Marketing the Microsoft Way

Anne Stanton posted a summary of the Microsoft Marketing web seminar today on her blog. She summarizes several good points that were made during the presentation. The presenter, Lori Stutsman, had lots of good tips to help you market better. Here a couple of things that stuck with me.

1. Mix up your approach, but keep the same message. Different people respond to different mediums. Post cards, email, letters, etc.


2. Stats say prospects have to be contacted three times to recognize your name and nine times to feel comfortable buying something from you. I like the Gentle Rain approach. Keep on them, but do it gently.


3. The best time to send out an email campaign is Tuesday and Wednesday. The best time of day is high noon. Mondays and Fridays are out because of the weekend. Thursday isn’t good because people are trying to clear things off for the weekend. Does this mean we only really work two days a week???


4. Microsoft is offering $600 dollar match for any campaign you launch though their web site. I took advantage of it a couple weeks ago. Now I just have to sit back and wait for the clients to bust down my door. Right?

There were many more tips, so I encourage you to review the web seminar when it’s made available. http://www.msreadiness.com/

One comment that I wanted to make at the web seminar, but held my tongue, was that SonicWALL has been helping partners run campaigns for years and they are a hell of a lot cheaper that MS. I have to give MS points for trying.

SonicWALL TZ170 and WSUS.... You two play nice now!

Here's and interesting problem that I encountered this week. I installed Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) a couple of weeks ago on my server. I put the computers into groups and approved all of the updated. I figured I was good to go, but after a week I noticed that I wasn't getting updates at the desktops. Further investigation showed that after I approved the updates the download of the updates failed. After a bit of troubleshooting I determined that the cause was the Gateway Anti-Virus (GAV) and Anti-Spyware (AS) on my SonicWALL TZ170. If I turned the GAV and AS off the updates would download. The troubling part was that the SonicWALL was not logging the failure. I opened a case with SonicWALL and level 1 & 2 support had me try all kinds of things; none of which worked. I finally got to 3rd level support and they had do the following.

Go to http://yoursonicwallip/diag.html Then click on internal settings and check the box for Enable HTTP Byte-Range requests with Gateway AV and apply the change.

This corrected the issue, but I still am waiting on an answer as to why the failure was not being logged. To make things it even more complicated it only seems to be a problem on the Standard OS. I have a client with a TZ170 running the Enhanced OS and WSUS. They have no problems getting the updates to download.

Such is life.

SonicWALL's secret... shhh

Here's an undocumented 'best practice' from SonicWALL. If you have multiple VPN tunnels on one box you should have a different shared secret for each tunnel. Currently this is not documented, but hours on the phone with SonicWALL has proven the 'feature' to be true.

Service Packs, Patches, and Upgrades Oh My!

For the last week I've been eating, breathing, and sleeping one of the above. I performed three SBS 2003 SP1 installs. Don't let anyone kid you these take a looooong time to install. The actual install is not that overly complicated. The work comes pre and post install. It also doesn't help that the service packs are huge and take a long time to install. If you're preparing to install SP1 you have to read this (note it's five pages). It's hands down the best guide out there. Holla to the MVP's on this one. They did a great job.

The other upgrade I've been blessed with this week is Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.0. Symantec was nice enough to publish a migration document. I had one moving from 8.0 to 10.0.... NIGHTMARE. I'm also performing a 9.0 to 10.0 upgrade today. I'm hoping it will go well. What made the first a nightmare was the legacy stuff that was on the workstations. Someone had done a partial install of Norton System Works on every workstation. This caused the 10.0 client install to barf. It was complaining that Symantec A/V 2003 was installed on the workstation. Please remove yada yada yada... Well it certainly didn't appear to be installed on the workstations. Hmm must be something in the registry. Symantec has a procedure for manual removal of their products here. After the manual removal I rebooted as instructed. When the workstation came back up it wouldn't pull and IP address from the DHCP server. Nice!!! Off I go hunting. After a little looking I find that the manual removal had me delete the Symtdi service. Well wouldn't you know it the DHCP Client service has a dependency on that service. I delete the dependency in the registry and I'm now pulling an address again, I still couldn't install the 10.0 client. GRRRR Okay now I'm getting mad. Reaching into my bag-o-tricks I pull out Process Explorer from SysInternals. What a great little tool. I manage to determine that the 10.0 client is writing an install log to C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Temp. Having a look at the log file I could see that the install process was searching and finding a registry entry for SAV 2003. This registry key was not listed in the manual removal procedure. A quick search and destroy for the offending key and boom I'm now installing the 10.0 client.

Bad Symantec! No Updates For You!

There are been some reports of the new Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.0 causing blue screens on severs. Here is Symantec's list of fixes. Hope this save someone a little trouble.

Root partition full? I can help!

Many of the install you Small business Server 2003 you come across has everything installed on the root partition (C: drive). The other problem in the root partition was created too small. Since many service packs, patches, and application's require a minimum amount of free space you many need to move some things off of the c: drive. Almost anything that is installed on the c: drive can be moved. For a comprehensive document on moving data folders off the root partition follow this link. For detailed procedures for moving the ClientApp folder follow this link. Since the ClientApp folder can take up over 1Gb of space it's the first thing I move when I need space.