When Microsoft first announced Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) a lot of partners, including myself, questioned why they were going direct to end users.  Microsoft has always been heavily partner focused and yet here was a new flagship product seemingly ignoring partners and being offered direct.

We did some of the online training available at release and the product seemed interesting, very well priced, but with one serious flaw: We couldn’t buy BPOS or segments of BPOS for our customers and resell it to them, therefore setting our own mark up.  We had to ask our customers to go to a website, create a Live ID and enter their own details and also state that we were their preferred partner – we would then see a share of revenue from Microsoft, but much smaller than our standard mark up on software.  For me personally the size of the revenue was an issue, but not the main one.  My main problem with BPOS was that our customers would no longer be able to get a single bill from us, their trusted partner.  They would also have to have a relationship directly with Microsoft and receive a separate bill for that part of the service.

So what’s changed?  Well unfortunately we still can’t resell the service as we do for most things, but maybe now that’s not such a big deal.  I started to reconsider it after a short conversation with fellow blogger and business owner Richard Tubb, after he had tweeted about a meeting with partners and some ‘softies in Washington.  (I’ve followed Ric’s development of his business and close relationship with Microsoft with interest.  Earlier in the year Ric was selected as one of the UK PALs and he also attended Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington last week.)  I was surprised that Ric was pro BPOS and he pointed me to a blog post he had done a few months ago.  He also compared BPOS to Microsoft’s Open Value licensing program, a program that was far from ideal in its first iteration, but one that has developed into a very partner friendly solution.

So hopefully the solution will improve from a partner point-of-view, but from a feature and price-point it’s definitely already there.  The average price for hosted Exchange from anyone other than Microsoft is around £8 to £10 per mailbox, per month and usually a 1GB or 2GB mailbox.  For a handful of mailboxes this doesn’t seem too bad, but if you’re looking to suggest hosted Exchange to a company with 30 to 60 staff the costs just don’t add up.  However, with Microsoft offering the same functionality for less than £4/month and a 25GB mailbox, things get interesting.

Sirona have been discussing hosted Exchange with smaller companies for a few years, moving to BPOS will allow us to discuss it with companies of any size.  Over the last few months we’ve been offering cloud solutions to new customers alongside standard on premise solutions.  Some customers still opt for the on premise solution; they like to see a piece of tin in the corner that they’ve paid for.  Other customers opt for the cloud solutions, one of the biggest selling points being the lack of a big upfront payment.  Somewhere in-between these two offerings is the hybrid solution, the bigger the company the more chance that they’ll have one or more line of business applications that require a server.  Depending on the user base Home Server, Foundation Server, Standard Server and now SBS Aurora all offer affordable onsite servers and BPOS can leave the complexity of Exchange offsite.

We’ve got some interesting server renewals and replacements on the horizon, embracing BPOS will give us another edge over our competition and ultimately give the customer the best options available.

As I blogged about previously, we’ve grown mainly organically up until now and that is also how most of my peers have grown.  We’ve now realised the time has come to grow our business aggressively, to start to see some of the returns we need.  In my marketing post I talked about the various angles we were trying, of those email marketing fell flat on it’s face.  I know in theory it will work, unfortunately we partnered with a company who couldn’t deliver and were not a pleasure to work with.  Given the right offering, we would look at email marketing again, but for now it’s on the back burner.

Front of mind for March is telesales or telemarketing as it’s known in other parts.  We were on course to hire a part-time telesales person, but our first interviewee didn’t bother to show up.  So for now this work is falling to myself and my business partner, Alex.  This takes us both out of our comfort zones, even though Alex has a sales background – it’s always been face-to-face stuff, rather than cold calling.  As for me, I have zero sales experience, but as some peers have pointed out that’s no excuse.   Alex and I started Sirona Solutions with clear roles, Alex was sales and I was tech.  But that is no longer an excuse, we need to grow and I am determined to do my part.

We’ve spent a lot of time finalising our service offering, something that has changed many times over the last three years.  There is still a little tweaking to do, but we have our cloud solution finalised and have some exciting ideas to help us stand out in the Managed Services space.  Once these last few bits and pieces are put together we’re going to put services to bed for the next six months and focus entirely on sales.  We will of course continue to serve our current customer base while we do this, that will always take priority.  On that front we have some exciting prospects on the horizon which could boost our helpdesk capability three fold.

The marketing guru I referred to in my marketing post doesn’t think telesales is the only answer and all being well we’ll also be working with him to run some direct mail campaigns.  On that front we’ve also ordered 2000 postcards to send out to businesses in the region, with the aim to raise our profile.  The direct mail will be more focused, but what we’ve come to learn is that the majority of marketing is about timing.  You need to contact a business when it has a need, that might be a server/PC crash, lost data, bad experience with current IT supplier, etc.  That’s partly why you need to contact as many people as possible, but at the same time the benefit of telesales becomes apparent.  If your first contact in telesales doesn’t find a need, ideally you want to find out when their current IT contract is up for renewal so you can try to get a competing quote on the table.

Well this is my first post for a while, even though I’m bound to be even busier going forward – I will try to find time to write.

My business partner, Alex, and I are back in the office today after spending a couple of days in Reading with Larry Shulze of Taylor Business Group (TBG) and the rest of the members of the Business Improvement Group I (BIG).  Monday and Tuesday this week have already gone down as some of the most valuable days we’ve spent out of the office since starting Sirona and I’m sure we’ll look back in years to come and see how influential they were.

Taylor Business Group is a US based company owned and run by Larry and Elaine Shulze.  They specialise in guiding IT Solution Providers through implementing proven business management techniques with the view to increasing profits – which is why we all do what we do, right?  I originally heard about TBG via Karl Palachuk’s blog post, as he moved over to TBG from HTG after HTG’s tie-ins with specific vendors.  I had also worked with HTG in 2008 and 2009 on one of their online groups and found the time spent with them and my peer group very rewarding.  Unfortunately the online groups were discontinued due to a number of people dropping out and Sirona were too small to join the in-person HTG group based in the UK (minimum of 5 employees required).  So I was excited to find an alternative to HTG and after speaking to Larry on the phone it seemed like Sirona would be a good fit for TBG’s first UK group – UK Profit Makers I BIG.

We first got together on a conference call in September and each member ran through a short presentation on themselves, their business and their targets for the upcoming 12 months.  It was apparent from the call that Sirona were one of the smallest and youngest companies by quite a margin and it did make us think twice about whether the group would be right for us.  Larry was obviously aware of our size and has had similar companies in his US groups.  Alex and I talked it over in the office and also raised our concerns with Larry.  Larry understood our concerns, but assured us that he wouldn’t have put Sirona forward for the group if he didn’t think we could both contribute to and take away value from the group.  We got similar advice from our business coach, Claire Coleman, and decided that we should stick with it and make the trip down.

The middle of November was here in a flash and on the morning of Monday 16th November we sat down with seven other companies in N-Able’s offices in Reading.  It turned out a number of the group already knew each other through N-Able, I think this added to the group as it broke the ice and the banter soon started to flow around the table.  Larry soon got us in order and started to go through the figures we had submitted earlier in the year based on our Q1 and Q2 results.  These were our sales and expenses figures based on criteria laid out by TBG and even just putting them together had been a lesson in itself, now Larry was shedding a lot more light on what they meant and what we should be aiming for.

The core of TBG’s goals are based around benchmarks for our industry and while these are based primarily on the US market, the vast majority seemed equally as applicable to the UK and Europe (one of the group members is based in the Netherlands).  As Larry went through his presentation showing where everyone was in relation to well over twenty benchmarks, it was very interesting to see how each company varied.  Larry would often challenge a particular business owner to ask why aren’t we hitting the bench mark?  This was sometimes met with a strong argument, but also occasionally a blank expression – to be fair we didn’t even know these benchmarks existed a few hours before!  To be challenged is why we’ve all signed up though and a lesser business coach might just run through some benchmarks and say this is where should be, without challenging you to justify why you’re not there.

There were other topics on the agenda for Monday, but as it was our first meeting a lot more time was spent on the figures than I think would normally be done.  By the end of the day we were all wiped out, but a lot smarter in our understanding of where we should be aiming.  It was certainly time for some light refreshments and we treated Larry and his wife Elaine to a perfect display of the British’s ability to consume refreshments of the liquid variety…

Tuesday morning brought with it some very bleary eyes and some equally fuzzy heads.  Half the group seemed slightly more eager than the other half, but there’s something to be said for spending a little longer sleeping off the effects of ‘refreshments’.  Larry got us all going though and he was soon going through his sales engine process, so beautiful in its simplicity.  We were then treated to a presentation by Steve (I don’t have permission to disclose details of other members of the group at this time, but I may come back and add details if allowed).  Steve owns and runs an IT Services company in Hertfordshire and his twenty year story with them has a been a real roller coaster ride, to use his phrase.  It was very interesting to see how they run things and certainly for Alex and I it gave us a view of a firmly established, bigger version of Sirona.

That pretty much brought an end to proceedings for our first in-person meeting.  As I mentioned at the beginning, these were some of the most, if not the most valuable days we have spent out of the business.  To use the E-Myth phrase, working on our business, not in it.  The group is full of amazing business owners, with some fantastic models and ideas.  It may sound silly, but I feel honoured to be part of this group and to be treated as an equal by people with far more business experience than either of us have in this industry.  I can’t wait to start putting into practice what we’ve learnt over the last couple of days and to see how we can hopefully alter our figures and get closer to those benchmarks.  We’re due to meet again in-person in April with Larry, but we’re also thinking of doing an interim meeting in January.  The sooner the better as far as I’m concerned, now I’d better get working on those figures!

Most of the SBS companies I know have grown organically, that is they have mainly grown from referrals.  Sirona was established on referrals of one type or another and we wouldn’t be where we are today without them.  The phrase “’It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” rang very true over our first year of trading.  In fact even our most recent customer originally discovered Sirona because his kids went to the same nursery as my business partner, Alex.

All that said, we’ve always wanted to grow faster than the organic approach has allowed us.  At the end of last year we signed up to Robin Robin’s Technology Marketing Toolkit after hearing her talk on one of Karl Palachuk’s conference calls.  The Toolkit is an amazing resource of marketing material, if a little American, it’s certainly fantastic place to start your marketing effort.  The amount of content available in the kit blew us away and you could easily have someone working with it full time if you wanted to make use of absolutely everything.  In February 2009 Alex flew out to Washington DC to attend one of Robin Robin’s conferences and found the whole trip incredibly worthwhile.  He was actually invited to dinner with Robin and a few other members while there and also recorded a testimonial available on her site, currently the third video down here. 

Soon after the trip we embarked on our first marketing campaign, a direct mail campaign using one of Robin’s templates.  This involved a sending letters out to contacts from a list bought from the Chamber of Commerce.  The letter had an offer of a free IT audit and used a multi-touch approach.  We’ve since learnt that multi-touch is key in marketing and it simply means sending more than one thing to a potential client.  In this instance we sent three letters to each contact, with about a week in between each one.  We got the most replies from our second letter, where-as most marketing experts would expect the most from the third touch.  Sending multi-page letters to 800 contacts takes a lot of time and costs a fair amount of money.  However we did convert two leads into contracts, so that covered the costs and certainly proved that direct mail does work.

Fast forward six months or so and we’re back into marketing full swing after a rather turbulent year.  Our first email campaign started last week and that has gone out to around 5000 leads in Stockport and Manchester.  We’ve had some great help from a marketing expert we found through the Chamber magazine and with his assistance we have created three independent marketing campaigns based around our key services.  One of those campaigns went out yesterday and the second touch will go out in a couple of weeks.  On paper email campaigns are very attractive, but getting email addresses of people who have opted in is tricky and the company we have partnered up with have been difficult to work with.  Saying that, just a couple of conversions from this campaign would more than cover the costs and this company could still redeem themselves.

Our next campaign is going to be telesales based and we’re working with a company in Bolton to run that for us.  We’re going to test the water with a three day campaign and the company hope to get around three appointments from that.  Taking the business average of converting one out of three appointments, securing an average contract with that company would cover the costs.  Converting more than one and/or selling a bigger contract or more profitable service and we could well be deciding telesales is the route for us.

By the end of the year we will have tried the three main areas of marketing and we may find one to concentrate on.  What I think is more likely, and what we have already been told, is that all of them together give you an effective marketing strategy.  This shows the scope for a full time marketing person, but until we’re big enough to justify such a role we will probably just concentrate on the area we get the most results from.

I’d be interested to hear your stories of marketing and how they compare with what we’ve found this year.

Another quick one on my journey down the Remote App functionality of Server 2008 TS.  I have set up a few apps in SharePoint and they worked internally, but when accessing them externally they failed with a certificate error.  The error indicated the certificate wasn’t trusted as it was a self generated one, the text of the error was:

Your remote desktop connection failed because the remote computer cannot be authenticated
The remote computer could not be authenticated due to problems with its security certificate.  It may be unsafe to proceed.
Name mismatch
Requested remote computer:
<farm.domain.local>
Name in the certificate from the remote computer
<servername.domain.local>
Certificate errors
The following errors were encountered while validating the remote computer’s certificate:
The server name on the certificate is incorrect.

Now we have a GoDaddy purchased certificate on our SBS server and this Technet article talks about signing RDP files with the cert so they are trusted.  I went through this procedure but unfortunately the same problem remained.  A bit of Googling found this unusual fix in a Technet forum, but it worked.  The only caveat was that I had to remove and re-add the apps from the Remote App list.

1. Open TS Remote App Manager
2. Click ‘Change’ next to ‘RDP Settings’
3. Select the ‘Custom RDP Settings’ tab
4. Add the text ‘authentication level:i:2’ to the Custom RDP Settings dialog
5. Add your Remote Apps and they should now work externally through TS Web

I’d expect the true fix for this would be to change the certificate from the locally generated one to a the purchased one, however I can’t find any reference in Google to this and I can’t find where in TS this cert is being used.  Anyway, it worked and that’s what matters!

I need to write a post about Terminal Services 2008 as it is fantastic, but until I get round to that I thought I’d share this link.  Many thanks to Stan Guinn of ECS Network Solutions for his blog post that makes it very straight forward to add TS Web to your SharePoint site:

http://ecsnetworksolutions.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/using-small-business-server-2008-companyweb-with-ts-web-access/

After installing a copy of Windows Server 2008 purchased through Open Licensing I got the occasional prompt saying that the copy of Windows wasn’t activated.  The text of the message was:

Windows could not be activated

Key management services (KMS) host could not be located in domain name system (DNS), please have you system administrator verify that a KMS is published correctly in DNS.

Error:
0×8007232B
Description:
DNS name does not exist.

A quick Google first led me to the KB article 938450 and some complicated instructions of resolving the issue were included.  I was about to post in PTOC for some extra advice when I Googled just the error code and came across this blog post by Darcy Lussier.  Turns out the only thing you need to do is re-enter your product key in the option available when right-clicking Computer and choosing Properties.

I followed those simple steps and a few UAC prompts later and Windows successfully activated.  Thanks Darcy!

After just over a year using Blogger I’ve decided to move over to Wordpress. The main reason for my move was the desire to have my own domain name.  Blogger seems to support taking over an entire domain, or sub domain, but not just having a /blog directory. I’ve heard good things about Wordpress and Sirona’s new website is going to have a Wordpress blog, so I decided to make the move.

The installation of Wordpress was straightforward and very well documented on the Wordpress site. Once installed I looked at a few themes and settled on this one, with its nice green banner.  There seems to be a lot more to Wordpress than to Blogger, plenty to look into over the next few weeks.

That’s about it. Blog will continue with similar content, just a new home

As previously mentioned we’re running CommitCRM as our CRM and PSA tool and the program needs to interact with Exchange to both receive and send emails.  Although we had this working to a degree, I finally got around to troubleshooting why we weren’t getting certain emails through.  I had previously read on UKSBSG that Exchange 2007 by default wouldn’t allow anon email to be routed internally – something a scan to email device might need to do.  CommitCRM has a tool to test the email settings and this was giving the following error:

AUTH CRAM-MD5
504 5.7.4 Unrecognized authentication type
AUTH LOGIN
RequestDone Rq=11 Error=504 5.7.4 Unrecognized authentication type

A quick Google didn’t turn up anything useful so I turned to the ever resourceful MS Partner Online Technical Community (PTOC).  As always I got a extensive reply and because it was in the SBS forum this was within four hours.  Shawn from MS explained that the application was trying to use “UTH CRAM-MD5”, but that this was supported by Exchange 2003 and not Exchange 2007.  To work around this problem Shawn laid out the steps to create a new Receive Connector for Commit to use:

1. 1.  In EMC, expand Server Configuration, highlight the Hub Transport.
2. 2.  Start new Receive Connector wizard
3. 3.  On the Introduction page, follow these steps:
4. a.  In the Name: field, type a meaningful name for this connector. This name is used to identify the connector.
5. b.  In the Select the intended use for this connector: field, select Custom.
6. c.  Click Next.
7. 4.  On the Local network settings page, click Next
8. 5.  On the Remote Network settings page, remove the existing 0.0.0.0 – 255.255.255.255 entry. Then add only the IP of the application server to the list
9. 6.  After completing the Wizard, open properties of the new created receive Connector
10. 7.  Enable the option "Exchange Servers" under Permission group
11. 8.  On the authentication page, enable "Externally secured" option
12. 9.  Restart Microsoft Exchange Transport service

This helped partially, but I also needed to allow Commit to send emails anonymously:

1. 1. Open the properties of the Receive Connector we created.
2. 2. Under the Permission Group tab, enable Anonymous users.
3. 3. Under Authentication tab, only enable "Basic Authentication"
4. 4. Restart the Exchange Transport Service.

I was now closer and could send emails internally, but not externally.  Via further communication with Shawn I discovered that Exchange 2007 doesn’t allow anonymous users to relay, but this can be changed with the following command in the Exchange Management Shell:

Get-ReceiveConnector "Connector_Name" | Add-ADPermission -User "NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON" -ExtendedRights "Ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Recipient"

After using this command email started flowing correctly for Commit and I’m pretty sure the same setup could be used for other devices/apps that need to route email.

Many thanks once again to the guys at MS PTOC, life is a lot easier when you know someone will have the answer.

We’ve dipped our toe in various CRM packages over the last couple of years here at Sirona, but we never quite realised how important it was until we finally had one place for everything.

We started our CRM journey using vTiger CRM, a free branch of the open source program SugarCRM.  Our primary requirement was a ticketing solution, but we also populated it with customer data and played around with it’s invoicing capability.  We used vTiger for a good twelve months until we decided to switch to using the ticketing system built in to Kaseya.  The main reason for the switch was all our customer’s PCs and servers were listed in Kaseya and tickets could be logged against them.  This meant we could run reports against individual machines to spot any issues.

We used Kaseya for probably six months until I started to want something more. My main aim was for customers to be able to email our support email address and have a ticket automatically logged. Having previously looked at both Connectwise and Autotask, I knew these products could do this.  We’ve had demos of both and they are fantastic looking products; I’m personally sold on Connectwise.  However, the cost of both is just prohibitive for us at the moment.  I think in a couple of years when we’ve grown some more we will head down the Connectwise route, but until then I needed something else.

What initially got me thinking about moving away from Kaseya was stumbling across Cerberus Helpdesk.  Cerberus is an email based helpdesk with decent pricing and was a definite contender.  Seeing as we were thinking of a move, I decided I needed to look at more than just one option.  Searching brought up a couple of other options, Blue Folder and Zoho CRM being the two other likely candidates.  I spent a fair amount of time looking at these three and had finally decided that Blue Folder was the option when a friend suggested CommitCRM.

Now CommitCRM offered a lot more than any of the others we’d either used or trialled, in fact it bills itself as a PSA tool for IT service companies.  Like any good service it offered a free trial so I downloaded it and started using it in earnest.  That was about two months ago, we’ve now paid for it and use it on a daily basis. 

Commit allows tickets to be logged by email and will continue to track email conversations regarding tickets.  It’s not the slickest of tracking, but it works and the Commit team are actively working on improving it (we’re on the new beta and it’s already improved).  We have all our customer’s assets in there so tickets are tracked against the right asset.  We’re able to expand assets from just hardware to anything, so we track all software purchases and licenses.  We can also track contracts as to what they cover and how much they cost.  Commit will link to Quickbooks, so we’re working on getting that working to simplify the monthly invoicing tasks.  We track every piece of work we do against the relevant contract, so we can see how much time we spend on a contract in a month.  This will help us both to see whether a contract is profitable and also demonstrate to customers the value of their contract.

It’s still early days, but it’s already making a great difference in the way our business runs.  It’s great having one place for everything, but it’s also vital that we use it for everything.  Sometimes it’s easy to do it the old way, but we have to change our ways and ensure that if it happens, it happens in Commit.  Going forward it’s great to know we’ll have one place for all the history for all our customers.