The wisdom of children

Ah! The wisdom of a child…

My daughter and I were having lunch the other day and out came a burp from her chocolate milk. After giggling a bit she looked at me and said “Burps are funny, but you really should say ‘excuse me’, right Daddy?” Of course, I told her she should have good manners and say “excuse me”.

What struck me was how little we encounter simple good manners in todays business environment. Perhaps we think we are to busy? It seems extending common courtesy and good manners to customers and non-customers alike seems to be a lost tradition.

As the owner of p3 Technologies, LLC I am constantly after my employees to make sure they:

1. Communicate clearly and honestly,
2. Go out of your way to make sure the customer’s concerns are satisfied, and
3. Follow up after a service call or project to make doubly sure that everything that happened was to the customers expectations… and if it wasn’t, make it so.

I’ve heard this philosophy expressed as “Plus 1” which implies a company is committed to meeting or exceeding your (as the customer) expectations each and every time you interact with a company. I like it!

What is troubling is that it my 5 year old daughter understands good manners but most business folks don’t, or at least I don’t observe it much in my travels.

Moving from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2010

I recently had the opportunity to migrate an Exchange Server from 2003 to 2010 and for the most part it was very straight forward but I encountered a couple of gotcha’s that I thought I’d share.

In preparing for the migration I read up on the differences between the two systems. I strongly recommend reading these documents, these authors really did helped us all in putting the pieces together:

Exchange Server 2007 Turbo Transition Guide – I found this document very helpful, especially when talking about certificates. Paul did a great job in detailing the steps involved. Although the environment he was working in wasn’t exactly like mine, it was a very helpful guide.

Rapid Transition Guide From Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 – this is a great guide to the basic steps involved in moving from 2003 to 2010, Milind did an great job with this and links to all of the reference material you’ll need to gain a thorough understanding of the topics discussed.

Public Folders

Moving public folders didn’t go so well for me. Even after following the guides and Googlin’ until all hours of the morning(s), replication would not work. Even though, after checking permissions, services, and everything else I could think of, I found no issues. What I ended up doing is a forklift-type operation… very sneaky! Here’s how I got around the replication issue:

1) With my mailbox on Exchange 2003 I opened Outlook, copied all of the public folders to my mailbox,

2) Changed the the “Default public folder database” setting to point to the “Public Folder Database <big long number if applicable>” on the Exchange Server 2010 server. Under Organzation Configuration->Mailbox, choose the Mailbox database and right-click for properties, choose Client Settings, browse for the database (like this)

3) Moved my mailbox to Exchange Server 2010 and copied all of the public folders from my mailbox to the All Public Folders.

Email Address Policies

Another gotcha I encountered was the conversion of the email address polices failed with this message:

“The recipient policy “Default Policy” with mailbox manager settings cannot be managed by the current version of Exchange Management Console. Please use a management console with the same version as the object. (shortened for brevity)”

The fix for me, as described here, was to uncheck the Mailbox Management Settings for each Recipient Policy on the Exchange 2003 server. After that the Set-EmailAddressPolicy command worked just fine.

Email Aliases and Security

Several of the mailboxes I had to move had spaces (or other illegal characters) in the Exchange Alias property. For example, this is not acceptable: John Pepper, instead it should just be JohnPepper.

Also, several mailboxes did not have “Include inheritable permissions from this object’s parent” checked. This resulted in several mailbox moves failing with “insufficient rights”.

UPDATE! (5/10/2010)

Distribution Groups and Outlook 2003

I heard today that several people were unable to send emails using the distribution groups, a quick check revealed that the Expansion Server for the groups was still set to the Exchange 2003 server.
To modify the setting open the properties of the distribution group, click Advanced tab, make sure the “Set expansion server” is checked and browse for and select the correct server.

Another gotcha / suprise was the change in communication protocols between Exchange Server 2010 and Outlook 2003. Apparantly Exchange Server 2010 no longer supports UDP, it only supports asynchronous notifications and (as a fallback) a polling interval when communicating updates to Outlook clients. Outlook 2003 only supports UDP and polling… you see the disconnect here?
As a fallback Outlook 2003 will use polling to communicate with the Exchange Server – this causes a weird user experience in Outlook 2003 where (for example) you delete a message and it remains in Outlook until the next polling takes place. You can read more here: “Maximum Polling Frequency is non-default” and here “Outlook 2003 (connected to Exchange 2010) gives unknown error when deleting some messages”

Attention real estate brokers!

Do you struggle with getting to the closing table with everything you need to have a successful closing?

Do you struggle with keeping tabs on agents, clients, and keep those lines of communication open?

Do you struggle with tracking your inventory and what it’s worth?

Do you struggle with complicated systems to track commissions?

Does your accountant complain about having to deal with two systems to get a clear understanding of your finances?

If you answered “yes” to any of the above – we want your help!

RealtyOfficePro

Is office management software for Real Estate that ties directly into QuickBooks and your local MLS. The focus of the entire system is to mesh your listings, agents, office workflows (documents, checklists, etc.), and clients into a holistic perspective.

Think about it! Nowadays, referrals, superior customer service, open honest and meaningful communication, and squeezing every drop of productivity from your workforce is how business survives. Your office could be on top of everything, but if you are lacking the synergy that comes from having the right information at the right time… you end up being inconsistent or worse.

The system is built upon widely adopted technologies like Microsoft Windows® and Microsoft SQL Server®. The current version is a Windows software installed on your office computers, however the plans are laid to have a web-based version and an iPad version to quickly follow.

The true power of RealtyOfficePro is that each feature, each area within the software, is designed with input from Realtors! As a broker you are in the unique position to understand the demands of running a real estate office and the processes involved in selling real estate.

We need your input! By signing up as a beta tester you will get RealtyOfficePro free of charge for the first year after the official launch.

To sign up or for more information please contact John Pepper at p3 Technologies, LLC by calling (860) 617-8893 or email john@p3tech.biz.

CollabNet Subversion Edge – Could not open the requested SVN filesystem

I’m finally getting around to upgrading my Subversion server and downloaded the new CollabNet Subversion Edge server. It’s pretty cool, easy to setup and administer… although it would be more convinient if it would detect old Subversion installations and automatically import or convert them.

In setting up the new server I encountered this error message “svn: Could not open the requested SVN filesystem” while testing my new repository with the client.
The new server is a Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit system.

After finding this posting on CollabNet that talks about the parent directory for your repositores… I found that on my server the parent directory was the “E:\” drive (no folder name)… I changed that path to “E:\repos” and everything worked well.

Now to import all those projects…

RealtyOfficePro – Real Estate Office Management

A couple of months ago I posted on Facebook that p3 Technologies has started developing a plug-in for QuickBooks that would allow Realtors to track and manage listings and use QuickBooks to keep track of the finances associated to their listings.

The idea came from the realization that most small businesses use QuickBooks to manage their finances… and all of the accountants I know are always complaining about having to deal with two systems when working with their Realtor client accounts. The brokers/offices are using QuickBooks to manage their businesses and some other product to manage their listings.

Well, truth be told, the simple plug-in has suffered from a good helping of scope creep – resulting from interviews with brokers about what their ideal office management system would look like and how they needed to be supported by the system and not pigeon-holed by the system.

I’ve dubbed it RealtyOfficePro, it is a real estate office management system that ties directly into QuickBooks and your local MLS. The focus of the entire system is to mesh your listings, agents, office workflows (documents, checklists, etc), and clients from a holistic perspective.

Think about it! Nowadays, referrals, superior customer service, open honest and meaningful communication, and squeezing every drop of productivity from your workforce is how business survives. Your office could be on top of everything, but if you are lacking the synergy that comes from having the right information at the right time… you end up being inconsistent or worse.

So stay tuned!

Why every business should use online data backup

It is no secret – you need to backup your business data. It is simply in your best interest to do so… yet many small businesses do not. I have been contemplating this recently trying to understand “why” – I can only think of one reason that would explain why small businesses do not take data backup seriously: they have never experiences significant data loss.

Consider what a significant data loss would be for your small business, run the “what ifs” through your mind.

Here are a couple to get you started:
Q: What if the server dies? (doesn’t matter how… it’s dead) How do you access your files, your accounting system, your emails, your databases? How do you conduct business?

Q: What if you are a law firm or accounting firm and all of your client files are in a file cabinet… and you have a flood or fire or a theft?

Also realize that it isn’t just you (or your employees) who suffer from a data loss – your customers are also impacted.

Tapes

Also, let’s be frank – tape backups do not work well for most small businesses. What I mean is that in most small businesses, if they are backing up their important data regularly, are:

• not testing the backups regularly to make sure they actually work
• probably not rotating tapes regularly… or, worse, they are rotating tapes regularly but are not monitoring the backups to make sure they were successful
• having issues getting all of their data backed up during the “off hours” window of time

Tape backups, also assume that the hardware (the tapes, the tape drive) is in working order and very (near 100%) reliable.

Compliance

In my mind it is simply common sense: if you have sensitive data, if must be protected. Not only because it is the law (e.g. SOX, HIPAA, GLBA, etc) but your business depends on the data!
The common theme in the legislation (as I see it) is that you need to identify the sensitive data and take reasonable steps to safeguard it… I like the way wikipedia says it “This rule is intended to do what most businesses should already be doing: protecting their clients.”

What to backup and how long to keep backups

I strongly recommend backing up all of your email, financial data, customer records, and any other data that, if lost, could hurt your business.
(Kind of vague… it depends on your business)

As a consultant, the worst calls to get are “I’m missing my QuickBooks file…” and when I check the backup and find it missing or a really old copy – that doesn’t make for a easy conversation.

I recommend keeping your backups for the same amount of time that the IRS required you to keep records. Basically 3 to 7 years depending on your circumstance. You should realize you will NOT get this type of retention from Mozy or Carbonite who only backup 30 days worth of data (including deleted files which are removed from the backup after 30 days).

In keeping with the 3 to 7 year retention I recommend using the Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) scheme – I’d stay away from the Towers of Hanoi scheme as it’s rather complex.
In the simplest form, GFS is a daily full backup, you keep each week end (Friday) backup until the end of the month, you keep each month end backup until the end of the year, and you keep each year end (usually the last month end) backup for 3 to 7 years.

How online backups help

Simply backing up to a local hard drive or tape is not enough for the simple reason that the backup does not leave the building/office. It’s great that you may be backing up your data… but keeping that backup in the office does not reduce the risk to your data.

The “best practice” is to get your backups offsite. Online data backup providers are a good way to do this. p3 Technologies uses Intronis, which we resell, because of the flexibility in backup retention. You can literally keep a backup for years and years if you choose to. Whereas, Mozy and other don’t support more than 30 days.

Having said that though, I strongly recommend you backup to BOTH an external hard drive in your office and online.
Why? Simply because when it comes time to restore files from an online provider, the speed of the restore is directly tied to your internet speed. I wouldn’t worry about it if you only restore a handful of files… but restored multiple folders (or whole drives) can take a long time. So, to compensate, keep a daily full backup locally and keep your backups online to fully protect your data.

 

Weird Office 2007 issue when opening or saving documents on a network

For weeks now I’ve been battling a strange issue with opening (and sometimes saving) Word 2007 documents on a network drive.
The client is a busy law office with several paralegals who typically have several – as in a dozen or so – Word documents open throughout the day. What would happen is while opening documents, Word 2007 would hang for a few seconds and display the “downloading” progress bar in the status bar area. It did not happen all the time or at the same point in the day… it was quite random.

The client’s environment is pretty straight forward: a single Windows Server 2008 Standard domain controller with a few shared folders, nine (9) Windows 7 Professional (32bit) computers running Office 2007 Professional SP2. I checked everything from ACL to network cabling looking for a cause, or at least a pattern to the issue. Found nothing!

Here are the things I tried before calling Microsoft, none of these worked in my situation though:

• The obvious things like not having so many documents open at once, etc
• On all computers (server included), turned off Remote Differential Compression (RDC)
• The client is running Symantec Endpoint with Network Protection running, I uninstalled the Network Protection and disabled the Windows Firewall on all PC’s via Group Policy
• Disabled TCP Autotuning using this command: netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled
• Disabled Offline Files via Group Policy

After reading this blog post by Ace Fekay, I tried these changes too, but none of them worked either:

• Disabled IPv4 Large Send Offload using these commands:
• netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled
• netsh interface tcp set global chimney=disabled

So I called Microsoft and opened a case. After explaining the issue and going through the gyrations of convincing each engineer I spoke with that (a) I’m not insane, (b) yes I do actually know what I am talking about, and (c) showing them the evidence I was collecting in the way of the above changes and observations… I was promptly reassigned to a “Product Specialist”, who then told me that because they are so busy another Product Specialist would call me soon. Yeah! Anyway, the Product Specialist did in fact call me and was quite good – he did not read from a script and ask you to reboot, he actually demonstrated some good critical thinking and problem solving skills.

Okay, off my Microsoft support soapbox, on with my story!

So the Product Specialist has me run a few diagnostics to capture “stuff” about the server and computers while the issue wasn’t happening and again when the issue was happening. They even remotely connected to a computer and observed Word 2007 hanging. They analyzed this (I’m guessing here, not really sure what they did with those logs) and then told me “we’re going to try a few things”… meaning, “you are right, there is an issue and we have no clue!”

One of the things we tried was to disable Robustified UNC; according to the Product Specialist, Robustified UNC tells Word 2007 (or any Office 2007 program) to apply “special security” to the document being opened.
So to disable Robustified UNC you need to set this registry key (which is a DWORD) from zero (0) to one (1):

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Options]
“DisableRobustifiedUNC” = dword:00000001

Immediately after hanging up the telephone with the Product Specialist I googled “DisableRobustifiedUNC” and found exactly three (3) search results, one of them was a blog post titled “Office 2007 Lags When Saving to a UNC Path or Network Share – Robustified UNC” written by Tony at the The Pittsburgh Tech Blog… imagine that! Anyway, thanks Tony for posting your experience… hopefully Microsoft will document this stuff.

Disappointing experience with Google Calendar

In general I think the stuff Google comes out with is pretty cool. I use Chrome, Google Talk, and on occasion Google Documents. For a few months now I have been using Google Calendar, simply because it is free and sync’s with my Outlook calendar (you need Google Calendar Sync to get this to work).

What strikes me as disappointing is the lack of support given by Google when there is a problem or confusion with their products – perpetual beta or not! I think that if they actively supported their products and made support accessible and helpful, instead of relying on the community support given by other users of their software… I think their credibility would be better and they would be a serious threat to Microsoft.
Don’t get me wrong – Google has some cool stuff for sure! They just aren’t ready for the average business environment yet. Business heavily depends upon information and access to information.

Case in point:

I have a law firm as a client, they are great people and fun to work with. They recently moved away from a hosted Microsoft Exchange system (part of a partnership) but still needed to share calendars, have paralegals keep updated calendars for the attorneys, and have the attorney calendars synchronize with their Blackberry devices.
My suggestion at the time was to try out Google Calendar, and if that didn’t work they could either switch to a 3rd party product like OfficeCalendar or subscribe to another hosted Microsoft Exchange service.

Google Calendar was easy to setup and synchronize with Microsoft Outlook (and thus Blackberry devices). For awhile everything seemed great… then somewhere in April 2010 Google apparently made an upgrade to Google Calendar. Immediately after that happened calendar appointments would start disappearing. The Google Forums are full of people complaining about this issue and there has been no response from Google, as far as I can tell anyway. These appointments weren’t being deleted either (I tested that theory); the scenario was simple too:

1. a paralegal (who had the rights to the attorney calendar to manage events) would create a new event on an attorney’s calendar… it looked like it saved, all the other paralegals saw the event on the calendar.
2. Wait one (1) day. Check the calendar the next morning… the event was not on the calendar. Bizarre.

After spending about 20 hours working through the different “what if” and “did you try this, did you try that” troubleshooting steps – no resolution and no support from Google.

Very disappointing!

Getting organized! Small team collaboration and project tracking

It seems like a universal challenge: how to get all your team members – employees, contractors, even clients – on the same page for any given project. Ideally I’d like a single “tool” to manage projects, time tracking, and documentation.
If this tool could also provide a way for my team to collaborate in terms of sharing information (notes, ideas, comments, etc) and coordinating tasks and resources that would be a bonus… to take it a step further, if my clients could have access to the their projects and see what progress was being made and have the ability to comment, answer questions, provide documentation or clarification… that would be awesome!

As a small business owner I find it extremely frustrating to have different tools to track different things… or worse! Different tools to track similar things. There are tools to manage projects but not documents, tools to manage time but not projects, tools to documents but not time or projects… you get the idea I’m sure.

So? What to do?

I started digging around for options and quickly found the number of choices overwhelming! Everything from Basecamp® to SharePoint® and Microsoft Project to dotProject. After evaluating and searching it became quite clear that the tool is only half the battle! How you use it, how you integrate it into your day-to-day routine is equally important. Does it “fit” your company and the way you do business – you must answer this question also. If you don’t you could end up paying for a subscription for a tool that you don’t take full advantage of.

For my firm, we settled on Feng Office. It’s pretty slick! It matches the way we work and allows us to keep our clients informed. The only downside, so far, is that it doesn’t integrate with everything would want it to; things like exporting the time tracking into QuickBooks and synchronizing its calendar with Outlook or Google Calendar. Other than that though I must say I am impressed.

Recovering Microsoft Business Contact Manager

It’s a sad affair when a computer dies… that’s what led me to give up my spare computer for a client to use as a loaner. After swapping hard drives and updating drivers, etc… and after the loaner computer was installed at the client’s location… I realized that the spare computer was also hosting the database for my Microsoft Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2007. Good grief!

“Not to worry” I thought! I have the hard drive… I’ll just hook that hard drive up to another computer (my server) and grab that database, a quick file transfer and BLAM-O! I’m back up and running.
(Sounded good, sounded easy… not so much)

Turns out that although you can reattach a Microsoft Business Contact Manager (BCM) database and use it as you normally would after setting up the correct accounts and permissions on the SQL Server. What you cannot do though is use the Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2007 Database Tool because the tool looks for the account setup as with the db_owner schema – in my case (perhaps in yours too) that is the Administrator account. When I copied the database from the old hard drive to the new server and reattached the database I did not (nor does it happen by default) reset the database owner.

When you open the tool it uses the ir_DBOUser stored procedure to find the db_owner account. The return from this stored procedure is the SID and the user name of the Windows account associated with the SID. The tool uses the user name when it builds the list of accounts to share the database with (notice the database owner below)… without resetting the database owner information on the database the tool throws a SqlNullValueException like this:

“System.Data.SqlTypes.SqlNullValueException: Data is Null. This method or
property cannot be called on Null values. at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlBuffer.get_String() at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDataReader.GetString(Int3 2 i) at Microsoft.BusinessSolutions.eCRM.BusinessLayer.Bcm DataStore.GetDBOUser”

The “Data is Null” part is because the database owner has not been set so when ir_DBOUser executes it returns the SID from the OLD database owner (from the old computer in my case) and NULL for a user name.

Luckily the fix is amazingly simple. Open up a new query window (assuming you’re using SQL Server 2005 or better), and run “EXEC sp_changedbowner ‘<put user name here>’” – in my case this turned out to be “EXEC sp_changedbowner ‘P3TECHSRV\Administrator’” – you may have a different setup but the same idea should apply.