Simplex-IT BizBlog

Bob here.  In 2007, Simplex-IT was started with two employees. At this point, we currently have five full-time employees and four part-time employees. An unstated goal of ours has always been a high ratio of folks providing service (the technical folks) versus the sales and support people.

So it’s taken me a while to get comfortable with adding a support position to the organization. To date I’ve taken personal responsibility for billing, reporting, trying to maintain project timelines, vendor relationships, payables and the like. So far, so good.

But I can tell that’s not going to last for long, therefore I’m creating a new position within the organization. Tentatively titled “Office Manager,” this position is still somewhat under construction. However at the least it will have the following responsibilities:

• customer billing
• accounts payables
• Accounts Receivable
• verify technicians schedules and ticketing

Salary is commensurate with experience (whatever the heck that means). The ideal candidate needs to be able to work with a wide variety of people, must have attention to detail, and be able to work on many projects daily. In addition, basic computer skills including Microsoft Office are a necessity. This position is neither a gopher nor a secretary but a critical piece of this organization.

If you’re interested, send me a resume along with salary requirements to Bob@simplex-IT.com.

Ok, I’ve been a geek most of my life.  If anybody starts talking about geek nostalgia (usually starting a conversation with something like “My first IT job we used paper tape to load a program into our 16k minicomputer while dinosaurs roamed the Earth,” I’ll jump right in.

But I’ve come to realize the importance of talking about business.  About understanding business processes and needs.

And it’s a skill that’s still sorely lacking in the IT world these days.  And in my mind it’s the best skill set any IT professional can develop in terms of increasing their worth to their organization (or client, in the case of consultants).

I’ll be speaking at the Ohio North SQL Server User Group on Tuesday 3 January about this very topic.  Click here for more information, and to register.

The meeting is free, open to the public, and there will be pizza, plus a couple raffle prizes (at least 2 copies of Windows Ultimate!).

This is our way of saying “thanks” to the 25 or so people who joined us at the fundraiser a couple of weeks ago.  And to thank my wife for giving me something as a Christmas present that was earlier given away as a raffle prize.

Thanks again to Microsoft and Life Equity for adding some additional raffle prizes!

Here’s a quick video combining both topics.

Ok, this is thanks to our bud Dan Hanson over at GreatLakesGeek.com.

Don’t know what to get that Microsoft geek who’s on your list, but you really don’t want to spend anything on?  We’ve got you covered!

It seems that Microsoft has put up 7, yup 7 free technical eBooks for downloading.

Yup, they're free!

Now, these are pretty good books.  Each of them are decent sized, and worth perusing.

And the topics cover a wide range of topics, including:

• IT Careers
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Virtualization
• Office 365
• SQL Server 2008 R2
• SQL Server “Denali” (the new version!)
• Deploying Windows 7

 Good stuff!

Click here to get your copies (oh, and check out the poster showing creating snapshots in a Hyper-V environment)

Bob here.  Over the past couple years, I’ve tried a lot of different marketing techniques. E-mail, postcards, social media, mailing lists, blitz contains, smoke signals, phone campaigns and more.

Some things work. A lot of other things, not so much. But I do think that we’ve developed a pretty good program that’s working for us. It’s relatively low-cost, relatively measurable, and seems to generate an appropriate amount of business for us.  It’s a combination of blogs, email, FaceBook, LinkedIn, mail, phone, YouTube and shoe leather.

In discussions I’ve had with other business owners, both in and out of the IT business, there’s always been a keen interest in just how we do this. And, as you can see from this YouTube video (recorded from an online meeting I gave to about 75 similarly positioned IT firms back in June), I’m always willing to share our methods and madness.

And it recently occurred to me that some non-IT folks might want to hear what we do.

So here’s my offer. If you’d be interested in hearing what we at Simplex-IT do for our marketing programs, drop me a line. If enough people are interested on this, I’ll put together an informal get-together where I’ll review our programs, and have some open discussion on what works and what doesn’t in this fun economic time.  Obviously, no cost or anything.

What are we selling? Nothing. But I’ve had enough conversations with folks to know that this is a tough topic. And I thought it might be worthwhile to hear from someone who’s not selling something.

So, if you’re interested, e-mail me at Bob@Simplex-IT.com, and let me know! Operators are… Well, actually we don’t have any operators. But if we did, rest assured they’d be standing by.

Bob here. As you know, we are a Microsoft Partner. Until recently, we’ve resisted the temptation to going for the larger scale (and somewhat expensive) higher-level partnerships, not only with Microsoft but other vendors as well. In many cases, these vendor partnership programs are little more than marketing strategies, helping to get logos and implied skills out more. So you might say I’m a little jaded in terms of partnership programs.

Well, I was. Now that Simplex-IT is a Silver Partner with Microsoft, I am firmly convinced that the only way a company has a remote chance of successful IT project implementation is to use a Microsoft partner.

Okay, I have to confess. That was a bit jaded, even by my standards<g>.

So why did we finally decide to go with the deeper Microsoft partnership? The key issue with the partnership is demonstrating the competencies that go with it. In our case we chose two competencies: “Server Platform” and “Portals and Collaboration.”

When you consider competencies, at least with Microsoft, you’re really talking about two things. Knowledge and Experience.  Knowledge is determined through employment of certified individuals, and experience is determined through your customers admitting to both knowing you and engaging you in projects that fall under the competencies.

Yeah, yeah, yeah… There’s money involved too (isn’t there always?).  But honestly, that wasn’t the most important issue.

Actually, on review we found that we already had both requirements under our belts. It was simply a question of formalizing the experience by contacting customers and asking them to share with Microsoft their experiences. Thankfully, we have a lot of great customers out there, and many of them still think (for some strange reason) that we know what we’re doing<g>.

So literally it took us about two or three days to get these two competencies. And my suspicion is that before the years over will probably add a couple more under our belts as well.

Are we a different company because of this? Of course not. Are we going to hold this over everybody’s heads, pretending that this makes us somebody special? Again, of course not. Over the past several years, I’ve made the interesting transition from technician to business owner. And during this process one thing stands clear. The most effective way to communicate the quality of work and the dedication ain’t in marketing, advertising, certifications, or partner logos. It’s getting the prospective customers to talk to your existing customers.

At least that’s work for us so far.

Bob here.  Ok, this is our first real “contest.”  And we sort of added it on a whim, truth be told.  But I thought it might spice up the eNewsletter a bit.

Apparently I was right.  The amount of click through traffic doubled for the first day.  We received over 20 responses specifically to the contest.

First, the questions (and answers):

1. What is the most frequently used command in Windows Explorer?  (Answer:  Paste)
2. Where did we first hear about the Office 365 eBook?  (Answer:  Benoit Hamet’s Blog)
3. Why did the kittens stop their Light Saber battle?  (Answer:  because the guy was on the phone)

 As to the answers, sorry Matt, “Because the Chicken crossed the road” didn’t quite cut it.

 Of the first 5 people (Teri, Christopher, Scott, Ann and Bruce), Ann ended up being the winner of the $50 Amazon gift card!

Bob here.  I’m not one to resist a bargain.  Ok, actually I am, but not in this case.  When I heard that HP was discontinuing production of their TouchPad line of tablets (click here for details) after only 7 or so weeks on market, I leapt into action.  Ok, actually, I did nothing.  But when I heard that HP was selling them for around $100 apiece (down from about $500), ok, now that got my attention.

Yesterday, my TouchPad appeared.  The first thing, of course, was get it connected to Office 365.  And that’s what this blog entry is about.  Keep in mind that the TouchPad is based on the webOS, both of which were given HP buh-bye.  But connecting to Office 365’s email is pretty simple.  You go through these steps:

First, you’ll need to know the actual server that your Office 365 account is hosted on.  To do this, go to a workstation (something with web access):

• Log onto Outlook Web (www.Outlook.com) with your Office 365 credentials
• Click on “Options” in the top right
• Select “See All Options…”
• Click on “Settings for POP, IMAP, and SMTP access…” in the middle left of the screen
• Under “SMTP setting” you’ll see a “Server name:”
• That gibberish to the right is the server name “pod51022.outlook.com” as an example.  Right that down!

(Ok, now we’re working on the TouchPad)

• Ok, hopefully you’ve set up the internet access already (or this will be a short trip)
• Tap the launcher icon (bottom right)
• Tap the “SETTINGS” tab on the upper right
• Tap the “Accounts” icon
• Tap the “Add an Account” button
• Tap the “Microsoft Exchange” button
• Tap the “Manual Setup” button
• For the manual setup, you’ll be asked for 5 things:
  • Email Address:  That would be your email address.
  • Server:  “https://”  and the server for your email account (see note above).  So using that example it would be https://pod51022.outlook.com
  • Domain:  Leave blank
  • Username:  You email address
  • Password:  that would be your password.
• Tap “Create Account” to finish.  This should take maybe a minute.
• By default, email, contacts, address lookup and calend are synchronized.  Change that as you will, then click “Create Account.”

Famous last words, you’re done.  Pretty simple, huh?  Hopefully this was helpful!

Bob here. I first saw this reported by Benoit Hamet on his Blog, but immediately wanted to pass it on to you folks. Microsoft often publishes pretty decent eBooks on their latest technologies, and then does a very poor job of getting that information out to the general public.

Well, they’ve done it again. This time it’s about Office 365. The e-book, entitled “Microsoft Office 365: Connect and Collaborate Virtually Anywhere, Anytime” was recently made available. Like previous offerings about Office 2010, BPOS, SQL 2008 R2, and others it’s a decent book, and hey… It’s free.

Click here to get it.

Bob here.  Y’know, here at Simplex-IT, we’ve had a pretty successful track record with our marketing. For those of you keeping track, you may recall that back in May we held a Live Meeting event where we described our strategies for marketing to over 50 other IT Managed Service Providers (from as far away as New Zealand and France). Since then, we’ve had several requests for copies of that meeting.

The only conclusion we can come to is that there are a lot of Managed Service Providers who need assistance getting their daily sleep.

Well, wait no longer! We have now posted the entire Live Meeting content into one long YouTube video. Yep, one hour and forty seven minutes of Bob talking endlessly about Simplex-IT and marketing.

Simplex-IT has long had a strategy of combining diverse methods as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, blogging, eNewsletters, lunchinars, postcards, telephone and would probably use smoke signals at one point or another. But we’re pretty careful about not wasting our efforts. So these tools work rather well together, without us having to rewrite marketing materials every time we want to use a different tool. And our costs are reasonably under control.

Keep in mind that this isn’t a sales pitch. Simplex-IT doesn’t sell any of the services Bob discusses. We’re just sharing our experiences with the hope that some folks find it useful.

Is it a smooth presentation? Heck, no! This is, after all, Bob we’re talking about.

But hopefully this will give you some idea as to how we use marketing successfully here at Simplex-IT.

Enjoy!