Microsoft’s Kevin Beares and I have been engaged in a squabble about the SBS Community Survey. (See his blog entry and all the associated links and comments.)
Kevin asked me to stop debating the survey’s methodological merits, which I will happily do at this point. He also posed the following questions:
How about telling me what you [...]

A few other solo IT consultants have asked me how I get my clients; that is, what marketing strategies work best for me. Currently, 100% of my new business is generated through referrals. Referral sources include current and former clients, other IT consultants, friends, and people I’ve met through professional networking. My business has matured [...]

The recording of yesterday’s conference call with Karl Palachuk is now available.
As Karl promised, one of the topics we discussed was my “Ten Commandments” for solo IT consultants. I’ve now posted those commandments, with commentary, on The Schlog.

Problem: The SSL certificate for mail.myclient.com expired. The certificate had been purchased from GoDaddy and was installed on the server by a former network admin. No one had any idea whose GoDaddy account had been used originally, and GoDaddy couldn’t tell us for security reasons. So there was no easy way to renew the certificate. [...]

Michael Vizard has an interesting commentary on the choice we IT consultants face between offering our “own” services and offering similar services from well-known, brand-name providers. It’s not all that different from the choice we faced years ago, between selling “white-box” PCs and recommending or reselling Dell, HP, IBM, and so on.
There are still a [...]

Well, not exactly. But if you’re running a one-person IT consulting business, it should be a reasonably valuable way to spend an hour of your time. Tune in on June 18th at 12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time, and in the meantime, buy some books from our sponsor.

Microsoft is conducting a survey of people who use Small Business Server about their experiences with the Windows SBS Community. I have some serious problems with the survey and I’ve expressed them here. I’ve gotten some heat for my criticism here (and maybe here — I’m not sure exactly what Vlad is getting at.)
Feel free [...]

Ever since Microsoft bought Winternals two years ago, there has been a great deal of confusion about whether IT consultants are free to use the Sysinternals software utilities on their clients’ machines. The license agreement stated that the tools could only be used on “your” systems, not those owned by anyone else (including, it would [...]

I was quoted in a ChannelWeb article about the launch of Adobe’s new on-line application suite, which is going to compete with similar offerings from Microsoft and Google. I’m not sure if it comes through in my one-sentence write-bite, so let me amplify here just a bit.
When you schedule an event through an on-line service [...]

I have posted a substantial update to my instructions for installing WSS 3.0 on SBS 2003 Standard. If anyone has time to double-check my work and fix any problems, I would greatly appreciate it.