Brandon Darling

Google provides great email service via gmail. However, they also provide a whole bevy of services for small and large businesses, alike. Check out Google Apps:

Google Apps provides email, shared calendaring, shared contacts, and an online document workspace where you can create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations - all compatible with Microsoft Office. The best part is that all of this is available with a web browser - no client software is necessary.

For larger enterprises, Google Apps provides email filtering, spam blocking, and archive retention for compliance purposes at very reasonable rates.

I’ve read my share of business and management books.  I’ve also sat across the table with hundreds of business owners.  The books provide great theory, the experience talking with business owners, great insight.

Business owners have this thought that, somehow they will become successful, and then they will do great things.

My clients consistently balk at our proposals to use technology tools to increase profits.  We can do that by lowering costs, creating more sales, or by making more efficient processes.

The response is always, “Oh we’ll worry about that later, right now we just need to focus on making money.”

Hmm.  Cart before the horse, I see.

My answer is this: your business will only be successful when you are doing successful things.

Being organized, diligent, and informed come first - they are not a byproduct of being successful.  Success is rewarded to those willing to pay their dues and be organized and informed, so they can be diligent in their pursuit of success.

Look at any organization that’s truly profitable and growing.  They have invested in the tools and training that their people need.  They are not necessarily on the forefront of technology, but their people have the tools which exist today in order to be more effective, more often.

Wildly successful companies are also that way because they realize their greatest asset is information - and they give as many people as much information as they can and allow those people to share information.  Organically, teams of people grow and begin to manipulate and create a new paradigm from that information.  Something now exists where nothing existed before.

So, hate technology all you want.  Realize that’s wasted energy and that you need to get the tools required to be successful.  Technology = tools and you’d best get them, and learn to use them, in a hurry.  Your competition likely already has them.

The Midwest lags the development of new business and technologies on the coasts by at least three years - sometimes as many as 10.  As such, there are many long-established Midwest companies that are big, complacent, and slow to act.

The upside to all this is that the Midwest is prime territory for new entrepreneurs.  But not in the high tech arenas: the Midwest won’t support the high tech infrastructure or culture that the coasts nurture.

No, in the Midwest the opportunity is this: find any successful company in any industry, clone their business model, and make fewer mistakes than they do.

Business doesn’t require creativity, genius, or a lot of money.  All you have to do is find what someone else is doing well, and do that very same thing - just without all their mistakes.

Taking away mistakes is easy.  Use technologies to automate redundant processes, keep the number of workers low from the beginning, create a culture where successful people make more money and those who don’t move up are simply fired.

Long-established manufacturing, banking, financial, insurance, and service companies are in for a big surprise.  You’ll be taken over by your competition who has half the work force and performs twice as well.  The reason?  They’re not better than you, smarter than you, or even more creative.

They simply make fewer mistakes than you do.

I was in a client’s office last week.  This gentleman has been a local community pillar, and has served as president of a large, local bank for decades.

On his desk sits a computer.  The screen, full of yellow and pink post-it notes.

When I asked him why he doesn’t use his computer, he responded “Oh, I don’t trust computers.”

He said it with pride - as if it made him more successful and more focused as a leader to be without a computer.  After all, Warren Buffet doesn’t use a computer.  Therefore, if I don’t use my computer, I am Warren Buffet.

Puke.

The big problem with this situation is this: as a bank president, his ENTIRE BUSINESS has depended on computer technology since the late 1970’s.  His bank, today, provides online banking, online bill pay, and his bank has a website full of online information about different financial products.

His confession of mistrust of technology should make me question the trustworthiness of his entire institution.  Ask THAT question and you’ll see a deer in headlights.

Somewhere, among the old, crusty, stuffy businessmen, being anti-technology is a sign of strength.  By sheer will, these men think they ensconce themselves in a world set apart; they drive their expensive (or modest) cars and dictate letters over their cell phones as if the rest of the world is too distracted to achieve their level of success.

Fundamentally, a distrust of the computer on your desk is fear of your own ignorance.  Our entire modern lives are completely dependent on the successful operation of hundreds of thousands of computers: from what’s on our desk, to what’s in our car, to what’s in our doctor’s office, to how we communicate via land line, cell phone, or even what we watch on TV.

Even that newspaper you read every morning would not be there - and be “trustworthy” - without computers.

Old dogs didn’t grow up with technology.  Admitting ignorance and asking for help, is, apparently, the worlds most shameful crime, punishable by exile from the elite group of techno-phobes that still think they matter.

The fact is this: success comes from adaptation and learning. Status Quo mediocrity gets you tired, poor, and old.

If you can’t learn something new, it’s a sign you no longer have the patience or the will power to be truly effective.  You’ve plateaued.  You’ve reached your summit.  Now get the hell out of the way!

Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Cisco are running circles around your business.  They not only understand technology, but they understand how to apply technology.  Now, you’ll never understand technology completely - but that’s not the point.  Puffing up your ego by stating that you don’t “trust” an inanimate object and in doing so are wiser for it, reveals to us “young bucks” that you’re in the headlights and ready to be run over.

I’ve worked on over a thousand individual IT projects.  Some have been small, others have involved international VPN systems with QOS for VoIP, and the relocation of an entire production datacenter with over 100 servers.

In all these projects, the smaller ones are more prone to failure and delays.  One would think that smaller, less complicated projects would be easier.  Here’s a brief analysis of why that’s not the case.  If you’re a business owner, read this very carefully.

Projects that have a total budget of under $10,000 I classify as “microprojects.”  At most, there should only be TWO people on these projects.  Of those two people, one has to be the decision maker - and the decision maker is the person who can spend money.  Any more people and these projects will cost more in wasted meetings and miscommuncation than they will ever bring in value to the company.  If you can’t afford to spend $10,000 with no more than a one-hour planning meeting then you need to focus on making more money.

Projects that spend more than $10,000 but less than $100,000 are small projects.  They typically involve less than six systems and are easily completed in under one week’s time.  These projects comprise the bulk of IT consulting work and they’re the MOST prone to failure.

Projects of this magnitude generally involve management and have more than one stakeholder - it is generally an entire department or possibly two departments.  The project involves phases, a multi-week project schedule, and generally is undertaken to realize some concrete gain, or return on investment.

Despite these critical factors, rarely is the requisite planning done in order to ensure success.  From a technical stand point, projects of this magnitude can be engineered in under a month - usually in one week.  The failure is almost always on the part of management to engage the pre-planning process.

To management, $10,000 on a line-item represents their quarterly bonus.  Subsequently, management engages “micro” projects in an attempt to make themselves usefull(less) by shaving that magic $100 from some significant (but misunderstood) line-item.

However, a $100,000 project is usually what small businesses spend on such trivial things as petty cash, professional service fees, or energy and transportation costs.  To management, $100,000 for a project is something they see every day.  As such, they don’t think about that project as much, and mentally disengage from the pre-planning process.

Having done this, management won’t respond thoughtfully to questions like “How long can these services be down?”, “Which departments or ongoing client projects require these services during the proposed transition?”, “If we have to modify the schedule, what are the high priority services and how do you define high priority?”

Management is *always* going to be taken by surprise on small IT projects - not because they’re complex, but because management won’t make decisions about the project because the cost seems small in the grand scheme of the business.  However, management will take a very, VERY keen interest when the accounting server goes down during the weekend upgrade and it won’t come back up - or when half the sales people stand to lose their last 3 years of email history.

At that point, management can do little or nothing.  So the point here?  Get involved on the front-end, during pre-planning.  Yes, plough through the technobabble.  LISTEN to your people.  LISTEN to your consultants.  Spit back what they say as you heard it until you get what they’re saying.

If you, as a business manager, won’t be engaged during pre-planning, then you forfeit your right to stand over the shoulders of your IT people shouting “JUST GET IT FIXED!”

I’ll cut right to the chase: there is an open source (FREE!) utility for remotely administering workstations.  From the company website:

SofTulz.net is excited to present Purgos Version 2.6, the latest Open Source solution for desktop management. Purgos gives its users complete administrative control over large numbers of computers from a single, easy to use console. Utilizing WMI for computer administration, it has the ability to instantly manage hundreds of NT workstations (Windows 2K3, 2K, XP) and server class operating systems, virtually eliminating the amount of IT work needed to meet the high demands of a thriving business.

Purgos offers a complete solution by providing the ability to:

distribute a clean operating system to any number of computers keep all computers up-to-date with security patches and virus updates instantly install and manage software applications to any number of computers collect and manipulate real time hardware, software, and system information track the inventory of computers within a network and provide an ownership mechanism schedule or instantly run detailed reports on a wide range of computer information and configurations remotely control a computer as if physically in front of the computer execute commands, processes, and batch files on any number of computers manage a network of computers both locally or from remote locations

Read more about this product here, or just get it here.

If you use this utility, please DONATE!!!  Even $20 will help the cause for this great utility!!!

I’ve used a remote control / remote access tool that few of my colleagues have heard about.  It’s a free utility called gencontrol, and the link for the .exe download is here.

This requires a Windows domain, or that the workstation you are trying to connect to has matching credentials from the workstation you’re currently logged on to.  In other words, if you’re on a workstation as a local admin, when you connect to another workstation, it’s admin account has to have the same password.  Period.  On a Windows domain, you have to have admin rights on the machine to which you wish to connect.

I put this little utility on the desktop of nearly every AD Domain Controller I administer.  It’s fast, small, light on resources, and works with Windows 9x all the way through XP.  I haven’t tried it with Vista.

With one click, it connects to a remote workstation by pushing the install files to the remote workstation, starting the service, and then connecting back the server or workstation from which you initiated control.  No installation required.

Sometimes when you end the remote session, or if the remote session abnormally terminates or crashes, the vnchooks.dll file will be locked and in-use on the target workstation.  Unfortunately, the gencontrol program doesn’t like it if it tries to reconnect to an abnormally terminated session - it will try and recreate, or push, the required files to the workstation, at which point it will see the existing files, and promptly throw an error - denying reconnection.  The only solution I have is the remote restart: open cmd.exe and issue “shutdown /r /m \\nameofnaughtyworkstation /t 00″.

You’ll have to wait for the system to come up again, at which point, you have to browse to \\nameofnaughtyworkstation\c$ and delete the VNCTEMP directory.  From there, you can reconnect with gencontrol.

If someone knows how to unlock an in-use file on a remote system, please let me know.

In short, this is one-click remote control that has no installation, little overhead, and can really save the day if you need remote control of a workstation on your network.

Yet another way to find your public IP address from behind a NAT firewall:

outsideip.org

Clean and simple.  Use the wget utility and you can write batch files that can find your outside IP!

I like this because I think it is faster to say “outsideip.org” than “whatismyip.com” or “whatismyipaddress.com” - there are a lot of words to spit out when you’re on the phone with someone else.  Plus, there’s a little alliteration to “OUtsideip.ORg” that helps it roll off the tongue faster.

Enjoy!

I consult for a lot of different clients, from executive home offices to companies with international offices and more than 5000 computers and servers in the enterprise. I’ve got a lot of experience. I like to say that being a consultant is like working in “dog years.” If you have a job at a company, all the experience you ever get is inside that one organization. You learn the politics and the pecking order in about three months. After that, you are NOT getting any new experience. You’re simply living out your years at that company, accumulating years of repeated experience.

Said another way, the typical IT employee with 15 years experience has 1 year of experience repeated 15 times.

For the consultant, it’s the other way: for every calendar year of experience, or time working as a consultant, you gain 6 to 7 “years” of real experiences.

It’s simple to understand when you think about it. As a consultant, I don’t have ONE boss, I have hundreds. I don’t know one set of office politics, I know dozens. I haven’t seen a few mistakes by one management team - I’ve seen thousands of mistakes by hundreds of management teams.

So it goes for most consultants or contractors. That’s why we get paid more than employees. We fix the problems before they start. When you, as a business owner, start thinking about a process - I’m already helping you strategize to avoid the mistakes you don’t even know you’ve made yet!

The other reason consultants are expensive is because of the pain factor. You, as a business owner, think that you have to do things your way. After all, it’s your business. Forget the fact that I do - and always will - know more about technology than you, you will create some mandate that hinders my ability to do what you hired me to do. You’ll have some policy, some rule, some hoop I have to jump because “that’s the way we do things here.”

Mind you, you had to hire me to solve a problem that you can’t, so let’s think twice about the way you do things, hmm?

So, because of that inane rule - the veritable flaming hoop, if you will - I charge extra. You want to do it your way? Fine, that’ll be extra, please. Sure, you’ll never see that extra fee as a line item on the invoice, but believe you me, it’s in there. That I promise.

But back to the original post - the “dog years” of the consultant. Next time you think about hiring a computer guy, think about his work history. Three, maybe four previous jobs? You like that? You think he’s a good worker and a good tech guy because he’s stable? His work history shows he can hold a job?

Trust me, the guy is REALLY good at maintaining status quo. That’s it.

Technology moves at a break-neck pace. What is practiced today will be obsolete tomorrow. A guy working a job in a cube can’t keep up. Period.

Consultants see more work environments, more problems, more mistakes, more challenges, and the SOLVE THOSE PROBLEMS at a pace that no computer employee can match. Consultants with 5 years of experience (calendar years) are 30 year veterans of the trade. They’re executive-level thinkers and you should treat them as such.

Don’t think someone in their 30s is worthy of that kind of respect? Then again, you’re afraid of computers, aren’t you? You’re an old dog - and you can’t stand new tricks.

This is why the punks that started Google are driving the new economy.

Get real.

Occasionally, truly disruptive technology emerges. Check out www.meraki.com - these are wireless mesh networking devices for under $200.

I have used these to create a network at an area hotel. There are 18 access points in the network, 10 of which are connected via CAT5 to a network switch and then on to a broadband Internet connection. The remaining 8 access points connect via the mesh capabilities of the software. It works flawlessly.

A pointer: I used the “outdoor” devices indoors, for a few reasons. First, they have a 200mw transmitter, and second, they come with a kit that allows you to mount them to a wall, pole-mast, or to a window with suction cups.

I think the nicest thing about these units is their cost and the “software” that manages them. I say software, but it is a hosted service provided by Meraki. Each of these units “phones home” when they connect to the Internet (either directly or through a nearby gateway node). You can configure the network, SSID, bandwidth shaping, and even a second SSID protected by WPA2 encryption. With the PRO models you can disable free access altogether, if you’re hell-bent on not sharing your Internet connection.

I have a 15dBi gain omni from Comet Antennas on the way. I want to test how far I can push the signal in an outdoor environment. Calculations say that the signal at 600 feet in free space should be -50 to -60 dBi, which is what you get from other routers at 20 feet!