IT guys, it is taking a spin at Russian roulette with the health and welfare of your business. And what's more, the employees that expect that owner is making sound decisions about their business. If the IT guy messes anything up too much, there's a real chance that the business could fail and they all lose their job. That's not hyperbole, it has happened. Fortunately not for me, but I know guys who will never admit it in public but they f'ed something up and it cost the business owner so much to get it fixed that they just threw in the towel rather than paying for the work to correct the problem correctly. That is the extreme, but most business owners, who don't really know how IT systems work, are trusting the business and the livelihoods of all their employees to IT guys who have no real stake in the quality of their work. The IT Guy mentality breeds a false sense of professionalism. The fact is that the IT Guy may have a personal interest in the success or failure of something, but they also know that come next Friday they get a paycheck from their employer. I won't even go into the dangers for the IT Guy's fulltime employer.

I survived this stage of business, but just barely. And knowing what I know now, it's not the right way to start an IT Business..

Next time, Hanging out my Shinle

I considered doing a webcast on this, but it kept messing up because Audacity and my screen capture (procaster) were trying to control the audio…so #fail!

Anyway, I have a recurring opportunity to assist my father with his audacity. A little about his setup, he has a mid-grade Dell Laptop of 2+years. It has Vista 32 bit and plenty of RAM. Internal HD is not really big enough, but too much trouble for me to reload on a larger drive, so we supplement the internal HD with an external drive for him to store photos, videos, muzac, archive email and docs…it works quite well. He even knows how to take the laptop out of it's web of wires (oh yea external display/kb/mouse when it's at home) when he wants to give a presentation at church or at local professional organizations and whoever will give him time to talk to them about Safety…but I digress. The point is that the laptop does very well for him, but whenever it gets back home, and everything gets plugged, almost without fail, I get a call, Audacity is not getting any sound…

He has a microphone going into the mic jack on the side of the dell…so I have to walk him through resetting this in vista sound panel and in audacity…

So the first thing we need to do is go into the sound control panel and look at the recording devices tab…shortcut right click on the volume icon in the taskbar next to the time…

And choose recording devices, which should launch a control panel and go straight into the recording devices tab….

So if it's active and available it should show up here and in my dad's case, I believe he would use the "Line In" setting… click on it to hichlight and then click on the set as default button…click ok at the bottom of the screen…

That should fix things, close out of any audacity applications running, restart audacity, and test.

But let's say this does not correct the issue…what next? Open audacity and goto to 'edit->preferences' which is all the way at the bottom of the list…

And it should look like this…

Specifically allocating Microsoft Sound Mapper - Input as the recording device. If it's not there, put it in there…and hit ok at the bottom. Test and away you go…

Good luck Dad!, and Happy Father's Day!!!

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Microsoft Partners on the Value of WPC
Microsoft partners share their experiences from past WPCs and talk about why you don't want to miss the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference this...

@ L2TC we try to refrain from going to 'conventions' and 'conferences'.  As a rule these become traveling hordes of groupies, a little like high-school.  You find some people you have stuff in common with and you travel in packs, from keynote to break-out to lunch to afternoon sessions and whatnot.  pretty soon you've developed some really good friends, and paid a ton of $$$ to get to do that.  The downside is your business may not grow.  Sure, you may grow personally, and perhaps some professionally.  You may get to meet some of the people you see and hear on conference calls and on forums, but for the most part, you, and they spend equal amounts of time building relationships with each other, rather than building strategic relationships outside your click.  I know, because I did some of it, and realised rather quickly, what a waste of time it was for me, but more importantly, a waste of opportunity to learn and build better relationships, with people my business needs in order to grow.  Consequently, we've taken a more stand-offish approach to large gatherings.  @ WPC08 in Houston for example we made a blitz out of going.  about 36 hrs on the ground and we packed more business building into that 36 hrs than we did in the previous 3 years of conferences and conventions.  We probably missed out on a ton of great stuff, but we were strategic and came out better for it.

This year, becuase of it's close proximity, but also because we feel like this is a watershed moment in history, we'll be at the whole of WPC09 in NOLA.  Don't get me wrong, we'll be strategic about it.  We have parties planned and lunches planned and meetings planned and all our sessions planned.  There are 2 of us going, and the 2 that are going are key members of our team, both responsible for setting tone and direction for the company.  We are purposfully not going to many over-lapping break-outs though.  We plan on maximizing our exposure.  What we take in, and who we meet with.  Given our goal of tight integration with Microsoft products and initiatives, it is important that we focus on our key businesses yet stay open to the opportunities that are available for us.

I hope that our partners will be there, and we can find some time to network, and build more of those relationships.  if you are coming to New Orleans, and we have not spoken, please do drop me a line or call me, so we can get together while you are here!

As a small business owner, employee, person, how do you see your computers and systems? Are they investments or are they costs? When I was in enterprise, I really enjoyed working in one organization in particular, because they saw the value in their IT systems. And they were not afraid to invest in it, if it would yield results. A couple of others though simply saw IT as a cost center, taking money away from the profits, so the less they spent on IT, the better.

If anything, that difference in thinking is exaggerated in the Small Business Marketplace. There's a real difference between companies that invest in their systems and their people, and those who see computers as a cost of doing business, nothing more, nothing less. As an IT consultancy, we are constantly pressed for things like ROI and TCO. Clients don't use those terms, but they ask "what's this gonna cost me?" or "why do I need to upgrade, this is good enough?"

So we really try to change the conversation from a cost perspective to a value perspective. This is not to be dishonest, but it is to open eyes and minds about the possibilities that are before people. Sometimes people get blinders when they see dollar signs, but they don't understand what lost productivity costs them. True story, I go to meet with a prospect in the manufacturing sector. As I am walking into their offices, I pass a couple Porches and Escalades. And we get into the meeting and we are discussing their systems, and the conversation comes around to how much this is going to cost them. So I go into the costs, and what was a very good meeting with very positive feedback, quickly turns into a discussion, of can we cut this or that. Of course it does not occur to me until I am walking out, that they are getting by with what they have, but they cannot go any faster than they are right now, without investing in their systems or changing dramatically how they conduct business. And I am walking out the doors to get in my car and see them getting into their cars, and I think to myself, they will invest in bigger more luxurious cars, but won't invest in their business? The moral is I did not explain well enough what their return on investment will be. They were stuck on a cost conversation, and they are still there. The business, that they wanted to grow, is still at the same place, no growth in orders, no growth in marketspace. I called them again to re-open the conversation, and their first question was is it going to cost the same? Without opening up their minds to why they have not grown and why they are not moving forward, but in fact contracting in their market share. The market is growing around them and other people are taking that increased market share…

It is hard, but lesson learned. Some people just don't want to understand the value proposition, no matter how it's brought to them. So when you look at your computers and your IT systems, do you see the value in them? Do you need more value from them? Do you need more productivity from your personnel and your systems?

Have you ever thought: "If I could get a hold of someone at Microsoft I'd tell 'em exactly what I thought"?

I have, over the years, had the opportunity, among others, to do just that. What I really enjoy about these opportunities, especially, when in a group environment is watching others' actions. I always try to see each situation from the other persons point of view, and ask myself, 'how would I want to be spoken to?' Or 'how would I want to be treated?' In order to do this, I have to have some level of understanding of who the other person is, and when dealing with Microsoft, it's important to know exactly who they are, and where they fit in the grander scheme of things, that is the Microsoft Hierarchy. Sometimes I may be speaking to a support tech, incredibly smart and skilled at the technology, but beyond their realm, they have very little influence. Then there's our tPAM, his job specifically is to help his partners make money and sell product, aka LICENSES. Sometimes, I get a hold of a Product Technology Specialist. This person's job is to influence the sale of particular products in a product group, primarily to Enterprise and Select Agreement clients. When they have time, they are open to assist us, but don't take too much of their time. Mostly the people we deal with at Microsoft are on the Sales side of things. They, even if not directly, are responsible for increasing License sales, be it Windows Desktops, Servers, Office or whatever. And while most of these people have a certain level of influence for product direction, that is primarily in providing feedback to product teams on what they are seeing from customers, and rarely if ever is that from my clients. Almost entirely that is feedback from Enterprise and Select Agreement customers.

So knowing all this, I enjoy, tremendously, the opportunity to talk to anyone at Microsoft, but in particular in a group settings, especially among my peers, the real minnows of the Microsoft Partner Ecosystem. While I may do SharePoint Deployments, and Business Desktops, and Business Continuity, my clients are rarely even a smudge on Microsoft's Balance Sheet, even on a regional or area level. But they are important. But in group sessions with some of our peers there is always someone in the group who really feels that THIS IS THEIR ONE AND ONLY OPPORTUNITY to get to speak their mind, openly, and so they do. They let it all out, all their frustrations, usually of a technical nature, loudly and emphatically. It is always so painful, because typically at Microsoft meetings of this nature, that is the one and only time they will ever get to speak their mind. How would you feel if you invited someone into the "inner circle" (name that Movie), and they sh!t all over you and dress you down in front of the rest of the inner circle? Would you invite that person back, to heap more abuse onto your parade? Well typically with Microsoft the answer is NO, We should not invite them back.

@WPC09, L2TC has been invited to meet with several actual influential people at various levels of the Partner Team and perhaps even product and corporate teams. So I posed the question to some of my clients, peers, friends, and family. "What do you think?" "What should I discuss, talk about ask about?" Obviously I have gotten a variety of responses, some logical and some irrational. In a couple of cases I got requests for Xboxes and games or new Zune HDs. Believe me I am all over that!!! But beyond the fun things, I am ever amazed by the gambit of things people see Microsoft as… So now, I'll ask you the Reading Blog Public. I still have time to ask for more people to get in front of. But please remember I want to be able to come back, so if your answer is to: "…tell them to all go f*@% themselves with a MacAir!' I guarantee that's not going to happen. L2TC is focused on doing the best thing we can for our clients, who cannot get 5 minutes with an actual person at Microsoft, so this may be their only opportunity, and I am going to do the best job of it for them. They expect it. So

What would you do?

What would you say?

Who would you want to talk to?

What would you ask?

No this is not about permits or even the DMV. Rather it's the ways businesses can get Office. Businesses want the functionality of Office. They like the features. But lot's of businesses continue to fail to understand that when they buy a software product, they are buying the rights to use that software within the terms of the licensing agreement. And in these rough economic times, it's staggering that people don't take the time to get to know their rights and benefits. What is even more amazing to me is the 'bottom line' attitude. How much do I have to pay? I have discussed this before but it bears repeating. There are huge differences between OEM, Retail, and Volume Licensing options.

If one only evaluates on price at the cash register, then s/he is failing to take into account all the hidden costs for that purchase. I will dismiss the OEM component for the purposes of this discussion. Office 2007 Retail boxed product, what one may buy from Best Buy or Wal-Mart, comes with very limited usage rights. It can only be installed on one computer but it can be transferred but not concurrently used on another computer. If that license is an 'Upgrade' License then the purchaser must have a qualifying product license to upgrade from. So Computer A has OEM Office 2003, we buy Office 2007 Standard on an upgrade, because it is cheap. That's fine as long as that computer is in use. But you replace that computer with a zippier, prettier computer. Can you install that same copy of Office 2007 Standard (upgrade) on the new computer? You can, but only if you have purchased on the new computer a qualifying license of Office with it. What's more you have to keep up with that license, should you get audited. Your ability to use software is based solely on the terms of the Licensing agreement, so if you lose the physical License, then you lose the right to use the software. The applications will still run on your PC, but you will be violating the terms of the license. Well this is not that big of a deal at home, one or 2 PCs and no-one is ever going to audit us. Your Insurance Company may beg to differ. Your Ex's Lawyer may beg to differ. And while on the subject of Home. Office Home and Student 2007 Edition is licensed for HOME AND STUDENT USE ONLY. I see lots of people get pc's with this preinstalled or they go buy the cheapest version on the shelf simply to save a $. If you are using it for ANY business purposes, then you are violating the terms of the Licensing Agreement. So what, the software police may not knock on your door. It is the difference between right and wrong. It's is stealing someone else's intellectual property.

This leads me to Microsoft Volume Licensing. For businesses, Microsoft offers Volume Licensing agreements at a variety of cost levels and with a variety of rights attached. Your business needs and your volume of purchase will determine which product license and terms you will get. For example a business could buy as few as 5 licenses of whatever for a very competitive price with regards to the retail box product, but with expanded rights over the retail boxed product. If they want to expand their rights to include Software Assurance, they may do so.

L2TC is trained in Microsoft Licensing. We offer consulting services on Licensing for our clients because we care about our clients. We care that they can sleep at night knowing they are in compliance with their licensing agreement. We care that they will not lose their business because they are in compliance with their licensing agreement. We care that they have upgrade and downgrade rights on their software, so they have the flexibility to upgrade when they want, not because a majority of their new PC's have new Office, so they need to upgrade. We care that they get eLearning, so they get to maximize training on the products they use. We care that they get technet subscription so they have incident support options and test versions of software. We care that they have run from server rights, and secondary use rights, and an employee purchase program. We care that they maximize their investment in a business tool, not just get a word processor or a spreadsheet. If that's all they need, we'll go get a typewriter.

So when we are looking at software, we take the time to discuss the business drivers and needs. Then we work with them to find the right software with the right terms to fit their business. And we take the time to verify that they are getting their full benefit from the software rights, no more, no less.

Partners, are you heading to the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in NOLA next month? If not why? I'd love to hear from you. I can't help you, but I am curious to know what other partners are thinking about WPC and the value proposition.

L2TC will be there posting leading up to the event, during the event, and after the event. We are working to secure face time with other partners who are going, as well as Microsoft Personnel. Who knows we may do an interview Ray (Watters) on Ray (Ozzie). Yea right, like we could get that close :-P

But seriously we are will be aiming to send status updates and interviews with Microsofties at the event and primarily partner team members who focus on our marketplace, the SMB space. Since we began as Microsoft Partners several years ago, the landscape has improved 100 fold, but there's still room for improvement and that's what we want to convey to them and get answers as to what the Microsoft Partner Team plans to do to address those opportunities. So watch this space, as well as our Facebook page, and my Twitter Feed. We'll also be streaming some content up to our Livestream Channel. So keep your eyes and ears planted and hopefully we can grow together.

Level 2 Technology Consulting is an award winning Microsoft Small Business Specialist Practice. We focus on 3 core areas, Information Worker, Network Infrastructure, and Unified Communications.

For those that do not know us, we are

Bill Watters, MCP: Chief Technologist, Gulf States Regional Office

Abbie Watters, CPA, MCP: Consultant, South Central Regional Office (Headquarters)

Ray Watters, MCSE, etc: Consultant, Midwest Regional Office

This is the kick-off of Lunch With L2TC, and it's a pleasure to be with you. In the past we have had several disjointed efforts to communicate with our audience; Blogs, Twitter, Video Blogs, Audio Blogs (Podcasts), and so with our expansion into 2 new markets we are launching this new, hopefully consolidated, series for our audience. Look for more announcements about this as we move forward. We will have a live stream on www.livestream.com/l2tc we will post to our various blogs, twitter and facebook, so look for more links and information on our website www.l2tc.net.

For this first effort I do want to share some thoughts.

1. Microsoft is closing their fiscal year, so if you are looking to get new or more licensing, be sure to check out www.microsoftincentives.com, there's a ton of opportunity to save some money.
2. Microsoft has a ton of licensing options, and one is right for your organization. L2TC is a Licensing partner who knows and keeps up with Microsoft Licensing. We use a consultative approach to helping you find a proper resolution to your licensing risks.
3. Microsoft has money. Not a little, but a lot!!! And they are willing to finance IT Projects. If you need some financing, better than credit cards and available quickly, check out www.microsoftfinancing.com. This is available through a partner, like L2TC. Microsoft Financing is willing to finance the whole project as long as there is at least 1 Microsoft product included. So it can include software, hardware and services, and can include complimentary software purchases.
4. Software + Services is not Software as a Service. While Microsoft is offering some things to compete directly with google apps, Salesforce.com and others, the vision for S+S is different, and that difference is fundamental to how IT infrastructures are going to be in the future. We will discuss this in more depth as time goes by, but if you are considering replacing onsite IT with hosted services, consult a technology partner like L2TC. Sometimes this may make sense, but we are seeing a lot of organizations return from the cloud. Some are keeping some cloud based services to augment onsite services that they control better.
5. The world of the information worker is changing. L2TC is keyed to keep up with those changes. We are Microsoft, Novell and Cisco partners. Our deep relationships make it possible to stay on top of the technology and translate that to solutions for Small and Medium sized businesses.

Finally, I want to bring up a recent case. We were recently contacted by a client worried about their backups. They had stopped working some time ago, and the president was starting to lose sleep over this. He called us to take a look at it, and as it turns out, after a dogged troubleshooting and issue resolution we were able to fix the backups. While doing this we discussed the need for business continuity. Turns out that they are keen to not just recover from a disaster, which is what backups are designed to do, but more importantly stay in production even during a disaster. Well this opens a whole new can of worms and a whole new world of issues. So over the next couple of weeks we'll discuss this and more, but it really goes to the heart of what an IT Partner should be providing to their clients. It's not simply adding users and deleting users and replacing laptops when they are lost.

So for now, that's about it. Feel free to contact

Bill Watters, MCP: Gulf States: 985.590.4066 bwatters@l2tc.net

Ray Watters, MCSE: Midwest: 773.634.9369 rwatters@l2tc.net

Abbie Watters, MCP: South Central: 214.454.5317 abbie@l2tc.net

While riding in the car today to a partners' office the topic of social networks came up, specifically regarding their purpose in the workplace. This got me to thinking about social networking in general and then onto, what else…SharePoint. For those that know me, I tend to be able to bring just about anything back to SharePoint and the Office System in general, very quickly. So I decided to commit some of my thoughts to digital paper…

Workplaces are social endeavors. By their very nature, we congregate workers in the same space for productivity and development. We segregate that space for individual productivity, but the space is generally open and conducive for knowledge transfer and collaboration. A colleague pops in to ask a question about a project, a supervisor sticks their head in to see how things are going, the phone rings with a customer asking about a product. For the information worker it does not stop there. The day is a perpetual motion machine for talking, chatting, discussing, and hopefully getting some work done. So how does this relate to my passion for sharepoint? Not yet…additionally we socialize at lunch and for an hour either side of it…'you want to go eat?', 'where ya wanna eat?' ' I ate there yesterday let's go someplace else', 'that was a great burger, we should go there again' where did you go for lunch?', you get the picture. 3 hrs of lost productivity right there, then there's the coffee breaks, coke breaks, smoke breaks, meetings, meetings and meetings. It's a real wonder we ever get ANYTHING DONE. So, one of the tools we have to be more productive is our business computer. The company gives us internet access for email, research, etc…but along comes Facebook, and Twitter, and Blogs, and MySpcae, and 'oh my gawd who's doing any work in here!?!?!' so a lot of companies are 'banning' these time sux. Block it at the firewall, monitor and police it! But the thing is, that in our socially charged workplaces, these social networks are essentially no different than the time sucks that already exist. The difference is that they are additional time sux. So what is a boss to do? Information workers are being called upon 24x7x365 these days. The line between work/career and personal time is blurring more and more. 'If the boss expects me to answer a call from a customer while I am out fishing on the weekend, then I should be allowed to socialize more and in different ways while I am at work.'

Understandable, so this brings us to Windows SharePoint services have some good capabilities to provide professional social networking within the enterprise. Out of the box there are blogs and wikis, which I have discussed, and are core to the web 2.0 feature set. RSS feeds provide easy access to changing data in a 'consumer' based manner. Additionally though, WSS offers a framework for additional social networking. So, an intrepid administrator or power user could create and deliver a twitter like (micro-blogging) feature using simple custom lists, and what's more provide access to that from client apps like word, excel, and more. Additionally, there is opportunity for integration with external sites like twitter, flickr, facebook and more, easily, by doing some simple sharepoint designer customizations. We can bring that information into the enterprise and deliver directly to the information worker. Looking up the food chain, Office SharePoint Server offers additional features and functionality for social networking. This is focused on the Mysites features of MOSS. As part of the Office system, it provides a point for information workers to focus their professional internal business networking and couple that with their productivity. SharePoint focuses information from the active directory, and organizational data, along with roles based permissions and security to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time. It facilitates moving a home directory from a file share or event the local desktop to a web portal environment. Additionally person workspaces and cross–team collaboration are easier.

SharePoint for an enterprise is a strong portal application, that grows with your organization. In this session I have not even included any of the business intelligence or business data integration that is possible.