• First open Internet Information Service Manager on the server and check that the website “OfficeScan” exists. Now close the Internet Information Service Manager.
• Now open a command prompt and change to the “Trend Micro\Security Server\PCCSRV” folder
• Now type “svrsvcsetup.exe -uninstall” and wait for this to complete, it could take a number of minutes.
• Now open Internet Information Service Manager on the server and check that the website “OfficeScan” no longer exists. Now close the Internet Information Service Manager.
• Now type the following commands pressing enter after each one:
• srvsvcsetup -install
• srvsvcsetup -setvirdir
• srvsvcsetup -setprivilege
• srvsvcsetup -enablessl
• Now restart the following services using the Services Applet:
• Trend Micro Security Server Master Service
• IIS Admin Service
• World Wide Web Publishing Service

Now if you try to access the console you should be able to log on to the console successfully.

This worked for us each time, so I hope it’ll work for others too.

- Rob

For those that rotate in the same IT circles as I do then you will have seen much of the buzz at the minute surrounding the CompTIA Reseller Forum this week and the TCA Conference. Both of these events were fantastic but I will not go into how the day panned out as other have done this already, you can read about it here or here. One of the points that was raised in the resellers forum was the relationship with vendors or distributors and the IT Resellers. The fact is that many of the traditional distributors don’t give a lot of attention to small IT resellers, the kind of people that were at the Resellers Forum, as they are moving lots of boxes to the big retailers such as Ebuyer, Dabs etc. The reality is that much of the time it is cheaper for the reseller to buy from the likes of EBuyer and Dabs as they are generally cheaper than buying through the normal distribution channel. The problem for the reseller is the consumer, the very people they are selling to can buy from these guys as well.

One of the suggestions from a friend and fellow member, Richard Tubb from Netlink IT, was to engage with the vendors and distributors on a personal level by asking them ‘How can I help you’. Now this philosophy, in this context, is quite unusual. Don’t get me wrong the concept is not alien to me, as a BNI member I am a big believer of ‘Givers Gain’ which basically says if I help you then someday you will help me too. However, I have never thought of it in this context and it started me thinking about things. After thinking about this a little I realised that this was something that I was already engaged in with a distributor of mine, Security IP. Some of my fellow AMITPRO members will already know Security IP but they are small distributor by comparison to others out there but that does not make them weaker but stronger in my opinion. My account manager there is James Cole who I have known for more years than I care to recall as I knew him at the last company he worked for. We have always had a candid relationship as I explained from the outset that I would likely never bring him any *big* orders but I would do all I could to get him in front of other people like me to that they can get more business, and I did this because I wanted to not because there was anything in it for me. What has happened is that when there are any new products coming out then he calls me and we get to be one of the first to try it, more importantly our feedback is heard and, where appropriate, acted upon. I also get help with marketing

Now as a small IT reseller would I get that type of support from a larger distributer? Almost certainly not, so why would a smaller distributer want to engage me in such a way? Well that I can only speculate from my point of view but firstly we have a relationship; what I call a personal-business relationship where by the personal boundaries blur slightly around that edge of the business relationship. Secondly, from the outset we have both made a concerted effort to help one another to develop our businesses by helping the other. Not in a conscious or premeditated way, if either of who has not been able to reciprocate it would not have made any difference, the relationship was there anyway.

So what is the point of the post? The point is that we live in a time when everything has been commoditised and we go after the cheapest price, much of this has been created by the box shifters like EBuyer, Dabs even Asda and Tesco. In spite of this there are still suppliers, distributors and vendors out there that want to make those personal connections and work with small IT resellers who don’t think that they are ‘big’ enough to be noticed. So speak up because you may just be surprised.

- Rob

Right now I am sat in a TravelLodge in Leicester as I am attending the CompTIA resellers forum at 7.30am at the Holiday Express followed by the TCA Conference at 10.45am at the Walkers Stadium. Yesterday evening all of the people attending the Resellers Forum were out for a dinner kindly laid on by Kaseya, and yes it was a room full of geeks but it was a great night out and fantastic opportunity for me to get together again with Chris Timm, Richard Tubb, Andy Parkes, William Linard, Adam Harris and many others some of whom I had not see for some time. These guys are some of the best in our industry and I proud to say my friends. On the face of it some of these guys run IT companies that are doing what I do so why on earth would I want to be socialising with them much less sharing the way we work? Quite simply because through sharing, you get the reassurance that ‘that awkward customer’ is not just unique to you and that others face the same challenges that you do. Also by working together we can all help to raise the standard in the industry and that is what the Resellers Forum is all about. If you run an IT business and are interested in getting involved in the Resellers Forum then you should contact William Linard for more information.

Many years ago while I was working at a local Nottingham ISP I was asked to go on a radio show to discuss the dangers that the Internet presents to the younger generation. Evan all those years ago people were aware of the dangers but they still needed to be reminded of what to watch out for. Now lets roll forward some 8 years to the Facebook, MySpace and MSN generation where you are considered strange if you don’t have a Facebook, MySpace or MSN account and to not be on the Internet makes you a ‘dork’*.

So is the Internet any safer now that it was back then? No.

What we are seeing more of very passive behaviour on the part of parents and the role that they *must* play in order to keep their kids safe on the Internet. Now that may seem like a harsh statement and I would like to think that most parents are sensible but many aren’t. Only today I heard that someone I know has just signed their son up to a free Live email account and then set them up with a Facebook account despite their son being below the age of 13 required by Facebook. Now we all know that there are kids out there below the age and the that is a fact but there are ways that this can be done *safely*, let me give an example.

Firstly if you wish to give your child an email account of any sort then you should setup the computer so that you get a copy of ANY emails that they get. This means that you can ensure that they are not talking to people that they shouldn’t be that could bring them to harm. Second, if you are going to set them up with a service like Facebook ensure that you set it up under an email address that is delivered to YOU not to the child. That way if someone wants to add them as a friend then you will get to know about it so that you can make sure that they do REALLY know them and they are not just added them for the ‘numbers’.  As adults there are a great many people that just anyone as a friend on Facebook as it is a ‘numbers game’ which is ok as we are mature enough to make that decision, but as a child then this *must* be policed by someone who is responsible. This does not even take into account ensuring that ’safe surfing’ is taking place with kids.

The fact that someone in this day and age has setup an account without putting any measures in to place to ensure the child’s safety is really bewildering and disturbing to say the least. In our house we have an ADSL router which has built in content filtering to ensure that all of the children are able to surf the Internet safely without exposure to ‘unwanted’ content. I have also setup OpenDNS to ensure that whatever the filter in the router does not pickup then OpenDNS will get it. The children’s computers also run Interguard which allows me to monitor things that they do such as MSN, web mail as well as keystroke logging. This means that I can monitor things that they do without them knowing, not so I can play ‘god’ over what they do but so that I can be a responsible parent and ensure that they are safe. The last thing is, when old enough, they can go on Facebook but email notifications are sent to me or Jules so that we can make sure that they are not doing anything daft and the kids respect that.

I like to think that our children are quite ’savy’ when it comes to computers and the Internet and they are but when they’re chatting on MSN they have no idea that the person they are talking to is really who they claim they are…that’s my job.

At the end of the day this is just my opinion for what it’s worth and as much as I would love it to be, the world is not perfect but you can be damn sure I will do all I can to make my kids worth perfect. As always I welcome you’re thoughts on this as opinions always vary.

- Rob

* not sure if the term dork still exists but it did in my day.

I was speaking with a friend the other day and he was having a bad day. First off in the morning his car wouldn’t start as the battery decided to die. Then after a neighbour had managed to get it jump started he then couldn’t get out his street because of all of the snow and had to wait until there was some grit down which meant he was late for work.  Once at work things didn’t get any better one of his companies servers started to have problems which is when we were speaking.  He explain how his day had gone and I said to him, “sounds like you’ve had some fun today”. At this he replied “ain’t that the truth, still, s**t happens!”. This got me thinking.

How many times have we all heard that said? I know I have said it a fair share myself over the years but when you say this what are you really saying to yourself and more importantly what are others hearing? Ok we’ll start with what others are hearing as that is sometimes more important in life. At best they find this funny and laugh it off as just something funny, however more often you will be seen as a very negative person, a ‘glass half empty kinda guy’. People inherently do not like to be around negative people, they want to surround themselves with positive, happy people that are going to help them to feel positive and happy themselves. After all when you meet with someone and they ask if you are well, they don’t want to hear that your back aches from driving 4 hours to see them, or that your tired because you had to get up at 3am to get to the appointment with them on time. They want to hear how great you are and how wonderful life is (though not literally).

So what does it say to yourself? If you are not able to find the positives in any situation then you will always see the negative, obviously. However, the impact on your life can be massive as over a period of time (which could be months or years) it can eventually start to make you feel unhappy with your life and every thing will just seem dour and pointless. It may seem a little extreme but I have been there and after a number of tough years in both work and family I found it hard, real hard with daily life but I still carried on. What changed me was two things. First of is someone who I consider to be a very good friend who over a period of time helped me to see there was two ways to look at everything and what you take from it is a choice and you must choose to take the positive or the negative. The second was when I joined a business networking group, the people there were *very* positive people despite being early morning. What I learned there was while you will make some close friends you can really talk to your must put your best business face on and show everyone there that you are having the best day ever because when you do people naturally gravitate to you.

With that in mind lets take another look at my friends day and see what he could have took from this had he looked at things differently:

“First off in the morning his car wouldn’t start as the battery decided to die. Then after a neighbour had managed to get it jump started” – What can be taken from this? Ok first off the car would not start which is a real pain for anyone who has had it happen. That said a good neighbour came over and helped him get it ‘jump started’ which took a LOT less time than waiting for a break down truck to come. So he has good neighbours to be thankful for.

“….he then couldn’t get out his street because of all of the snow and had to wait until there was some grit down which meant he was late for work.” - So he couldn’t get out of the street straight away because of the snow, after all we did have some last week. However, the positive here is that it turns out that once again one of his neighbours had some grit and went out and spread it the length of the road so all the neighbours could get out.

“Once at work things didn’t get any better one of his companies servers started to have problems which is when we were speaking.” – Here again is another positive. Ok on of the servers is down and clearly he was out of his depth, but what he did was called me and we located the problem, resolve it and had the server up and running in less than an hour.

So next time you’re having a tough day, always, always find the positives in whatever happens because it is always there. It’s all too easy to focus on what it negative in the world but it takes true spirit to find the positives.

I wish you all the greatest success for the New Year, hope you all have a great one!!

- Rob

To cut a long storey short the two key things happened that sealed our fate to 6.5hrs in A+E and a lot of stress and arguments. The first thing was that the doctor did not contact the people we had clearly told him to speak with to get more information. Instead he just rang the on-call person which mean that the wrong information again was fed back. The second was that the carefully written procedures for handling Daniel and the care & oxygenation plans were not made accessible to all people that may be in contact with him. This mean that he was given all of the wrong treatment.

So what has this to do with my IT life? Simple.  The first lesson is when you are dealing with a client, new or existing, the most important thing to do is LISTEN. Let them talk, make notes and ask questions. This simple step alone can save you hours in wasted time and if the client is on a flat-fee contract this means money saved. Second lesson is as you begin to create business processes, checklist and procedures to run your business smoother make sure that everyone that needs to know they are there..know. After all you could have the best product/service on the planet but shouting about it in the middle of a dessert is not gonna do a great deal of good is it.

So to summarise; Stop, Listen then Talk….in that order then you can’t go far wrong.

Any thoughts? I’d love to hear them.

- Rob

However, as I have gotten more involved in the business of running a business and not just owning a job it has become much more difficult to remember this so fluently as I used to. This gave rise to processes. Many people have come across Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) which are common practice in large organisations but not so in small businesses, why? The reason is quite simple; In order for a large business to run fluently and in the way the creator designed it there must be an SOP as he/she will not be there to train every role in the business.

I am currently in the process of creating a whole raft of checklists for tasks which are undertaken at a clients site along with business processes for things that must be completed within our own business. So what needs to be documented? Anything and everything…..this sounds like a mammoth task but it isn’t. The reality is that you need to document anything which needs to be done but should not require you to perform it yourself.  For example my topic this weekend is ‘SBS2oo3 to SBS 2008 migration checklist’. This is simply a checklist to tech’s to following when they are performing this type of migration. It is not a full migration manual for SBS but it is a ‘crib sheet’ to help job the memory of a training technician so that something important is not forgotten.

Does your business need checklists and procedures? Maybe. Would it benefit? Definitely.

- Rob

“The Application has requested the runtime to terminate it in a unusual way. Please contact the application’s support team for more information”

The first job was to install all of the available updates which did not resolve the issue so a search of the usual online communities was in order and after a short search I came across someone with the same issue here.

The suggested resolution was to open Active Directory Sites and Services which in my case was not affected, then go to ‘Tool’ and on the ‘Disk Cleanup’ tab click on delete files. The issue seems to be caused by the installation of third party apps, however there is nothing unusual installed on this server but in this instance the AD tools were not happy. No the less simply following this method the issue was resolved and I hope this helps others.

- Rob

None the less the first person to that came to speak with me was Adam Harris from Bear-IT who came over to speak with me and discuss what I did. This totally opened my eyes to the fact that maybe, just maybe, those other IT companies were not so evil after all and that maybe, just maybe, there could be synergies between seemingly rival businesses. After this Adam invited me up to meet with him to discuss things further. I was told by another IT company that I was working with at the time not to discuss software and tools etc as they should be a closely guarded ’secret’. However, once I started talking with Adam I found that we all do the same things, same tools, same software just a different business with different faces. So I reciprocated the openness that was shown to me.

Fast forward on to the beginning of this year when I was approached by another IT consultant and fellow business owner from Birmingham. Richard Tubb from Netlink IT contacted me following some posts which I had made on Twitter. After reading Richard’s blog it seemed clear that he had travelled the business path which I wanted to embark upon, making the move from being ’self-employed’ to being a ‘business owner’, so we began to talk. Once again I was astounded at the openness of information that was being afforded to me by someone I had only known a short time. Things such as the type of tools to use, how to deliver the best customer experience, service management and delivery, all of which is normally hidden information within the IT trade. So why was all of this being given free of charge, without a catch or clause? Because Richard believed in the community and the power of working together instead of against each other. Now all of this collaboration what highlighted when in May 2009 I was drafted in by Richard and some of his peers to assist in a massive nationwide upgrade project for one of their clients, you can read all about it here. All in all there was 8 different IT businesses working together under on collaborative umbrella which meant that what was a massive project which included over a dozen servers, 200+ desktops across 13 sites was all made possible by the IT community working together instead of against each other.

It was once said by John Donne “No man is an island”, and no truer word has been said. For those that run businesses it can be quite isolating but there are people out there who are willing to work with you and help you so don’t be afraid to ask.

If you are interested in developing a strategic alliance with myself then please feel free to contact me at rob@potter-tate.co.uk. Alternatively if you have a storey you would like to share about how the community has helped you then send it over as it would be great to share.

- Rob

What I have learnt over these last months is that I have spent most of the last few years just “getting on with it” without actually knowing what ‘”it” is that I am trying to achieve. Through the introduction that I had made to a book called “E-Myth Revisited” I have learnt a great deal about small businesses and why they succeed and more importantly why the fail, I would encourage ANY business owner to read this as there is something for everyone in there.

However, what I did learn was that I did not yet have any specific goals in my personal life or my work life, both of which are absolutely critical if you are to succeed. After all if you have no goals what have you to gauge success against? So I set about working out what my goals would be for the next year, while the book encourages ‘life’ goals I felt I needed to take smaller steps.  Once I had finished writing them down the list to be quite honest felt almost overwhelming and I felt a little lost with it.  That feeling has been lurking around for some time but recently I had what some would call an epiphany which has changed my perspective a little.

I have always been a keen cyclist but about a year ago my road bike was side-lined due to mechanical problems which I just didn’t know how to get sorted. But thanks, and that’s a BIG thanks, to my dad he took it and managed to get it sorted out (thanks dad!). So about a month and half ago I started back getting up at 6am and cycling. At first I was doing 7 miles in the morning and soon moved on to 14 miles which was a really great feeling. This weekend I stepped it up to 18 miles which was no big deal but along the way there is a hill, not too steep, but it is about a mile long. So here I am 6:30am going up this long dragging hill in the lowest gear at just 5mph. I looked up the hill to see yet more hill and thought I need to walk, there’s no way I can get all the way up there.  It was an all consuming and overwhelming feeling that I felt I had no way of overcoming. Then it suddenly dawned on me and I thought, “if I walk this will hurt, if I cycle this will hurt and while I cannot manage all that way I CAN get just 1 metre further”.  Now logic may well be screaming “all those 1 metres all add up to the same distance you moron”, my heart is saying “I can do 1 metre more”.

So I continued up this hill completely and totally focused on just 1 meter ahead with the occasional look up the hill for any obstacles ahead until I hit the top, where I relaxed and just pedalled on. The strange thing was all the hills on this route after this one was so much easier by comparison and they really did feel much, much easier.

Without realising it I had broken down this insurmountable goal of climbing up this long drawn out hill to much smaller, manageable steps of 1 metre chunks.  By focusing on a ‘micro-goal’ and making sure that I kept looking ahead to check I was on the right path with no dangers I was able to achieve my goal.  I have now applied this same logic to my business goals and suddenly they don’t seem too insurmountable anymore I just need to take one step at a time.

To some this may be obvious as some people work this way naturally but to others it isn’t always and if this has been of use then please let me know. Or if you have any better ideas on how to make goals more bite sized then let me know as I am always interested in new ways of doing things.

- Rob