One of the first things I learnt when working in retail was the "obvious question" - most sales people never learn it, and wonder why they don't win as much business as their colleagues.

The obvious question is so obvious, it amazes me that so many sales people miss it. here is the obvious question in context:

I am looking at a computer, in a store. I have read the pamphlet, I have played with the mouse, I have watched the short video that is playing. I seem to be interested. Sales person number 1 approaches. They are the "gun" salesperson. They sell more than anyone else on the floor, and they know it. They have an air of arrogance, and they rely on the FUD factor. (the FUD factor is the 3 horsemen of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) They dazzle me with speeds and feeds, lease options, rental options, they talk non-stop, for 45 minutes, and now, I cannot remember their name. Let alone what I actually came into the store for.

This tactic has a high success rate. people buy ...

Something that seems extraordinarily common amongst geeks is the frustration in talking to the business. One area this really tends to "blow up" in is conflict resolution - whether that's disagreements between colleagues, dealing with bullying, disagreeing with business direction, or trying to persuade the business to adopt a new technology.

I especially feel for girl geeks in this regard, because I think it can be all the more difficult for them. A recent conversation with AuTechHeads member Simone got me really thinking about a general blog post to discuss it. Women in IT can get a bit of a raw deal, because they're regarded as a minority - yet I highly value the female geek because of the fresh insight and skills they bring. For my purposes, a geek girl is at least as good as a geek guy.

I'm hardly an expert in this area, but I've found some ways to better cope with conflict, and sharing these insights could well be said to be at the core of the AuTechHeads concept. If it h ...

When i first started blogging back in 2008 I wrote two posts about Technology User Groups, the first was about the Sydney Business & Technology Group (SBTUG) and the 2nd about the Sydney Windows Mobile User Group (now the Sydney Mobile User Group) (SMUG or SydMo). Since those two User Groups i have attended nearly everyone since, and even through inspiration from Craig Bailey, created the Sydney Windows User Group (SWUG)

The first user group event I went to was SBTUG back in May 2008, I had travelled down for work meetings in the City and it was the first time I was in Sydney on the same night as a User Group. I turned up at Microsoft Australia’s Sydney office early and waited in the waiting room watching TV and reading the newspaper trying not to look nervous. Finally someone else turned up and after saying a nervous hello, I discovered it was Catherine Eibner and after chatting for a bit we were joined by more people including our Microsoft hosts Roger Lawrence ...

I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a pirated copy of the next version of Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) by answering a spam email offering the "latest appzzzz for cheap". I knew it was legit by the number of z's and happily coughed up the USD$24.95 for "Configmgr vNext".

I've been a big fan of ConfigMgr since SMS 2003 days, and was eager to get my hands dirty with this version. Little did I know what a trial this would turn out to be!

I was initially very impressed by the time it took to deliver- only 72 hours before I had a knock at the door! This version promised to totally change the way people looked at configuration management ... and it has certainly done that. Imagine my surprise to discover that Microsoft seem to have done away with the hardware/software concept, and gone for a physical human. I'm not sure if this is maybe just an alpha, but there are certainly changes done by the people who pirated him. As an examp ...

Yesterday I downloaded and installed Citrix Xen Client.  Xen Client is a desktop Hypervisor which allows virtual machines to be run on the bare metal without the need to first run up a full operating system.  This works in much the same as vSphere or Xen Server in the Data centre.

I should preface this post by noting that Xen Client is currently pre-release software and as such plays up a little.  My first installation attempt was on a Lenovo x201.  Whilst the install completed okay and the Hypervisor loads, the graphics drivers are missing and as such I was unable to load the GUI.  I had been warned during installation that the x201 was not on the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) and rightly so it seems.

Running over to Citrix.com I noted that the x200 was on the HCL so I grabbed one from the desktop team and installed Xen Client again.  This time I was presented with a client screen.  The interface here is very simple.  Across the top of the s ...

I've been using the Android Platform now for roughly 18 months. In that time I've owned three different Android devices - HTC Dream / G1, Motorolla Milestone, and currently  - Nexus One.

The latest release of Android dropped today - and Nexus One owners are the first to get official updates. At the moment the launch appears to be limited to devices in the US, with the rest of the population getting updates as they're progressively rolled out. 
It's also available for impatient non-USA Residents such as myself to manually install.

There's a fair number of new features in this release, here's my impression of what the newest iteration of Android is like.

Exchange Calendar + Exchange Global Address List Support

Exchange Calendar is something that I had been waiting for. I use Exchange at work, and keeping one consolidated calendar view for everything is very useful.
Having Exchange Global Address List support is ...

I've worked in an educational institution for a number of years now, and in that time I have to say that I've seen far more examples of why computers in schools are a bad idea, rather than why they're the best thing ever.  The reason for this is because of a fairly fundamental approach to the mass injection and use of IT equipment - in any formal environment the infrastructure you bring in HAS to underpin and enhance the primary business model, and in a school that business model is the curriculum.  But too often I see computers used as the driving force behind curriculum, when it needs to be the other way around.

Concepts like 1-to-1 computing are very popular politically and tick all the right public perception boxes, but without the right drivers in place such schemes are, in my opinion, either going to result in something ineffectual and frustrating at best, or outright failure at worst.

I wonder how it would be if you stripped all the student computers out of a ...

I have been selling IT since 1992. I have sold all sorts of brands, technologies and ideas to my clients. Problem is, though, once you mention that you are in IT, at a dinner, a party or at a gathering for business networking, two things happen. One, the IT people think you are a competitor and won't talk to you about work. Two, every person with a problem with their home PC, their work network, the printer that keeps flashing funny lights, descends on you. Good if I was a tech. I am not. I am a selling tech. I have enough industry and product knowledge to know what the product does. I can config a server, a router and a switch, diagnose a printer, by reading the manual and watching the pretty lights. The manual is always there to help me sort out a problem. Granted, i did not read it when I installed my home stuff, but I read it when it goes pear shaped.

The number of people who have asked me why their printer isn't printing in colour (they had run out of ink or toner) why their system see ...

When I first started my career as an IT professional, it was supporting both PC’s and Apple Macs. Next role moved me into a support/consultant role where I worked with customers running PC’s connected to an application running on either AIX, Solaris, SCO or NT4 (shudder). The job after that brought me wholly into a Microsoft environment (Windows2000 servers & upgraded PC’s from Win2K to WinXP). Since then, my career has almost exclusively had me supporting MS software on various vendor’s hardware.

I will admit to spending some time during the first decade of the 21^st century being a massive Microsoft fanboy. If they didn’t make it, I didn’t want to know about it. I religiously purchased Windows Mobile device after device; I strongly & loudly advocated Windows XP as *THE* operating system to run on your PC, at work and at home (not hard, given what had come before); I transformed the companies I worked for by implementing SMS, Exchange & Win ...

We all love gadgets. This should, of course, go without saying.  We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, geeks, nerds or anoraks of various shades of intensity, and the prospect of a Bluetooth watch with a binary display which detects a particular hand motion and then responds "These aren't the droids you're looking for" sets most of our thighs a-trembling.  But how do you respond as an admin when a user fronts up with such a device and asks that you pair it up with their corporate laptop?

Consumer technology is amazing and I never cease to be dazzled by the range of reality-enhancing gizmos on offer.  I also can't help notice that the vast majority of them are constructed and marketed in such a way so that the user never needs to know what makes them tick, or what the implications are of using it in a particular way.  In many ways, that's understandable.  I drive a car but don't know the finer details of automotive mechanics (or even the bloody obvious de ...

As a general rule, I like the Windows DNS server and find that with a little work to ensure its security, it's generally quite acceptable for usage. In an Active Directory environment, it's the most realistic option for your infrastructure, and AD integration is the most effective way to replicate your AD DNS zones.

We have put a lot of thought into our infrastructure. DNS client configuration at a minimum includes at least one local and one remote DNS servers, and usually includes 2 local and 1 remote, or 1 local and 2 remote. This is quite effective for redundancy in the majority of cases. However now I've identified some behaviour of the DNS server that potentially eliminates the effectiveness of this in particular circumstances.

Yesterday, my workplace suffered an outage for name resolution and authentication. The root cause was some form of corruption in the Active Directory databases and/or registry on one physical machine that was the FSMO role ...

So I have been having this issue with Visual Studio 2008 for the past couple of days which has caused me quite a lot of frustration. I would be in the IDE and when I went to edit the source of an ASPX page the IDE would appear to freeze and not take focus as if there was a dialog sitting behind the window that I could not access. Clicking anywhere on the window would just cause the error sound in windows.

The only way I could continue working was to kill Visual Studio in task manager. I tried rebooting my machine but the problem still persisted. I decided to turn to Google to try to resolve my issue.

The culprit… Office 2010! It seems that uninstalling Office 2007 when upgrading to Office 2010 x64 had broken the web authoring component of Visual Studio, according to the KB article from Microsoft; this was due to a bad uninstall of a MSXML5 component.

The solution: From the KB Article (KB2022915)

You can work around this problem using these steps:

1.  If an automati ...

With the announcements about the budget out now, what is there to celebrate from an end user's perspective? will you have enough budget to buy the power workstation you need to help you develop really cool code for a new website? Will you get enough to upgrade the San or the External backup drive?

and what happens when the resellers realise you have money to "burn"?

How do you interact with the reseller community? do you deal with a specific company, who sends you your very own rep and expects them to sell, sell, sell?

Or are they actually a friend to you and your company / department? How many resellers are trusted by you?

Here is the thing. Silly season is almost upon us. For the end users, silly season means spending money in surplus to budget so that you can get a similar budget allocation next fin year. For private companies, not so much an issue. For the reseller, it is the make or break time of the year. This is the time when the world literally goes mad. They are in ...

Good. Bad. Average. Just plain horrible.

We’ve all experienced it, & we all have war stories from “that time we spent an hour and a half on hold on and off just to get to the answer I needed”.

Sadly, our tech company experiences of customer service are often the worst. I don’t mind being diverted to Delhi or Darwin, as long as the person I’m speaking to on the end of the phone is intelligent enough to work outside the script at times & be responsive to why I’m really calling. Some tech companies have caught on to this & now offer a premium service that lets you speak straight to the server tech people or even, once properly certified, log call for parts for your machines yourself on the internet. There’s lots of solutions.

Internal Help/Service/Support Desks cop even more flack – and rightly so.

I don’t want to tar all IT Support professionals with the same brush. There are lots of good guys & gals going a ...

If we look at SQL Server 2008 then there's a lot of new capabilities available to us for data security.

SQL Server 2008 Encryption Capabilities

Creating certificates It's not that  complex to create certificates (btw, all SQL Server certificates comply with the IETF X.509v3 certificate standards) on SQL Server 2008. it's as simple as using T-SQL.Self-signed certificate

CREATE CERTIFICATE name ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD = 'strong password goes here' WITH SUBJECT = 'subject goes here' EXPIRY_DATE = 'expiry date goes here'

Certificate from a signed executable file

CREATE CE ...

Where do we start? 

Encrypting web.config connectionstrings

The obvious first choice would be to take whatever details you're storing in your config files and make it unavailable - check (web.config isn't readable from the web....or is it?).

naturally we don't want to encrypt everything - so lets just do those that are important for now.

Connectionstrings, encrypt:

aspnet_regiis -pe "connectionStrings" -app "/AppName" -prov "RsaProtectedConfigurationProvider"

ConnectionString, decrypt:

aspnet_regiis -pd "connectionStrings" -app "/AppName"

Now we've encrypted the connectionstring - data is safe..nah, of course not - this only encrypts that section of the web.config with a machine-level key. data is still being transfered between servers in plain text.

Next is a simple way to ensure that your data is being encrypted - get hold of a SSL and use the SQLClient connectionstring ...

Office 2010 recently hit the RTM milestone and is now available for download via a couple of different channels.  For admins looking at deploying it, one of the biggest changes they will see relates to license keys & activation.  For previous office deployments, enterprises would establish a volume license agreement with Microsoft and then they would receive a volume license key (VLK).  They would then download a volume license (VL) edition of office, create a custom answer file, using the custom installation wizard or the Office customization tool depending on the version, run the setup with the answer file and be done.

For Office 2010 the process changes a little. The good news is that if you have deployed Vista or Windows 7, your pretty much set as Office now uses Volume Activation 2.0.  For those who haven’t though, a little time will need to be spent preparing your environments for Volume Activation.

The first question that needs to be answe ...