Month: March 2008

Body: Have you recently gone AWOL without any form of communication for a few days?  I have to say I’ve not done this in many many years.  I’ve always had a mobile phone within reach, or an Internet connection handy – even if it is just GPRS.  This weekend, I’m going AWOL.  No laptop, not mobile phone, about the most technological thing I’ll have is my wristwatch (and that’s analogue too!).  I’m taking a good old fashioned pen and paper for anything that I need to write down and think I can’t remember. In this day and age, we take … Continue reading Stopping to smell the roses

Body: Ok – so I’m posting this a day late 🙂  Friday was my last day at Trend.  It was a week that I really enjoyed.  I met lots of new people and got the unique chance to express directly to these people about all the things that matter to us in the SMB IT Professional / Reseller Community.  I’ll post next week on some wrap up items. On my last day, I began with spending 2 hours presenting / discussing with the teams that I’ve met about a summary of my experiences, along with suggestions as to how I … Continue reading Trend Taiwan – Day 5

Body: Well – today I spend time with the QA department.  Kind funny really because last night the team released the external beta of WFBS v5.0 (aka CSM 5.0).  Max and Eric from the QA team walked me through the development cycle from a QA perspective.  I got to understand the stages of development from Pre-Alpha through to GM release (final shipping product).  One of the most interesting things that I found out was that Trend have made a change to the way they do the development and sustaining engineering side of things.  Previously (and I think like most companies), … Continue reading Trend Taiwan – Day 4

Body: Another round of blogs that I read focused on the business side of SMB IT consulting.  Some of these are not direct answers to your business problems, but ideas for future directions you might want to take.  BlogStorm Online Marketing is one of those.  This site talks about how to use your website to get higher rankings with the various search engines.  Customers that already know you and your products will likely know where your website is.  However new customers won’t and this is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) comes in.  There’s some interesting ideas here in this site, … Continue reading Business Blogs I read – Pt 2

Body: Sean is one of the longer serving members of the SBS team in Redmond and he recently did an interview and showed of the SBS 2008 Backup and gave an overview of the SBS console.  Check it out here http://edge.technet.com/Media/683/ Category: SBS 2008 / Cougar Published: 20/03/2008 9:37 AM

Body: Ok – so today is the day I spend with the Research and Development team.  I arrived at the office to find that the lead for the team has pulled an all nighter and only left at 7am – I guess this is the real world now huh 🙂  So Jonas is my lead today.  He’s just given me the latest build of Worry Free Business Security 5.0 (aka CSM 5.0) to install.  This product is within days of going into a public beta and yesterday I saw some of the screens and functionality for the first time and … Continue reading Trend Taiwan – Day 3

Body: Today I spent time with the User Interface team talking to them about how the product looks and how they expose features of the product to us.  I’ve seen some very cool previews of things to come and taken a lot of the feedback that people have given me direct to the team that make the design decision.  Thanks to Charlene, Jecy, Theresa and Mayur for the chance to do this. So some specifics… How would you like to see a one button install for CSM for SMB on an SBS server?  Ideally I think it could be done … Continue reading Trend Taiwan – Day 2

Body: I get asked from time to time by many SMB IT consultants about which business blogs to read.  Here’s a few that have interesting stuff on them this week.  I’d recommend you take a look and see for yourself if they strike a chord with you. Small Business Trends – this has some great info, normally focused on the USA, but equally applicable across the globe.  They have a post today offering 100 of the best kept marketing secrets.  Check it out here  This book is assembled based on community input which is a neat idea. Flying Solo – … Continue reading Business Blogs I read